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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. But to be fair, I've yet to see somewhere with a better cheese selection.
Well, I live in Berkeley, so I'm pretty damn spoiled when it comes to cheese shops. But I can see that being helpful if there are no cheese stores, import stores, or specialty foods stores in your town.
I visited Barcelona in 2019. I was shocked at how much better grocery stores were, and how much cheaper, than in California. We are getting shafted in CA at the grocery store.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why fuck raisins? Earnest question, I always just assumed taking a lot of the moisture out of a grape was bad enough for flavor
> Why fuck raisins? They’re garbage grapes. And they often add sugar, directly or indirectly. Dried wine grapes are delicious.
This seems like a very simplistic analysis, I'd expect more from the economist. They compare huge chains like Walmart, Aldi, and Whole Foods to Europe's Tesco. Yet we have lots of regional options in our small city and very rarely go to these big chains. Kind of disappointed I created an account just to read this tbh.
I don't get your comment. 1) Both Aldi and Tesco are European. 2) The point is that food shopping in the US is dominated by large stores like Wall Mart, Target etc, while in Europe stores more akin to Aldi, Tesco etc dominate. I live in Norway but have lived in the US and Netherlands while visiting a lot of Europe on vacation naturally. There is most definitely a very different way in which food is sold in general. T…
Aldi has a large presence in the U.S., as noted in the article. About 2100 stores, according to a search. That's nearly half as many as Walmart grocery stores.
> Like how they meticulously pack your bags. I would say in Europe scanning is generally faster or one uses a more self automated systems where shoppers scan, pay and pack themselves.
I dunno, having your shopping bags loaded for you is pretty nice. With respect to self-checkout, I haven't been in a chain grocery store in the U.S. in at least 10 years that didn't have it. They may exist, I dunno. Usually, you have a choice of both.
> And of course saying "Europe" may be quite inaccurate as there are such large regional variations in Europe. Broadly speaking smaller stores in central areas is more common in Europe than in the US, but once you get into the details then each country tends to do things in quite different ways.
This is the truth.
Anecdotal I guess but I’ve visited 15-20 countries across Europe and Asia in the last ~10 years and the supermarkets were largely not great relative to your average American Kroger.
Yeah I think the like lowest end bread at an Italian grocery store is going to be way better than the lowest end "bread" at an American grocery store, but the difference is at the American store there is literally (I shit you not) 50-100 varieties of bread and a lot of them are decent (actually by a lot I mean like 4-10).
I grew up in Montana so I am probably one of the few millennial Americans that probably recalls what life is like before supermarkets. They were just becoming a thing there as I was growing up. (Very, What's Eating Gilbert Grape.) We had an IGA in the small town I grew up in. The fresh food options there were borderline Soviet. We went to a butcher to get our meat when we didn't have meat from hunting. We got produce…
Why fuck raisins? Earnest question, I always just assumed taking a lot of the moisture out of a grape was bad enough for flavor
If you add raisins to a salad for example they'll just collect at the bottom; Hope you like finishing your salad with a spoonful of dried fruit covered in ranch dressing.
I guess people have forgotten the world before supermarkets (the replacement for traditional 'grocery stores'). You could not buy a pineapple or a banana or an orange. It was impossible. What made it possible were the literal overthrow of governments by corporations that acted like pirates with a monopoly on a given crop, in combination with technical and logistical revolutions. It's also amazing to see supermarkets…
I guess people have forgotten the world before supermarkets (the replacement for traditional 'grocery stores'). You could not buy a pineapple or a banana or an orange. It was impossible. What made it possible were the literal overthrow of governments by corporations that acted like pirates with a monopoly on a given crop, in combination with technical and logistical revolutions. It's also amazing to see supermarkets…
This true, but it's actually not the proximate cause for higher food prices: excess stimulus and higher energy prices are. 1. Government spent $1T. 2. Fed made it stupidly cheap to borrow money. 3. We have under invested in the oil and gas industry for years, further industry consolidation after the COVID crash has led to high natural gas and diesel prices. We lack the equipment, manpower, and capital to expand. 4. F…
I guess people have forgotten the world before supermarkets (the replacement for traditional 'grocery stores'). You could not buy a pineapple or a banana or an orange. It was impossible. What made it possible were the literal overthrow of governments by corporations that acted like pirates with a monopoly on a given crop, in combination with technical and logistical revolutions. It's also amazing to see supermarkets…
This true, but it's actually not the proximate cause for higher food prices: excess stimulus and higher energy prices are. 1. Government spent $1T. 2. Fed made it stupidly cheap to borrow money. 3. We have under invested in the oil and gas industry for years, further industry consolidation after the COVID crash has led to high natural gas and diesel prices. We lack the equipment, manpower, and capital to expand. 4. F…