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Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

economist.com

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Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#231

Post by laurencerowe »

fredley wrote: post #32

UK supermarkets are crap, and have got noticeably crapper in recent years. At even large mid-tier supermarkets you will find a paltry range of fruit and veg, and a maeger selection of almost entirely prepackaged meat and fish. I have noticed many things are routinely out of stock and it can be a lottery shopping for a specific recipe. I recently visited Portugal, and in a small city supermarket there was a bakery, me…

Honestly I miss U.K. supermarkets now I live in the US. (I moved before Brexit so things are probably much worse there now.)

Tesco somehow always managed to have what I needed but my local Safeway in SF frequently has empty shelves (predating the pandemic.) And unless you go to Trader Joe’s (which is missing a bunch of other stuff) there’re no nice freshly preprepared meals available.

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#232

Post by OJFord »

MonaroVXR wrote: post #194
prennert wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly? Where are you shopping, what are you comparing to each other? I think the segmentation of stores in the UK and Germany are very different. UK has Waitrose and (for some things) M&S for high quality fruit and veg. But they are also highly priced. Germany does not have a posh equivalent. However the common non-discounters (Rewe, Kaufland, Edeka, Globus), are really not bad. I am not sure about the exact numbe…

Isn't discount supermarket a perception. I mean they are all supermarkets.

Only in the sense that low-end anything is 'a perception', since they are all after all 'that thing'?

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#233

Post by agildehaus »

Hellion wrote: post #175
DubiousPusher wrote: post #172

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

They're toxic to dogs and cats, to the point where some animals can die from eating just a few of them.

Same with grapes, but from what I understand raisins are worse for a reason that is not currently understood.

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#234

Post by formerkrogemp »

algoatecorn wrote: post #3

With the emergence of dark grocery stores, there will be major opportunity in the space of personalized nutrition. Shoppers will be more connected with a mobile app when it comes to their grocery store experience, and those apps have the potential to steer you toward an optimal diet that saves money and improves health. I strongly believe personalized nutrition and shopping experiences will have major impact on non c…

> With the emergence of dark grocery stores, there will be major opportunity in the space of personalized nutrition. Shoppers will be more connected with a mobile app when it comes to their grocery store experience, and those apps have the potential to steer you toward an optimal diet that saves money and improves health.

What a rosy view of grocery stores. I used to work in grocery and later a "dark grocery" store. It ain't all puppies and sunshine, sonny. Grocery apps are engineered to hoover up your data and entice you to spend more money, especially on things you normally like to buy. Average ticket size is higher on pickup orders over in store shopping. These apps definitely enable junk food habits with targeted discounts and advertising. Trying to subsist on a diet? Here's a free gallon or $0.99 5-gallon tub of ice cream. Good luck with that diet.

Source: I worked for Kroger for over a decade in every department.

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#235

Post by mattlondon »

fredley wrote: post #96
sdfhdhjdw3 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think part of it is that UK standards are lower when it comes to food, yes. I know this might be offensive, but I think there's some truth to it. The reason I think there's truth to it is that it works in the opposite direction too. Standards for food are higher in Italy than in Portugal and guess what? Their grocery stores are better than the Portuguese ones. Comparing meat specifically in Portugal vs UK, it's gen…

I think you're right. For example in EU supermarkets you will typically find, separately: white onions, brown onions, sweet onions etc. In the UK: onions. Maybe sometimes also 'large onions'. Same goes for most other produce. It's chicken and egg, as the demand for this won't materialise without awareness and the awareness won't arise without the knowledge there even are different types of onions, I imagine most Brit…

This is a ridiculous claim and entirely false (just go look at the online grocery sites e.g. https://www.ocado.com/browse/fresh-chilled-food-20002/vegeta... ). I have never experienced this in the UK. What kind of shops are you guys going to in the UK?

Red onions, brown onions, white onions (normal, large, bulk bags, loose or bagged, pre-chopped etc), shallots, echalions, spring onions, red spring onions, tropeas etc (them also organic + non-organic varieties of each) are all normal to see in UK super markets (at least in my local part of London). Even Tesco - a chain that many would say is the lowest of the low super market "for poor people" in the UK - carries these.

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#236

Post by asiachick »

DubiousPusher wrote: post #172

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…

I'm sure supermarkets now are better than what you grew up with in Montana but I have the opposite experience. I'm in SF, we supposedly have good produce, farmer's markets, and big supermarkets with lots of selection. But they pale in comparison to what I'm used to from Japan and France.

The bread here in SF is horrid and that includes that massively over rated Tartine, not to mention how bad the baked products are at most supermarkets. They're shovelware baked goods. The produce selection is 1/3rd what it is in France and much of it is tasteless compared to the good stuff you'd find in Japan or France. There's 1/6th the selection of cheese. !/10th the selection of pâté. But hey, we get fresh tortillas so you win some you lose some. Even the milk here is off. Our beer selection is 1/50th of Belgium and zero of the sweet ones. Our cider selection is 1/5th of the UK's.

It's all relative. If you were at a 1 and entered a 5 then it seems like a huge step up. But if you then experienced a 10, that 5 no longer seems so great.

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#237

Post by noirbot »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #25

> but they do not have the size that European supermarkets have to resist price increases by suppliers. Walmart bankrupted Vlassic by suckering them into a deal where they were stuck selling pickles at a loss. They are infamous for dictating price to their suppliers.

Yea, that seems totally bunk outside of double or single-digit store companies. Even the regional US chains like Publix or HEB or Fred Meyer are as large as many EU chains outside of Tesco, which may as well be the Walmart of Europe.

I'm just tired of so many articles whose whole premise is "the US isn't doing thing X that a smaller, denser, and massively older country has done." Yea, the US has issues and is responsible for a lot of its own problems, but it's also not the same as Germany or France or Spain on so many different levels. You can make the case that the US should actually be N different countries, but that's not really an option, so you deal with the world as it is.

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#238

Post by mattlondon »

rightbyte wrote: post #127
petercooper wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's just a coincidence, but since Brexit I've noticed the shelf life of fruit and veg has gone through the floor (I suspect the time the produce takes to reach the shelf has increased). For things that have advisory "best by" dates on (e.g. strawberries), where you used to get a date a week in the future, now you need to take care to not buy something with tomorrow's date. In semi-related news, The Independent…

I have noticed the same thing with Christmas trees. They lose their "tiny green things" (name?) earlier. Maybe picker/cutter shortages? Like instead of picking the strawberries or cutting trees with 10 people in one week 5 people do it in two weeks? To fill up one truck load.

You need to get a base that allows you to water them, also some varieties just drop no matter what. Nordman firs seem ok still.

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#239

Post by noirbot »

m_mueller wrote: post #215
istorical wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Which I think generally means you have to be more savy on wha to buy. But tbf. specifically regarding bread, coming from German speaking region, I could never get happy in my (limited) US experience. The standard there seems to be adding sugar and that just straight up ruins bread for me.

That's all going to depend on where you are. Bread seems like a big division - shelf-stable bread is a lot less of a thing in Europe, likely because of a longer tradition of bakers. If you're in a major US city though, I've never had an issue finding French/German style breads, and usually at a normal grocer, if not at a specialty baker.

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#240

Post by 0des »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #209
Hellion wrote: post #175

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.

I will now be aliasing 'raisins' with 'garbage-grapes'
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