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Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online

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Re: Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online

#111

Post by zwieback »

redisman wrote: post #76
allengeorge wrote: post #3

I like going to the grocery store.

Me too. I've been using pickup during covid but it's just one more thing missing in my life. I really don't mind browsing the aisles at 9pm listening to a podcast while I do the weekly shopping. I go to very large and dull grocery stores and they have a weird charm.

Me too - we have a large employee-owned no frills supermarket and I've been going there for 25 years. The calming, trance-like experience of picking out my items is something I don't want to miss. I like the walls of cereal, the bulk food bins and the excitement when an item moves to a new location.

Re: Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online

#112

Post by mdoms »

OJFord wrote: post #73
thaeli wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The shavings from baby carrot production are still used, for juice and pulp.

For the benefit of any other perplexed non-Americans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_carrot#%22Baby-cut%22_car...

Thank you, I really was confused!

Re: Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online

#113

Post by makerofspoons »

I have decreased the amount of choice and the amount of shipping required for my food by switching to powdered nutritional shakes like Huel and Soylent. No need to worry about the picker getting the wrong thing and there is less need to worry about the colossal amount of plastic waste my weekly shopping used to create. I feel great and I only wish that there were some way to buy various 'lents in a reusable container I could ship back to them, or better yet pick up locally.

Re: Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online

#114

Post by ping_pong »

leetcrew wrote: post #87
ping_pong wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social distancing is another myth. In a place like a supermarket, microdroplets with SARS-CoV-2 will linger in the air for 10 minutes. Social distancing is meaningless.

okay, I'll bite. you're ignoring a lot of important variables here. the total volume and circulation of air, number of people in the store, your distance from other people, and whether you and others wear masks all affect the probability that you get infected when you go to the store. if you, the other shoppers, and the store do everything right, the odds of infection are pretty low.

I said social distancing, not wearing masks. Everyone wearing masks is very, very effective in stopping the spread. I've been saying it for months even when the CDC and WHO said the opposite, and some sheeple started to parrot that malicious misinformation.

Regarding social distancing, which I specifically mentioned, someone put in the effort to calculate a model and simulate it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vv9JQ0iPfgE

Have you done the same or are you just guessing?

Re: Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online

#115

Post by pkaye »

darrenf wrote: post #106
kerkeslager wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Playing devil's advocate: an enormous amount of food waste is caused by people simply refusing to buy ugly food. It's literally less wasteful to shave off most of a carrot so that it's a baby carrot, than to try to sell the same carrots as-is. There's nothing wrong with the ugly carrots--but they'll rot on the shelves. Bruised apples are perfectly edible. Maybe you just don't like them, and that's fine--there's no ac…

> Playing devil's advocate: an enormous amount of food waste is caused by people simply refusing to buy ugly food. In London there's a startup which sells such rejected, ugly fruit and veg: https://www.oddbox.co.uk/ (no affiliation beyond being a happy customer)

My understanding is the ugly food is often times used to make packaged foods like pre-chopped fruits and veggies, salads, apple sauce, baby carrots.

Re: Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online

#117

Post by jedimastert »

nitwit005 wrote: post #80
ping_pong wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great marketing gimmick that some companies have made, but it's largely false. https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2/26/18240399/food-waste-...

> But when a crop is complete, farmers plow everything back into the soil. Some of it ends up as organic matter that is supporting soil health, and that is okay, too. Basically declaring that the waste is not waste. Solving problems by changing definitions.

It's it essentially composting? How is that waste?

Re: Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online

#118

Post by jhfdbkofdcho »

It costs more, it’s inconvenient, I often can’t get the items I want and won’t know about it until it’s too late, and the in store shoppers aren’t great at their jobs.

I’m fine buying things off Amazon because if I order something I know I’ll almost certainly get what I ordered.

Re: Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online

#119

Post by Spooky23 »

fsckboy wrote: post #96
denimnerd42 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't get any discount in this case though. You're still paying $2-3/lb for bruised apples that are like you said literally waste at that point and $2-5/lb for chicken that if you picked out yourself would be of higher quality. Even if they did give you a price break for lower quality food. They'd still do things like give you a pineapple that will never ripen before it rots like we received last week.

in a competitive market (which US groceries mostly are) if the store has to "eat the cost" of bruised fruit, then the price will necessarily have to be higher on the fruit they sell. Think of it this way, you have fruit at home to be shared by all the members of your family, it was fine when you bought it, but now some of it is bruised. So now you own a mix of fruit: what do you do, throw away the bruised fruit, or t…

Makes sense in economics 101. The reality is, the Instacart guy doesn't give a shit and will provide bruising as part of the service of schlepping your crap for you. The in-store shoppers don't really care either.

The explanation that you're providing is really a rationalization for paying more to procure an inferior product. You're always going to have wastage of perishable items. It's much cheaper and sensical to avoid moldy strawberries, close to date meat and dairy, etc by shopping yourself, or hiring your own casual labor without some intermediary subtracting value.

All of these services are hiding costs through VC largesse and exploitation. You can literally get more for less by just hiring a housekeeper and having them pick up stuff for you, but nobody does that because the costs are "above the line", and it feels less nouveau riche and more clean to have some service exploit the poor sap picking your banannas rather than talk to a human.

Re: Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online

#120

Post by gvjddbnvdrbv »

kerkeslager wrote: post #14
elmerfud wrote: post #2

It's not that I want to visit the store it's that I can't trust the store people to properly pick out fresh produce or good meat. When the stock person just takes a bucket of apples and dumps them in without care so most of them are bruised, why would I want that same person selecting which apples to send me? Often times to find 3 apples I have to examine 10+. Most of the produce selection is this way. Meat selection…

Playing devil's advocate: an enormous amount of food waste is caused by people simply refusing to buy ugly food. It's literally less wasteful to shave off most of a carrot so that it's a baby carrot, than to try to sell the same carrots as-is. There's nothing wrong with the ugly carrots--but they'll rot on the shelves. Bruised apples are perfectly edible. Maybe you just don't like them, and that's fine--there's no ac…

Bruised fruit goes bad much faster than none bruised fruit.
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