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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

#81

Post by mattl »

CameronNemo wrote: post #57
lapetitejort wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I concur. I can't find anything other than all purpose and wheat flour. No bread flour, or anything more obscure like rye, spelt, etc. Similarly, they sell a single sea salt, alongside tons of trendy mixed salts. Want iodized salt? Go find a big grocery store. I do find tons of snacks and TV dinners, which I enjoy. But if I'm stocking up on essentials, I'd rather go to a big store. And yes, I do find obscure flours a…

This is indeed why Trader Joe's could never be my entire grocery shopping experience. Even staples like dry black beans are unavailable. God forbid you want to bake something... They have a couple interesting products that I can't get elsewhere, and they don't have lots of products that I can get at literally any other grocery store.

What are you using the dried black beans for that a can won’t suffice?

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#82

Post by olyjohn »

hunterb123 wrote: post #23
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…

Yeah I doubt that. Personal shoppers can't even pick out the correct produce now. It's like they search out for the least ripe or most bruised thing. Seems like it's because it's not for them so they don't care, or they don't know how to. The other point against that theory is people will buy what they want to buy, that may be healthy food, it may not be. Unless you're talking about taking away the choice and distrib…

I have to say... as much as I don't like them... WalMart does the online shopping properly. I had to switch to delivery / pickup for a while during 2020 and found them to be the best. But I think this is because the people shopping for your food are paid by the hour and not by the job. They are regular employees of the store. They aren't rushed to get your order, and 50 other orders, checkout, and drive around town burning their own gas for a paltry fee. I never had shitty produce delivered, and substitutions actually make sense.

How bad is it when WalMart is treating its employees better than most?

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#83

Post by tengbretson »

thehappypm wrote: post #19
tengbretson wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their food is whatever, but their long, slow checkout lines that obstruct other shoppers and generally customer-hostile layout often pushes me to the border of rage. The only thing that keeps me level are those dark chocolate peanut butter cups.

I don’t understand, can you elaborate?

Can you tell me by looking at this photo what section I am in and what else I might find in this aisle?

https://i0.wp.com/www.dailycal.org/assets/uploads/2021/09/TJ...

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#84

Post by sdrabing »

Something about comparing the US to other rich nations rubs me the wrong way when, in my opinion, servicing a country as large as the US is very different from servicing a small island like the UK. The post talks about difference in margins and regional squeezing, etc. However, how much of the cost difference comes from transporting the goods? The post also mentions how large stores are, and how large of a selection there is, in US stores. That seems like it'd drive up the cost, but I don't hear Americans complaining about too many options. Honestly, I think it's an achievement that an American can eat as healthy for the same price as the French, they are very different countries geographically!

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#85

Post by robonerd »

bragr wrote: post #27
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…

>I strongly believe personalized nutrition and shopping experiences will have major impact on non communicable diseases. What about all the poor people without smartphones? We have such an unequal distribution of wealth and technology in this county that (particularly on site like this with mostly digital natives) it is easy to loose sight of the fact that the poorest ~20% still don't have basic smart phones, or mayb…

Or the people who have smartphones and are sick of it and pine for the old ways, but feel compelled to keep one by society increasingly expects that everybody have one and capriciously install invasive apps on it, even for things like buying groceries!

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#86

Post by QuercusMax »

ajcp wrote: post #68
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.

The article was referencing regional grocers. However, and to your point, Albertsons and Safeway may be "national" brands but Albertsons, Inc. (which is Albertsons/Safeway) actually has 22 "regional" banners that are all serviced by a single corporation, which I don't think this article actually takes into account.

I discovered a few years back when visiting OH, SoCal, and VT that my Safeway card works at Vons, Acme, and Shaw's.... and that the store layouts and much of the contents are basically identical as well.

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#88

Post by socialdemocrat »

nightski wrote: post #12

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. The article points out pretty much the same experiences I have had when comparing.

In fact this has been remarked on for years as a difference between Europe and the US: The US is about really large stores where land is cheap and you can store a lot of products. In Europe one tends to follow the opposite model: Smaller stores with more limited selection which has rapid replacement of products.

Automation is also quite different. I was also surprised by the kind of old fashion way checkout works in the US. 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.

Of course there are stores of all kinds of sizes in the US. The same applies to Europe. There are Wall-Mart style shopping Europe as well. It is just that there is a difference in what is more common in each region.

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.

For instance I loved shopping groceries in the Netherlands but kind of hated doing it in Germany.

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#89

Post by grendelt »

HEB is loved in Texas (suspiciously absent from NE Texas), but has a pretty great line of private label foods, competitive prices that are usually at or below Walmart's prices. For example, when meat prices spiked because national meatpackers had problems, HEB's Texas meatpackers didn't have such high costs (less of a spike).

They have to be doing well financially with a decent markup, but the quality is pretty great and other chain grocers usually don't have the same draw that HEB does in markets where they compete.

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#90

Post by dragonwriter »

reducesuffering wrote: post #30
sbf501 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opposite here: I dislike Trader Joe's. I call it "bougie safeway". Trader Joe's is great if you like boxed, prepared food, but it isn't much better for anything else. Their produce is meh and overly wrapped with packaging.

TJ's is significantly better value and less margin than Safeway. The opposite of "bougie."

TJ’s may be lower margin on what they carry than Safeway would be on comparable items; they achieve that by avoiding carrying lots of the low-margin items every other grocery store spends lots of money devoting floor space to.

(But those are things people tend to also need a lot, so TJ’s ends up being an extra shopping trip, instead of a replacement.)

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