Supermarkets also need to stay open so they can sell you your beloved products, and you'd not believe how thin the margins of some supermarkets are: Having 8 kinds of lemon yogurt, each someone's favorite, while disposing of the products past the expiration date leads to either some of the highest prices in town, or closing down. Profitability in very small supermarket chains is small.
Now, the models that the somewhat sophisticated supermarkets use don't fit on a spreadsheet, and really try to guess which items really are people's favorites, look at profit margins, and risks of people just going to a different supermarket altogether because the competitor down the street still has your favorite, or charges 30% less for it. They check what happens when a product isn't in stock, or when a competitor has a significant discount. It's a difficult optimization problem, given all the differences among people's shopping lists.
Having a favorite product get discontinued sucks: It happens to me at least a couple of times a year, and sometimes straight from the manufacturer, so I can't even buy it online. But don't imagine that every supermarket out there is run by teams swimming in money. It's an extremely competitive business with many players, and there's not that much of a difference between the way the small chains run their operations today and having to close down because the lower prices of a larger competitor dropped sales just enough that they are losing money.
Supermarkets also need to stay open so they can sell you your beloved products, and you'd not believe how thin the margins of some supermarkets are
Oh, no doubt. I'm not saying the spreadsheet guys aren't needed. They clearly are because competition is so stiff. So the reason store A needs spreadsheet guys is because store B has them. All of the spreadsheet guys, collectively, lock the grocery stores into a race to the bottom.
I'm complaining about the existence of spreadsheet guys in the first place. Pulling back a little bit, maybe we need to question whether technology is always beneficial to society? Maybe some technology is inherently worse for society but we can't get rid of it because it's now locked into the market.
I worked in a store in the early 90s with the registers set up that way. It is so much more efficient to pick directly from a cart so you can plan the best sequence of items for bagging. The IBM scanners of the era were much faster and more reliable than today's garbage. You could blast through, pulling items out with the right hand, tossing into the left, and blind scanning while reaching for the next item.
Seems to be a common thread in the past 20 years. The ergonomics of the product is garbage now. Partly because more compute is put into them, and with it comes bloated software that seems to be written by people who don't understand that their avoidance of "premature optimization" is just stealing people's lives by making the work go slower.
Where I live we are behind that point now, as in everything is OK and working fast again. Though sometimes it happens that when a cashier opens a new line, and the POS-thing boots for the first time that day, showing some update process running under Windows and makes my day, because I can't stop giggling.
Anyways, it's good for the cashier too, because time for smalltalk, maybe sipping some drink, or such.
Maybe independent grocery stores are the wrong model for a globally connected world? It's not that they are the producers of anything they offer, even if branded as such.
I often think that they are the source of endless waste and inefficiency, because they are working against each other and none of them stocks everything.
Personally I'd prefer fewer larger ones which stock really everything in every variety, instead of many smaller ones which don't.
This are really so called first world problems, it's still a cornucopia, though one could argue about the nutritional/health implications also. But again, 1st world problem.
Some technologies would be better off not existing, but I think the root problem is just unrestricted market competition. Without something to keep the bottom from falling out (<cough> <cough> regulations), a competitive market is a fearsome optimization force. It will suck out all joy and happiness from any activity, as everyone gets increasingly more creative and willing to sacrifice to squeeze out just a little more marginal profit, for however brief a moment before the competitors catch up.
Those optimizations make it possible for prices to keep dropping, for food to be very cheap and plentiful. Global hunger has dropped to an all time low, since 1950 or so, because of that.
Yes, squeeze that marginal profit, please. I was born in communism, and guess what, we did not have 20 flavors of yogurt to choose from, or supermarkets for that matter. In Eastern Europe we counted ourselves very lucky to have plain yogurt, which was rationed.
Joy and happiness aren't the point, those are just nice to have. Putting food on the table is the point.
And having a flavor of yogurt discontinued, out of dozens, due to profit margins, is a first world problem and it affects only the rich.
There is more than one factor to consider. Food is already way past being cheap and plentiful. Further optimizations go into enabling variety. Meanwhile, some prices are way too low, which is a serious problem in the climate crisis. What's the point of dining on a dirt cheap meat and 15 different flavors of the same yogurt today, only for our grandchildren to starve on a devastated planet?
I was born at the tail end of communism in my region so I haven't experienced the worst parts, but the 20+ years of market optimization in the food space that I actually remember went primarily into variety. There was no point in those 20 years where quality food was scarce or even too expensive for most.
I have people in my family who worked in grocery stores some years ago, when the market managed to optimize these jobs to the point there were a step away from modern slavery. Fortunately, a few large scandals over events like a pregnant employee losing child due to workload made the regulators clean the space up. Today, a chain store employee in Poland earns a reasonable salary and has hard, but not backbreaking work conditions.
There is a point past which things get too optimized, and there is no loss in preventing or reversing that.
My corner grocery (run by a family that lives a couple blocks away) did the same thing - they dropped the soy milk brand I like. I asked about it, and they brought it back.
I think they do cost more on average than HugeCo (if you use the HugeCo surveillance/loyalty card), which also theoretically has a larger selection, etc.
But for some weird reason the store that sells me what I want gets my business.
There's a chain of supermarkets around here that are the size of a Super Walmart, but all groceries. They carry for example 15 flavors or more of PopTarts, just to give one example. And they have low prices, and have seemed to figure it out (they were even apparently mostly immune from the TP shortages earlier this summer). I wonder how they manage, yet other chains don't (not that they have a lot of stores in their chain, they are spread out to no more than 1 or 2 stores in any county).
They even have other customer-service oriented niceties, such as the fact that you don't have to put your groceries on a belt at checkout -- instead their carts are designed so that the cashier pulls directly from the cart, they go into bags that then get put into another cart for you to take out of the store. Little things like that make me wonder why these concepts haven't caught on. (Same with Aldi's letting their cashiers sit on a stool -- employee friendly, and doesn't interfere with the customer).
Am I missing something, I thought big grocery stores where the normal in the states. the Krogers all around us is so big they actually started carrying clothes shoes and outpacing Walmart.
It's called Woodman's Market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodman%27s_Markets. Mostly in souteastern Wisconsin, and some in northeastern Illinois. My favorite part of it is the fact that you don't have to take the food out of your cart, put it on the belt, then take the bagged groceries and put it back in your cart again. The front of the cart flips down, and it gets pulled up in front of the cashier who can either bag it after ringing up the items, or typically there is a dedicated bagger.
It is really fun to take someone there who has never been in one before, and watch as they get overwhelmed. Just the fact that there are 3 aisles of frozen pizzas... and the cheese coolers run at least half way down the width of the store.
Oh, and the employees are friendly -- I wonder if the fact that it is employee owned helps there (or how the employee ownership works).
Edit: do a video search for Woodman's, someone has posted a video of traveling the store on a scooter, you can get a good idea of the size of it.
Now, the models that the somewhat sophisticated supermarkets use don't fit on a spreadsheet, and really try to guess which items really are people's favorites, look at profit margins, and risks of people just going to a different supermarket altogether because the competitor down the street still has your favorite, or charges 30% less for it. They check what happens when a product isn't in stock, or when a competitor has a significant discount. It's a difficult optimization problem, given all the differences among people's shopping lists.
Having a favorite product get discontinued sucks: It happens to me at least a couple of times a year, and sometimes straight from the manufacturer, so I can't even buy it online. But don't imagine that every supermarket out there is run by teams swimming in money. It's an extremely competitive business with many players, and there's not that much of a difference between the way the small chains run their operations today and having to close down because the lower prices of a larger competitor dropped sales just enough that they are losing money.