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I’ll have no choice but to close a store.
Yeah, because hiring staff back and getting rid of self help checkouts is impossible?? How would they even go about that?
Or, and here's a radical idea, drop your prices so people can actually afford to pay for the food??
That last one is more of a problem. Grocery margins are usually very slim. In most cases, a grocery store can't reduce their prices by any significant amount and still remain profitable.
How is their bad business my problem. Other stores seem to he doing fine.
All grocery store margins are tight. Historically, grocery stores are not enormously profitable. Most of the price gouging that you've seen in food lately has been at the manufacturer level, not the retailer level. That's why you don't see a lot of price difference between substantially identical items at different stores in the same region; the same size box of Cheerios is going to have roughly identical pricing at both Piggly Wiggly and Kroger. You start seeing price differences when you go to an upscale store like Amazon's Whole Foods (prices go up sharply), or when you're buying in bulk at Costco or restaurant supply stores (such as Gordon Food Service). That's also why you see self-checkouts everywhere now; once one company cuts their labor costs by introducing them, everyone has to, because otherwise they can't remain competitive. ...And then prices stabilize across the industry at roughly the same very slim margins. The company that cuts costs first sees a slight initial uptick in profit, and then competition forces them to cut their margins back again.
At the store level, there's not a helluva lot that can be done. The obscene profits are farther upstream.
See this as an example. Grocery stores are making profit in volume, but not a lot of profit per item. Typical margins are 1-3% per item. That means that, if you cut off every single bit of profit that a grocery store makes, your $200 worth of groceries would cost you... $198. Maybe as little as $194. Saving you a whopping $2-6. But when you have hundreds of transactions each day, that 1-3% per transaction adds up to profitability for the store.
I was thinking of the supermarket duopoly we have here in New Zealand were the two major players own 85% of the total market. So it might not be comparible to this type of store? Margins here are around 20% so that's coloured my read of this story. The obcene profits here are at the retailer and they pressure the wholesellers to reduce prices to where they can even exceed a 20% margin. We're definitly in a "It would be a shame if your product couldn't be found on our shelves" situation. They own everything from small country town stores to large city supermarkets.
...Ah. That's super shitty. I'm in a pretty small town--about 5000 people--but we still have three large grocery stores (if you count the WalMart as a grocery store), and a small, higher-end health food store. There's heavy competition, which keeps prices down, but also leads to wage stagnation for workers, and means that poor people get fucked by rising food prices.
Omg.... You fired all the check out people and now your mad that people are stealing from a faceless for profit company!
Will anyone think of the investors?
I don't personally steal at self-checkout, but if saw anyone stealing I'd just ignore it. As far I'm concerned, they deserve to be stolen from. Zero interest in hearing the crocodile tears of those who were complicit in price gouging.
This. Zero sympathy. And people need food to live.
As the meme goes, if you saw someone stealing food, no, you didn't. Poor people gotta eat too.
Every dollar stolen from the store gets added to the prices you pay going forward, they absolutely do not let it come out of profits.
then why are they whining about it?
Because now they can't increase the prices anyway and get better profit margins.
Do you think they'd lower prices if theft stopped?
Nope.
I hear what you're saying, but we're not talking about a single-mother sneaking diapers out because she needs them or a Jean Valjean-type taking bread because they're hungry...
This is OCR (Organized Retail Theft) where a team of 3+ people coordinate with phones, distractions, and a driver, to quickly get as many high-dollar, shelf-stable items out of a store as possible to resell on Facebook marketplace/eBay/etc. It's typically at least $1000 per store.
If you hate large organizations, you should hate the greed of criminal rings like this, because we all absolutely pay more because of it...
EDIT: I'm just talking about what the article is referring to. I'm not saying companies don't pass the costs on to consumers, and I'm not casting moral judgement.
We'd pay more anyway, they're just butthurt that the margins are smaller. You think the prices are going to come down if the theft stops?
i've never seen someone steal food and i never will.
Remember kids, if you see someone stealing food,
No you didn't.
Adapt or die. It’s not really that difficult a concept.
I'm torn on this one. On one hand, fuck the money grubbing corporations that got themselves into this mess. On the other these closures are creating food deserts.
I'll make it easy for you. It is the money gubbing corporations creating the food deserts.
Yeah it's not the customers at fault here. Nobody asked for the cashiers to be cut down to 1 or 2 (ever) and replaced with self checkouts.
I was at one such shitty grocery store the other day. We'll call it Roger but with the letter 'K' omitted. They have these large self checkouts with conveyors. Up until about 2 weeks ago, you could scan your items at a normal rate like the regular cashiers do. It was convenient, and it was glorious. The older self checkouts were horribly slow and were only meant for a basket's worth of groceries, so this was a welcome, but very temporary, improvement.
An employee told me they "cranked up the security" as he came over for the third time because that ~~self checkout~~ bathroom scale with delusions of grandeur kept calling for backup. You can only scan items once every 3 seconds and have to wait for it every time. I've got a cart full of groceries, and they expect me to scan them at a snail's pace. If you scan too many items (5 apparently?), you have to walk to the end and bag them even though there's plenty of goddamned room on the conveyor. Then walk back and scan a few more. Rinse, repeat. (Until recently, you could scan your whole cart, load it on the conveyor, pay, and then bag everything up at once like a normal person.)
I was absolutely livid, grabbed what few groceries I'd already bagged, put them back in my cart, abandoned the transaction, and waited in line for the one lonely human cashier.
She was confused because some of my stuff was already bagged. Told her why and she just sighed and said yeah. I jokingly said I'd like to give the manager an earfull and she said I should, but it won't do any good. And she was likely right because this reeks of corporate heavy handedness.
Needless to say, I'm never going back to Roger (with a K) anymore. I only went there for the fuel points and because it was close to my workplace, but it's no longer worth it.
People stealing food? That's not a crime problem thats a poverty problem.
Stealing isn’t OK, but I always found it a bit disjointed how making “mistakes” (minor or large) at self-checkouts basically has zero recourse. They really do need to be reworked
All of the local grocery stores in my area have been bought by Kroger, they have tossed most of the normal checkouts for self checkouts. This wouldn't be a problem but they only ever staff one "group" of checkouts with one gormless teenager regardless of how long the lines are. Meaning every time sombody has to get an ID checked for beer whatever dumb dumb is running the checkouts has to notice, put down their phone, and then shuffle over to you to just hammer 9/9/99 into the age prompt. I walk out of the store now if the lines are long and go somwhere else. Fuck them.
It's funny how this wasn't a problem back in the days before customers were expected to act as unpaid employees.