Why Supermarkets Suck

Is there anyone who doesn't agree that most supermarkets suck. It's not the fault of the supermarkets, per se. People need food, and food has this nasty habit of decomposing. So a large number of folks are at supermarkets all the time, picking up food, so they can eat for another week.

And this leads to crowds. And this leads to painful parking. And this leads to long lines, with carts filled to the brim, and this leads to customers that wish they didn't have to stand in line to get ten items or less, standing behind those who figure twenty items is close enough to ten items (I have a solution for this. Penalize a person one dollar for every item over ten they have in their carts).

The solution seems obvious enough. Hire more people to man the stations. But that doesn't solve the problem of crowds parked. I suppose the solution then is to get people to come by bus (good luck with that!).

What most people would like to do, to be honest, is to have food delivered. But, supermarkets already operate at razor sharp margins. Delivery is expensive. So people are willing to put up with the pain of shopping to save that money. After all, you don't save a ton of money eating at home (maybe half?). You begin to lose that when you pay extra to have someone deliver it.

And do you trust a person being paid minimum wage to try to get you the "best" tomatoes? They'll give you what's convenient, and you're left with no choice. They have no incentive to favor you over favoring someone else, so they resort to what's easy.

The Starbucks solution isn't that good either! That's the one where you have a Starbucks at every corner, so that ever Starbucks is tiny and personal. Here's the key though. Each Starbucks has a limited menu. So every Starbucks can be the same.

Most grocery stores sell 20,000 items or more. It helps to have a large number of items on stock. This makes it hard to be small, because people want so much stuff available.

And, the US lacks the kind of income inequity of India, so we can't simply hire someone to do the job for us, and in any case, they suffer, so we don't have to.

We could shop off-hours, but many stores that we want to shop at don't open 24 hours.

I was surprised after leaving College Park, to discover many a store isn't opened 24 hours. The Giant in Greenbelt is. The Shoppers Food Warehouse in College Park is. But get away from this and most places close at midnight. Inconvenient!

The problem is we want food and we want it cheap, much cheaper than eating out. And stores have no incentive for us to get the kind of choice we want at those cheap prices and have it delivered (and honestly, we want an outdoor secure fridge, and conscientious people, that will place the food their safely, securely, so we don't actually have to be there to receive the food).

So many things make it so hard for us to avoid the pain of buying groceries. Someday, someone will become a genius in this respect. But it's because we demand perishable goods for good food that we are left in this conundrum.