Remember: If you see someone stealing food, no the fuck you didn’t.
It’s pretty easy to have an uptick in profits when you charger more. Eggs are still double what they were a year ago. Because why not.
Yup, stores realized they could make more money while simultaneously dealing with less overhead.
Eggs are a great example. Let’s compare a $2/dozen vs $6/dozen difference. With $2 per dozen, you need to sell 50 cartons to make $100. Consider that you also paid for each carton, had to ship them into the store, pay people to stock the shelves, pay rent for the store, pay to keep the store lit and cooled, unsold product spoils, etc… And your margin probably isn’t that great on that $100. Let’s say your overhead expenses are ~$1.80 per carton. You probably spent ~$90 in overhead, so you only actually netted ~$10 in profit.
Now let’s do the same math with a $6 carton. You only need to sell ~17 cartons to make the same $100. And since you’re selling fewer cartons, your overhead expenses have dropped; Some of the expenses (like rent and utilities) haven’t changed, but you’re not paying as much in shipping, there’s less waste from spoilage due to smaller back-stock, etc… Let’s say that all combines to reduce your overhead per carton by 5¢. So now you’re paying ~$1.75 per carton. That 17 cartons would have only cost you ~$29.75 in expenses. So now you have made over $70, instead of only $10. All while comfortably selling less.
And of course, there are two big losers in this scenario. The first is the producer. The egg farmers. Suddenly, their demand has dried up. Not completely, because food is a fairly inflexible demand… But people are increasingly avoiding them if they can find cheaper alternatives. And that’s exactly what we have seen; Farms are almost universally in the red right now, and Trump just followed that up with a one-two punch. First, he removed a lot of their cheap labor (immigrants) and then he killed a bunch of subsidies that would have kept those farms afloat. But hey, they got what they voted for, right?
The other big loser is the consumer, who is suddenly struggling to feed themselves and their family. And it’ll likely only continue to get worse.
yeah our neighborhood lady who sold her leftover hen eggs for $0.50 a pop, she hasn’t changed her prices but now she’s about as expensive as the store. only her eggs are better. only problem is she’s only got like 4 chickens, so she can’t supply the entire neighborhood.
Grocery store chains raise prices amid hunger crisis.
I work at one. Unfortunately you’re not wrong. Mine is also in a food desert, a fact they take full advantage of. I’ve at least convinced them to let me donate outdated bread and dry/canned goods. They act like it’s some grand fkn gesture while paying poverty wages and charging extortion prices
edited for grammar
Not an excuse but I’ve been told that some big stores don’t donate expired stuff for liability reasons. Which is bullshit. We have enough food for everyone but profits are always put before people. And if you can’t afford food you’re probably not gonna get a lawyer to sue for free bread that hurt your tummy.
That’s a common myth. There are laws in place that exempt stores from liability in this exact scenario. No, the real reason they do it is to enforce artificial scarcity. They can’t donate to a food bank, because then people might get it for free instead of paying the store for it.
“liability” being a euphemism for artificial scarcity. Ever seen those videos of employees forced to cut up perfectly good clothes or that girl fired from Dunkin for donating donuts they told her to throw away? they need to keep their prices up and destroy their own product to do so.
damn damn damn damn damn there’s a really expensive blazer with a real faint paisley i wanted to buy ten or so years ago and looked great in but i didn’t have 700 bucks in the jacket fund (i have bought 700 bucks worth of regret tho) so i left it in the store. and just hoped i would somehow run into it somewhere, sometime in the future. not as fabric shreds.
I work at an auto parts scrap facility and you’re right on the money. Besides defective parts, there is a mind boggling amount of brand new parts that never make it into a car. Anything that the automaker can’t sell gets shredded and destroyed so resellers can’t get at them and the automaker gets a cut of the refund for the materials.
Take a look sometime at the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act. It protects donations made in good faith; liability only comes into play when ill intent is involved (i.e. purposely sending spoiled meat). That’s how I was able to convince them for the little bit they’ve gone for so far.
Feel free to expose them by putting together evidence and releasing it.
There’s nothing to expose; the local community is well aware how overpriced the store is. They promote themselves as a small independent chain while being owned by the largest grocery distributor in the US other than Walmart. It’s disgusting, and I hate them for it. But I’m doing what I can to help from the inside to stop so much waste at least.
I’d love nothing more than to “expose” them, but there’s literally nothing that can be done. Take solace in the fact that our grocery sales are actually down significantly and my guess is my particular location will be shuttered inside of a year.
Burn it down
I’d love to. But the way things are going around here, I might need that insider access to the bread lines.
The outcome of that is less availability of groceries, long treks to buy food, and higher prices.
What’s actually needed is a unionized competitor
That won’t happen
It can with local support.
So… Is it a kroger or albertsons subsidiary?
Neither. I can tell you we’ve been purchased twice in the last 8 months; we were purchased in february by a large grocery distributor, publicly traded, and then about 3 months ago they were purchased by the largest privately owned grocery distributor in the country in a 1.8 Billion dollar deal.
But yeah, they still ride the reputation of the small chain (think 12 stores in a small tristate region) and use that to justify their high prices. Management’s answer to any complaint is always “we’re a small local business, we don’t have the purchasing power of a Walmart”. Yeah, not entirely true. Not by a long shot.
Huh, ive never heard of another mego grocer with that kind of money to throw around. Thats interesting. Are yall at least unionized like the others?
This is just going to get worse thanks to the current administration:
- tariffs raising prices
- stagflation
- job losses/layoffs/hiring freezes stacking up
- AI bubble to pop eventually
Seems like a bad cycle that will be difficult to break.
You’re skipping “flu season”…
COVID didn’t just go away. And they’re legitimately wanting to ban anyone under 70 from getting a vaccine this year.
Not only is it going to be bad this year because of that, but a lot of people’s lungs are already fucked. Throw stress and poor nutrition on top of that…
A shit ton of predominantly elderly trump voters are gonna die in the next six months from easily preventable diseases thanks to Trump’s administration.
And, a lot of agriculture workers are immigrants. ICE is actively damaging farm labor, making workers afraid to show up and hauling away people who are just doing their jobs.
Not to mention the primary directive for human life, for profit. Think of the shareholders because theyre always more important.
Grocery store chains are reporting an uptick in profit.
🤮🤮🤮🤮
Starvation is an acceptable way to commit mass murder.
258,000,000.
one of the staples at the pantry here used to be chicken from walmart’s deli. the roasted and fried chicken that didn’t sell even out of the cold case the day or two after, or on markdown on the sell-by day.
the store now freezes what doesn’t sell, relabels it as ‘chilled’ with a new sell-by date, and puts it back out at full price, one or two at a time as they sell.
My church food pantry used to serve about 200 families a month. This past year we have risen to over 900 families per month. We used to service three counties but reduced it down to one and we have reduced our days from five to three days per week. We can’t get enough food and regularly run out. The only plus is that my community is primarily MAGA and they got what they voted for.
Hopefully your local MAGAs are too proud to take advantage of your churches program, because that would be socialism!
