Upset about the rising cost of food? Here are some things we do that directly impact the prices:
– leave behind perishable foods all over the store (pork in the soap aisle, fresh peaches in the freezer). These products get thrown out!
Nobody tries to guess if those oysters, dumped in the chip rack, are still safe to sell.
– Using services improperly. IE: Asking the pharmacist to ring thru your groceries! Expensive staff costs mean expensive food. A highly paid university educated professional versus a minimum wage cashier (hired to ring in your stuff) – you do the math.
-If you waste a staff member’s time you are also requiring paying another employee to take care of duties for them.
You’re now paying for two employees for something you could have done yourself.
Also staff take care of a lot of behind the scenes things that keep a store running smoothly. Don’t assume that staff are soley there to serve you and nothing else. The more interuptions to orders/pricing/stock/tillcounts etc. the less smoothly the store runs and the higher the operational costs.
-Letting your kids run amok;
Damaging products and wrecking displays (that a paid employee has to fix). Teach them at an early age the value of food, and that a place of business is not a playground.
The grocery industry has a term for these examples called “shrink”. It’s not just loss from stealing but all the damage/lost time/lost product that has to factored into the cost of the food you buy.
We’ve realized individual actions can make a difference collectively in the environment, yet few of us have come to understand our actions inpact us economically as well.
This article appears in May 1-7, 2008.
try: your shareholders just wanting more cash, not fairly paying farmers what they are worth and trying to be more than a grocery store. Oh and by the way Shrink is a widely used termnot just in the grocery circle…Lastly Your shareholders won’t get a dime from me until they stop importing canned mushrooms from china. Eating canned mushrooms from china is just a russian roulette of suicide…
this is funny.While it is true. You will see this has little effect on the cost of things and is more of an annoyance to you. Take for example the cost of one extra person or maybe two employees per day. That calculates to about an extra two hundred per day. Combine that with say $500 bucks worth of misplaced shit a day. That money would easily be recouped by raising the price of just three items such as milk or pop or soap. You sell enough of that in a day. Reality is that food prices are skyrocketing not because of that shit you said…… IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN LIKE THAT. SINCE THE BEGINNING OF GROCERY STORES.Reality is, farm land ruined by floods, high cost to feed animal, high world cost of things like corn (because it is fuel now), cost of gas is much higher and now hurts the bottom line of supppliers, grower, warehouses, and shippers. While this was a great attempt as justifying why we should put food back on the shelves, and other poor actions on the part of shoppers, this isnt something new. SO if it isnt new, why is there a recent superspike in prices? Look at external influences, and you will find out what affects prices. By the way, food prices are also affected by the “super” grocery stores. When you look at the shit they carry and have to hire the extra staff to maintain a beauty shop, a drug store, a toy store, an audio video store, they have to break even to justify the inclusion to these stores. Should one of them be signififcantly impacting on the store’s bottom line in a negative way, the product most sold will take a tiny increase to compensate. That product would be food.So it is a great idea to suggest that stuff OP bitched about has anything to do with food prices, but reality is, since grocery stores have been around for over 50 years, this isnt new behaviour, and prices remained the same for quite a few years.
This is the stupidest bitch I’ve read in a while! Has nothing to do with any of things you’ve listed off, and if we all changed that the cost of food would still go up, just like everything else these days!Have you taken a look around lately, prices of everything is increaseing, so don’t worry about that can that is in the magazine rack, its not going to raise it another .50!!! Christ!
You think that’s bad, wait another 2 years and let’s hope we’ll actually find food in the stores with high fuel prices. All this farm land in Canada, all this oil, yet we’re still living as if we’re an underdeveloped country and heading for another depression!
this is such a stupid bitch. you act like you are knowlegable on the subject, what with using the lingo, but you make some very ignorant points.i worked 3 years in a grocery store and if i had ever thrown out oysters left in a chip rack instead of checking with a manager to see if it had perished, i would be severely reprimanded. maybe your staff is just lazy?as for having to pay extra staff for the pharmacy, etc because of people ringing through their purchases at the wrong counter, thats bull. yeah, it’s annoying and we all hate it, but a pharmacy is open set hours with a set staff schedule, and when they have no customers, they dont mind doing it as THEY ARE THERE ANYWAY…. only a moron of a manager would hire more pharmacy staff to serve grocery customers instead of just adding an extra cashier or two when necessary. they dont call in a pharmacist on her day off because they are backlogged with grocery customers.wasting a staff members time?? last time i checked, it was in my job description to serve customers to the best of my abilities, whether or not i feel it’s my ‘job’ at the time. i did the scheduling and did all the cold-calling when we needed extra people and we based scheduling on one factor: the maximum people we might need in the event of a rush, and to be filtered off as the night died down. there are ALWAYS employees who arent needed at the time, but will become useful in a rush, puttering around the store, trying to look useful to befuddled customers. the system has always wrked that way, and will until they replace us all with machines, so you’re not raising the food prices by asking a stray employee to help you find something you need. it is pledged as a service standard for most grocery chains, is it not? and last but not least, look at your own employees. last year, we busted 12 employees for theft or ‘sweethearting’ to friends or family, all of amounts exceeding $5,000 because the observation period is so lengthy. you’re blaming your own customers who provide you with revenue, wagging your finger at them in shame, when you can account for a lot of your loss right at home. i dont know too many employees who dont ‘forget’ to pay for their lunch on a regular basis. it explains a LOT more shrink than the occasional thoughtless person who put peaches in a freezer