I think there has been some cutthroat competition in the grocery business in my small town. When we first moved here, there were two grocery stores: the big supermarket, Willie’s, and a smaller store called Coborn’s. Coborn’s abruptly closed up, to everyone’s surprise — the story was that they were denied a liquor license to allow them to sell beer, and then they packed up and moved out. This town is dominated in some ways by the apostolic church, and they’re pretty strict on the blue law enforcement.
Then a few years ago, a new grocery store, Meadowland, opened up just a few blocks from Willie’s. It’s not a high-end place, it’s got a cheaper esthetic, has a substantial stock, but it’s all a hodge-podge of brands. You’d think it would fold up in the face of competition from the established store, but it’s hanging in there. It’s run by…the apostolic church, so it’s got that advantage.
There’s stuff going on behind the scenes, on the town council, in private meetings, and I know nothing about it. What I do know is that grocery prices have been steadily climbing, and there’s nothing I can do about it, because we’re a small town and competition isn’t much of an option. Buy from the supermarket which basically has a stranglehold on the county, or buy from the fundamentalist church-run business that would probably be even worse if they got a monopoly? What a choice.
Mike the Mad Biologist highlights a brief comment in the Washington Post:
But there is no immediate fix for policymakers. Grocery prices remain elevated due to a mixture of labor shortages tied to the pandemic, ongoing supply chain disruptions, droughts, avian flu and other factors far beyond the administration’s control. Robust consumer demand has also fueled a shift to more expensive groceries, and consolidation in the industry gives large chains the ability to keep prices high, economic policy experts say.
Yes, that’s our situation. We do not live in a food desert, other than the artificially constructed one. We are surrounded by farms — unfortunately, most of them are growing corn for feedstocks and alcohol — but we could do better. In the summer, we subscribed to a local farm service, and every week we got a big box of fresh produce. It was a bit overwhelming, since we’d get this diverse collection of unfamiliar vegetables and had to struggle to figure out what to do with it all, but there’s clearly a better alternative to all the pre-packaged overpriced stuff with get from the overly-familiar store.
I do wonder what Willie’s would do if local farms became a more popular source for groceries. We’d probably also be healthier.
It’s not just small towns or monopolies. While I don’t live in a megalopolis, I’m in a, I guess, rural city of about 200k. I have 5 grocery stores within walking distance (a couple miles) including Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club. Prices are high everywhere. Cheapest alternative is Aldi which only carries off-brand knockoffs of popular brands which are universally terrible compared to the original.
We used to make trips to Aldi, which is about an hour’s drive away from us, to get slightly better prices. Now my wife is working nearly full time at a senior citizens’ center to try and make ends meet, which means neither of us have the time to do any comparison shopping.
I went to UM Morris in the early 1980s, and an apostolic church group ran lots of businesses behind the scenes even then, and had for some time. I don’t know if it was the same one. For us students, it wasn’t so behind the scenes, though, because various members of the sect owned most of the rental properties in town. Rents were high, but that’s not unexpected in a small, rural, college town. What sucked was that the apartments were so run down, and many of them almost unlivable. I lived for a year in a place where, not only was there not a shower, but to take a bath, you needed to let very brown, rusty water trickle for half an hour into the tub in order to get enough to take a bath. We complained, but knew from others that nothing would get done.
There were lots of rumors about illicit business shenanigans going on amongst and between members of this group, but nothing came of it while I was there. It was just one of the things in the background of living in that town at that time.
That’s the same group still running the show. I know they’ve dictated all kinds of nonsense to the local schools by threatening to pull their kids (they have a lot of them) out if certain things were taught. I think that’s how we got a creationist science teacher in the high school for several years.
Buy local, eat local. Here in the Japanese countryside, we buy mostly organic food grown by farmers within a 50-mile radius via a co-op system. It’s delivered once a week and there are around 200 choices of various kinds of food (probably 70% organic). Yes, it’s more expensive than the local supermarkets, but the way their prices have been going up recently, it’s not that much different.
I suspect Japan can do this because of having a denser population compared to the US, but still, it would be nice if more US farmers grew food to be distributed locally, organic or not.
“we’d get this diverse collection of unfamiliar vegetables and had to struggle to figure out what to do with it all”
Get Mark Bittman’s “How to Cook Everything Vegetarian” cookbook. It’s great! You can probably get a used copy from ABEbooks.com.
“we’d get this diverse collection of unfamiliar vegetables and had to struggle to figure out what to do with it all”
Get Mark Bittman’s “How to Cook Everything Vegetarian” cookbook. It’s great! You can probably get a used copy from ABEbooks.com.
Sorry for the double post.
@5 redwood: There are places in the US where farmer’s markets do the same thing. In the US it’s more a matter of terrain, hilly terrain prevents large scale automation so you get a bunch of small fields which can be planted with different things. It’s also common in Amish and related religious areas, where a large part of the population won’t automate.
“But there is no immediate fix for policymakers. Grocery prices remain elevated due to a mixture of labor shortages tied to the pandemic, ongoing supply chain disruptions, droughts, avian flu and other factors far beyond the administration’s control.” Labor shortages have eased greatly, the supply chain problems have largely been ironed out, the avian flu is diminishing and in any case never hit even a majority of producers. One of the bigger reasons for continuing high food prices is just profit maximizing. Food producers played the inflation card to jack up prices, saw their profits skyrocket, and have decided to keep prices high because hey, people gotta eat. And consolidation in the market provides little competitive pressure to lower prices. Because they don’t enjoy economies of scale, locally grown food is often much more expensive than grocery store prices, albeit generally better quality.
The alcohol license situation is greatly contrasted here in Louisiana. I grew up in Virginia, where hard liquor was only sold in ABC stores. (I think that was the term. Too much LDS in the 1960s to remember for sure. : ) ) Lighter stuff was available in other stores.
Moving to Louisiana in the early 1970s was therefore an eye-opener. You can buy hard liquor in convenience stores! And it’s a highly religious state. I’m not saying that’s true everywhere in the state – there are Baptist holdouts in some parishes, places – but still it’s common almost everywhere.
At least here in Australia there’s the problem that the sector is dominated by a duopoly and they are busy price gouging. They’re charging more and paying suppliers less.
I can think of one solution, and there are probably others that don’t involve guillotines
dangerousbeans, you are mistaken. It’s four, not two.
“Australia’s supermarket industry is dominated by four main companies, Woolworths, Coles, Aldi, and Metcash (IGA).”
(https://www.statista.com/topics/6399/supermarkets-and-grocery-retail-in-australia/)
FWIW, I’ve lived in a couple of small towns in the Adelaide hills between 1997 and 2020 (Springton (pop. 607), and Birdwood(pop. 932) — current figures from Wikipedia), having moved from Adelaide suburbs after I quit my suddenly-stressful job (EDS, it
bought outcontracted and consolidated SA Govt’s mainframe operations, but being USAnian stressed me out). Populations as per Wikipedia, current — fewer people then. Bought a cheap house in the country, since I could not afford one in the city.Point being, we had a supermarket in Birdwood, small and mediocre as it may have been (nearly a thousand people around the township!), but only the classic General Store in Springton.
Trust me. Supermarkets are not as bad as local shops. More choice, better prices.
In short, I’ve lived where there are no supermarkets. I do not recommend such places.
@11 Eh, Louisiana isn’t really southern in the sense that most of the southeast states are southern and they aren’t really religious either. They’re French. They started out as a French colony which the US bought from France and they kind of kept the French attitudes towards alcohol, sex and religion. Nothing else explains drive-through daiquiri stands.
@10 this 1000+
You could jack up the hourly wage of the slaughterhouse workers, the cannery workers, etc to $15/hr and it wouldn’t affect the end price more than a few cents. Corporate overlords are trying to hide behind the fig leaf of inflation and it just isn’t true. It’s what the market will bear and as you pointed out, people like to eat. If expenses are eating up so much of their profit, why are so many companies posting their highest profits in years/ever during the pandemic? Add to the fact that a lot of people either lack basic cooking skills or just don’t like to, so they buy a lot of prepared foods which is more expensive still.
@6 I like the Chez Panisse/Alice Waters cookbooks myself.
You are lucky to have any farms nearby that offer community supported agriculture. So many farms are now basically leaseholder farms, where the people who own the farmland aren’t actually the ones farming it, it’s farmed by people who lease the land, which forces them to either farm in service to big business like Archer-Daniels-Midland, Tyson, etc or go broke. It’s the modern version of sharecropping, with similar outcomes. The people doing the hard work of farming don’t really profit from their labors.
I support some of the local farmers but not going to lie–it costs a fortune to eat like a peasant. The local chicken farmer closest to me has an actual pasture-raised chicken farm (it’s so tiny that the term ranch seems rather grandiose) but the chickens are actually running around on grass 24/7 (they are cooped up in mobile chicken coops on wheels at night, which allows them to be moved to fresh pastures daily.) She only raises heritage breeds (no modern breeds that grow so quickly that they die on their own if they are not slaughtered by 12 weeks) but it costs a lot to eat that way–her chickens start at about $15 for a 3 lbs chicken and the cost goes up rapidly. But it’s either support local farming or else see farms turned into strip malls and condos.
@ John Morales :
Foodland where I usually shop? Belair area FWIW. Or is that IGA now?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foodland_(South_Australia)
Anyhow Coles and Woolies do seem to have far more power economically than the other two. There’s recently been an inquiry into it which actually seems to be an on-going thing – see :
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-07/coles-submission-supermarket-price-inquiry/103436864
Hah. Recognised the CoL pressures notably NOT saying they’ll actually do anything about them with corporate profiteering behind 70% or so of inflation lately so I gather. Its certainly an issue under discussion here with the duopoly note dupo-poly being heavily ctriticised and inmy view rigfhtly so by alot of people :
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=4+Corners+Duopoly+Coles+Woolworths
Yes, StevoR, Foodland. In fact, when I lived in Springton, I used to travel there for shopping rather than to town — only 20k away or so. Point being, (supermarket >= general store) for value and for choice.
If you’re ever around the place, check out the Springton General Store, for some contrast.
Ironically, since I’ve retired to Qld, my local is Drake’s, which is a SA-based chain.
Part of the Metcash (IGA) group. Not part of Coles or Woolies, which you think are the overwhelming power in that space.
You could check out my link @13 — but sure, they have more than half the market share between them.
Or check other sources; basically, Woolworths’ share was 36% in 2021-22, followed by Coles at 28%, then the others. Whether you call that “far more” is up to you, but you’d do well not to take opinion pieces as factual and authoritative.
As for “profiteering”, fine. Nobody is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to shop there.
Feel free to to your local (more expensive, less choices) regular shop, if you have one available.
You’ll not enjoy the experience, and the very point of having a shop is to profit from selling stuff, so you’ll find it too tries to make a profit.
PS I used to live in Belair, myself, back in the day — used to bicycle up and down Old Belair Road to Mitcham, where I worked. Got lumpy legs out of it, used to beat the traffic downhill.
But I’m talking around 1980, so before your time.
Oh, there are fixes available to policymakers, they just won’t consider them. How about a public option for groceries – a network of publically funded shops with administrative costs set to a fixed percentage of supply costs? Would provide some competition for the duopoly here in Australia, and get farmers a fair share of the income. But that would be socialism.
First-world problem that I’m sure starving people in third-world countries appreciate you complaining about. Poor little Pizz who works as an associate professor at a state college has to drive an hour to an ALDI to save money. Everyone shed a tear for the poor old man.