7 ms·

This feels like the proverbial dollar left on the street that economists say should not exist, so I'm racking my brain trying to figure out what's stopping chai

• SubiculumCode 9y ago
  Maybe its just because there isn't enough competition after corporate consolidation. For the most part I see the same brands and items in stores in Virginia as in stores in California...even in the organic food stores.
• paulddraper 9y ago
  > Markets also cut costs by eschewing extra technology and certain aesthetic choices—the Journal points out that shelves “are typically made of plywood and lined with newsprint,” prices are scrawled on cardboard instead of printed on stickers, and credit cards are not always accepted. Some people don't want to buy food with cardboard signs and cash. Hell, I've heard California even has people who are fans of convenience so much they will pay for other people to do the grocery shopping.
  • throwaway2048 9y ago
    Its a conditioning thing, if thats how you had always bought vegetables it wouldn't be odd to you at all.
    • ethbro 9y ago
      I may be showing my roots here, but I've never bought a cantaloupe off the back of a beat up farm truck that wasn't delicious.
  • s0rce 9y ago
    I met people in London who also pay people to grocery shop for them. For most staples I'm pretty sure this could probably be cheaper then having a grocery store in SF, they could have a warehouse in Fremont.
    • kbutler 9y ago
      We could call it "HomeGrocer" or maybe that's too specific - how about "Webvan"? (I agree though, I think this is something that is going to happen - just have to find the right business model at the right time.)
      • dylz 9y ago
        Doesn't that exist in the form of primenow, doordash, seamless, grubhub, instacart, uber eats, [...]? From what I remember I've seen quite a few "night time delivery only, no pickup allowed" grocery "restaurants" on those services
      • pault 9y ago
        Eh? I don't have a car and do _all_ of my shopping via amazon now and instacart (direct from Whole Foods). I get deliveries 3-4 times per week.
        • joshyeager 9y ago
          Kbutler is joking. HomeGrocer and WebVan were early companies that attempted to sell groceries on the Internet. They both collapsed in the dot-com crash. I am not sure why they failed but more recent attempts seem to be succeeding. My two current theories are: 1. They were ahead of their time. There weren't enough people shopping on the Internet to sustain them back then. 2. They were killed by structural obstacles that may also kill the new versions.
      • InitialLastName 9y ago
        Something about how you can get Fresh food Directly from the warehouse.
      • 9y ago
  • mistermann 9y ago
    > Some people don't want to buy food with cardboard signs and cash. Gee, I wonder why do you have to pay with cash....that might be one contributing factor why prices can't be matched by mainstream retailers.
    • sotojuan 9y ago
      Immigrants in general, but especially Asian ones, do not want to pay the fees required to accept cards. Most people in their communities are fine with it.
      • mistermann 9y ago
        In my experience they often seem averse to typing sales into a cash register, even when they have one right in from of them....or the ole "type the price in and hit "cash" " trick. Must be some sort of a superstition.
        • jfoutz 9y ago
          My grandfather ran a store that my uncle took over. No pennies, no tax. Everything was priced as marked. End of the day, count up the register and write it in the log. end of the month calculate how much came in, multiply by sales tax, and send a check off to the state. Maybe they're cheating. IMHO, most of that cash register discipline is because the owner (or his immediate family) isn't running the register. Im sure you can get away with not paying taxes for a while, but if you're going to have a generational store, you've got to be honest. Technical controls are cool and all. When you can just look over and see you need more cans of soup, when you implicitly trust your employees, and you're not looking to make a quick buck and run away, they're just a lot of work for not much value. Scaling has a cost.
        • GFischer 9y ago
          In South America, tax evasion has evolved so much that there are software packages with built-in "under the table" accounting, and dual accounting (one for the state and the real one). Paying actual taxes is a fast way to bankruptcy here :( , the above-board companies look for tax loops, smaller ones make do with dual-accounting and understating income. Government figured out that income tax is the most difficult to fake and heavily hammers employees :(
  • thoughtpalette 9y ago
    I pay a service to do my grocery shopping for me. It's a bit of a markup, but I highly value my personal time, don't own a vehicle and have an extreme dislike of grocery stores. There's a great market for such services (gig economy). Chicago Resident.
    • benwilber0 9y ago
      yep same. Brooklyn here. I order grocery delivery from a local independent grocer via an app once a week or so. I value my time and don't want to spend it standing it line at a grocery store.
    • paulddraper 9y ago
      Exactly. I was being facetious, but the point is that rock-bottom prices aren't everything.
• Nav_Panel 9y ago
  > what's stopping chains from replicating this Probably volume. Chinatown is extremely dense and has such high foot traffic that it makes sense to operate without refrigeration, with goods stocked from neighborhood warehouses. Most parts of the country don't have anywhere near that level of density, so the economies of scale wont work out like they do in Chinatown.
  • Spooky23 9y ago
    Not really. Drive up to Albany where there is zero foot traffic and the Asian markets are about the same price. They have coolers though.
    • Nav_Panel 9y ago
      I'm actually from Albany. There are 3 Asian markets there: "Asian Supermarket", Kim's Asian Market (never went in this one, but I think it's Korean rather than Chinese), and one more whose name I forget that's smaller but seems to have fresher produce. I never tried buying produce there (we'd mostly hoard Asian snacks) but I wouldn't be surprised if it was more expensive and less fresh than Chinatown simply as a result of the additional shipping/refrigeration required. Anecdotally, no family I knew would shop at those over the standard region supermarkets unless they needed some specific Asian ingredient, whereas in NYC many shop preferentially at the Chinatown markets.
      • Spooky23 9y ago
        Totally agree on all counts. I think price is good but the quality varies, as everything is coming up from NYC. Typically I buy scallions, onions and peas every month or so if I stop in to pick up a few other things like dumplings or sauces.
  • panglott 9y ago
    Free market economics always works best in an actual marketplace, where vendors are competing stall-to-stall. Most Americans buy groceries from a large corporate-owned store that they drive to and has everything, which compete with other large corporate-owned one-stop-shop that you have to drive to.
• NwmG 9y ago
  Likely has something to do with scale. In particular they are able to keep a low or nonexistent administrative overhead.
  • bcaulfield 9y ago
    A real-world example of diseconomies of scale?
• bpodgursky 9y ago
  My understanding was that a lot of the produce sold in Chinatown markets was near expiration dates and often had already been rotated off of the shelves of normal supermarkets, often for cosmetic reasons or as a way of segmenting the market. (basically, supermakets sell produce to Chinatown vendors for a lower price, who then move it to a segment of the market which is willing to buy non-aesthetic food which needs to be eaten in a day or two)
  • landryraccoon 9y ago
    Your point was addressed and refuted by the main article.
  • bgun 9y ago
    As the article mentions (and in my experience having lived and cooked in Chinatown for years) this is fresh produce from small wholesalers, not near-expired undesirables. I don't doubt, however, that mostly untracked/untaxed cash transactions (both store-customer and wholesaler-store) contribute to some of the price differential.
• bryanlarsen 9y ago
  From what I understand, these networks are both small and very local. That makes them undesirable to large chains. This is also the reason that Whole Foods has gone downhill, they used to use similar networks but as they've expanded they've been forced to use larger more mainstream suppliers.
• sushid 9y ago
  Well on the retail side, we do have retailers like Aldi's. You bag your own grocery and they have no workers focused on presenting the store in an ideal way. It's an IKEA maze full of warehouse goods like Costco. I feel like the reason Safeway can't replicate this is because they have regional distributors. Having each and every store work independently requires very shrewd buyers on the retailer side. Furthermore, there's the expectation of having certain items for sale, regardless of demand or price fluctuation. There's no expectation for the Chinatown retailers.
• naravara 9y ago
  >I'm racking my brain trying to figure out what's stopping chains from replicating this. Scale. Anything living has a level of variability and likelihood of failure/damage/spoilage to it that gets harder and harder to manage as your scale gets bigger. When you're a small shopkeeper who sells about 3 baskets of apples a day, it's both easier to sift through it and throw out the bad ones AND easier to find 3 basket's worth of apples that meet your quality expectations. When you have to move 3 pallet-loads of apples, though, not only does QC become a more complicated endeavor, but you have to find 3 pallet-loads of apples to sell at a competitive price, so you may not have the luxury of being so choosy. When pallet-loads scale up to shipping-containers. . . you can see where I'm going with this. And then there are logistics issues. If you're a large retailer you have to bring everything into centralized warehouses and then send them out. This means things need to travel longer distances and/or have longer shelf-lives. The upshot of that is they have a higher chance of either being past their prime by the time they get to you, or that had to get picked before they were properly ripened on the vine. When you're smaller, have smaller scale suppliers, and less complicated distribution networks a lot of that extra burden falls away. Starbucks had this problem when they first started to get big too. A lot of people give them flack for over-roasting their beans and giving everything a charred/muddied flavor. When they were small they were able to be choosier about the beans. As they grew the scuttlebutt is that there just weren’t enough beans of that quality level on the market, so they had to lower the quality threshold and move to darker roasts. They still sell better beans, but only in select locations.
  • ThrustVectoring 9y ago
    There's also the matter of what trade-offs customers are willing to accept. I suspect that the customers here care a lot more about price, whereas the typical suburban supermarket customers are willing to pay premiums for things like later operating hours, selection of goods, higher likelihood of availability, and the "organic" label on produce.
    • athenot 9y ago
      And taste. And freshness. I find a much better selection of flavors at my local Asian mart, and produce is usually a lot fresher since it moves off the shelves fast. Contrast with my local supermarket which sees that same bunch of brussel sprouts stay out all week, until it shrivels up and end up tossing half in the trash.
• Alex3917 9y ago
  > I wonder whether this alternate network is as scrupulous about source tracking and food safety regulations. If you think there are some regulations that Jetro or whoever is enforcing that these other wholesalers aren't then post that. Otherwise this just comes off as a subtly racist comment.
  • bjt 9y ago
    What is racist about wondering whether a marginal distribution network is being as closely regulated as the dominant/mainstream one? It's a natural thing to wonder regardless of anyone's race.
• mikeash 9y ago
  I don't think produce prices are all that competitive. For one thing, it's terribly difficult to comparison shop them. The prices change all the time and you pretty much have to visit the store in person to find out what they are on any given week, so it's either waste a lot of time shopping around, or go with what you find in the store you usually visit anyway. The fact that the prices are usually round numbers (e.g. when I buy apples they're almost always $0.99, $1.49, or $1.99/pound) seems to support the idea that stores aren't trying hard to wring out every last bit of competitiveness from this stuff.
• a3n 9y ago
  There are not enough people in an American metro area to distribute this variety across stores across the area. The produce departments sell what the computers report as margin friendly. There are enough people in a metro area who want this and are willing to go to the asian district to get it. The five or 20 families in a subdivision who want this are not enough for all the Safeways and Krogers in the subdivision to stock this food. But enough handfuls of those families across the area are willing to go to the few stores concentrated "in the asian district" to make it viable for those few stores. This is also capitalism at work. Huge markets and niches both have ways to operate. As for tracking and safety, as others on this page have noted, knowledgeable (and alert) shoppers and proper preparation go a long way to promoting food safety at the end-use end of the chain.