8 ms·
That's a pity, because doing grocery shopping at CVS is like doing grocery shopping at a gas station / convenience mart: there's a $1-3 markup on damn near eve
by AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
That's a pity, because doing grocery shopping at CVS is like doing grocery shopping at a gas station / convenience mart: there's a $1-3 markup on damn near everything. And I imagine the people that are forced to shop at a drugstore are probably poor to begin with, so, that hits them even worse.
- manojlds 7y ago> And I imagine the people that are forced to shop at a drugstore are probably poor to begin with Why so?
- samayylmao 7y agoIf you can't afford transportation you're limited to what you can walk to. In the area I live you cannot bring more than one bag with you on public transportation and it takes almost an hour to get across town on the bus. It would be cheaper to buy marked up food from a gas station or drugstore than pay for a taxi ride or waste half a day riding the bus. Edit: essentially, a lot of the time it is expensive to be poor.
- joezydeco 7y agoI can confirm that. I live near a block of apartment homes that are populated by lower income residents. There's a CVS and a gas station/cstore within walking distance, but the grocery stores and department stores (Target, Walmart) are all more than 2+ miles away. The buses are infrequent and expensive.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoAnecdata: I have money and property and plentiful transportation (three vehicles for the two of us). Live miles from town. I drive to one or more grocery stores infrequently to get what I want. Buy quality food and freeze/store it in my large house. Garden provides some more. Waste is composted and feeds the gardens. Meals cost me a buck or two to prepare from my plentiful stock. All because I can afford to. Food is a negligible fraction of my budget.
- ARandomerDude 7y agoYou're also handsome, charming, and incredibly humble.
- kombucha11 7y agoWhether or not he meant to his comment illustrates the problem perfectly: those with the means to do so can eat healthy food and absorb the cost/time/distance inherent in that, those that cannot will suffer and chose whatever they can get. Good healthy food at a sustainable price is hard to come by in the US. There are food deserts everywhere. Good food is treated clearly as a lifestyle luxury. Let them eat cake indeed.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoMy point exactly
- matt4077 7y agoI get where your comment is coming from, but I think they acknowledged that their situation is somewhat privileged. Quote: "All because I can afford to." It's the old adage about it being expensive to be poor, only in reverse.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoYes, actually. But I didn't want to bring it up.
- thrower123 7y agoYou don't have to be wealthy to do that, but you do have to have the storage space and to shift your mindset in a more long-term direction. It's also a lot of work. I grew up relatively poor, but in a rural area, so we had enough land to put in a garden, and we slaved away all summer and fall picking and processing food that got stacked up in the basement cold-cellar and in the freezer. We also bought meat in bulk, either a half or a whole beef from a local farmer, so you had to plan for that lump sum expense and, again, have the freezer space ready to take hundreds of pounds of meat when it went to the slaughter house. We'd also try to shoot a deer or two each year to supplement that, and catch a mess of trout that we'd can up. Then there were the trips to the pick-your-own berry fields, where you'd pick a hundred pounds of strawberries, and then have to freeze them or turn them into jam, and the trips to the orchards where you could pick grain sacks full of the dropped apples for a dollar apiece; then you had to go home and sort out the bad ones. My aunt had a Sam's Club membership, so a couple times a year we'd go with her and load up on staples - again, you've got to save up for it, and then you have to have the storage. You can do that kind of thing when you are relatively settled and have roots and connections in a community, and the know-how to do all that home-making. We didn't have any money, but we were rich in a lot of other ways. If you are isolated and precarious, living reactively day-to-day, it makes something that is already hard nigh on impossible.
- hedora 7y agoAlso, “proper” grocery chains are often much more expensive (with lower quality items) in poor areas where residents can’t afford transportation. In those areas, CVS might not a terrible choice. Kroger used to be so bad in our neighborhood that we drove 30 minutes (past upscale krogers) because their business model of abusing stranded populations was abhorrent.
- mc32 7y agoBeing poor doesn’t mean you can’t get a bus ticket. All it means is you are deliberate in your shopping and planning. You plan your trip to take advantage of transfer tickets and such. Sometimes you walk a mile or two or you bike or you bum a ride from someone. Being poor doesn’t mean you can’t plan and are helpless. Sure it’s not ideal and I prefer being able to shop ad hoc at my leisure, no doubt. But when I had to I made do.
- dev_dull 7y agoThere’s a weird misconception about poor people here. I’m willing to bet the vast amount of people on SNAP have a car and a job. Being poor doesn’t require an abject state.
- throwayEngineer 7y agoPlan for the worst of poverty. Not the best.
- PhasmaFelis 7y ago> Being poor doesn’t mean you can’t plan Chronic stress (such as from financial stress and working multiple jobs) actually does severely impact your executive function and decision-making ability. It's hard to make dispassionate decisions when you're exhausted and scared. There's been studies about it. Obviously it's possible to overcome that, and some people are better at it than others. But the burden is real. When you're coming off a double shift, it's really hard to make the decision to spend an extra 45 minutes walking round-trip, or two hours hopping on and off buses, when you could just hit the Walgreen's near your apartment and get home to your family.
- ionised 7y ago> Being poor doesn’t mean you can’t it kinda does though. The effects of financial stress on your mental wellbeing are pretty well documented and can manifest in ways such as inability to focus/concentrate, chronic fatigue, spotty memory from stress etc.
- samayylmao 7y ago
- monocasa 7y agoBecause drugstores tend to be a replacement for grocery stores in food deserts.
- nerdponx 7y agoAnecdotally, the areas in the USA that most lack proper grocery stores tend to be low-income urban neighborhoods.
- noer 7y agoI think because if someone does their grocery shopping at a drug store, then they probably live in a food desert which are typically in lower income areas.
- CarVac 7y agoBeing in a "food desert" where there are no grocery stores nearby.
- JustSomeNobody 7y agoThis is known as the poverty tax. People in poverty pay more for necessities than people who are not in poverty because they can't easily get to places where they can buy more for their money.
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoWhere real estate is expensive the only grocery stores that can stay afloat are fat margin chains that cater to upscale customers. The poor people are then forced to shop at CVS or wherever, sure it's more expensive than Walmart or a proper grocery store but it's still cheaper than whole paycheck. WF (or Trader Joes for that matter) simply doesn't sell value priced versions of a lot of items. CVS will sell it at a ripoff. It probably comes out close to a wash put poor people are poor, not stupid. If the numbers worked out in favor of WF they would be shopping there. Also, nobody(TM) does their entire shopping at CVS. People will drag their asses elsewhere on a regular basis to buy certain items that are cheap. Many convenience stores, bodegas, etc. will sell a couple staples or classes of items dirt cheap in order to attract business. You buy your regular items where they are cheap (e.g. $1.50/gal brand name milk from the bodega that buys about to expire milk from a restaurant supplier for pennies and passes on the savings to create foot traffic) and buy everything else at CVS.
- mlrtime 7y agoCVS is not cheaper than WF on staple items.
- momokoko 7y agoThis is a massive misconception and nicely illustrates how much people are influenced by branding and merchandising. Whole foods 365 brand is actually cheaper than many grocery store generics. The data is available online if you want to explore this further.
- p49k 7y agoAssuming this is true: If you visit WF, your entire shopping needs won’t be met by the available 365-branded foods, which means you’ll either have to shop at multiple stores (extremely difficult if you are poor) or buy the remaining products at severely marked up prices, negating any savings the 365-brands products might have offered. In particular, produce, meats and other fresh products are absurdly marked up in WF.
- 7y ago
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dd36 7y agoThere’s also no fresh food or produce. It’s all long shelf life processed food.
- throwayEngineer 7y agoI study food and I find processed food is lower calorie per dollar, than their fresh alternatives. It's contrary to advertisments who make you think you are saving money by buying "cheap processed foods".
- jcater 7y agoLower calorie per dollar, as long as none of it gets thrown out as waste.
- sct202 7y agoCVS is has a high/low pricing scheme, so most of the items you see aren't being purchased at full price and people really only buy them on sale. You have to play their games with stacking ECB, coupons and sales though, so it's work.
- behringer 7y agoI had to stop buying at CVS because of this, it was driving me crazy. I would pick up some over the counter medication and it'd ring up for an extra 5 or 10 bucks. Just walked out one day and now I get my medications at walmart or my closer neighborhood pharmacy.
- sct202 7y agoOh yeah they put stuff like that stuff on BOGO all the time, which just shows how much they're marking up the normal price if they can give you a free one and still make money.
- cvsthrowaway64 7y agoKeep in mind that Walmart is able to beat everyone in price not by having less of a markup but by purchasing in huge volumes to get a lower wholesale price to begin with. Off the top of my head our typical store margin is between 20-30%. So yes, pretty high. That doesn't tell the what the company actually pays I'm sure. But markup isn't where we make the money. Most sales, and particularly BOGO are loss-leaders to get people to sign up for the loyalty card. That's where the money comes from because now we have your phone number and email address and purchase history to sell. Every one of those coupons that prints on the receipt is a paid advertisement. CVS gains by promoting those products. By gamifying coupon use. And those ExtraBuck coupons aren't discounts but more like short-term microloans that CVS keeps the interest on.
- ghc 7y agoI think maybe urban stores might skew the stats a bit. There's so much demand for groceries within a short walk of all the local condo buildings that my local Walgreens has set up a fresh sushi counter. The cheaper, giant grocery stores are all located in low income areas where land is cheap, but there's 8 CVS, 5 7-Eleven, and 2 Walgreens within a quarter mile walk of where I live and work. So when I run out of flour, I have a decision to make: would I rather sit in traffic for 30 minutes, wait for instacart/amazon fresh delivery, or go to CVS/Walgreens? I suspect there are many people like me who pay the markup every day because it's less of a hassle.
- Blackthorn 7y agoDo people not just add it to the grocery list when they run out and pick it up during their usual (bi)weekly grocery shopping trip?
- asdff 7y agoIf it can wait
- ghc 7y agoI remember the weekly shopping cadence growing up in a relatively rural new england town, but there was still always the inevitable "milk run" when you ran out of something unexpectedly. With smallish high rise condos it's hard to store a lot of food (kitchen designers assume you don't need a pantry or full size freezer for some reason). Another factor is that in this age of instant gratification if I were to buy a week's worth of perishables items would go bad because it's so easy to have a shitty day and say screw it, let's go out, get takeout or get delivery (369 restaurants will deliver to me via uber eats) instead of cooking. Not saying that it's a healthy way to live, but it's become a strong pull over the 10 years since I've made the transition to fully urbanized life. The way we cope, especially after having a baby, is to shop at the local butchers, bakers and markets for fresh stuff every few days and order delivery of heavy bulk goods periodically. Accidentally running out of flour, coffee filters, half and half, etc., is probably an inevitable side effect.
- ryacko 7y ago
- Broken_Hippo 7y agoI worked at CVS for years before moving overseas. It has been 5 or 6 years since I worked there. I worked at 2 different stores. All sorts of folks buy from CVS, mostly stuff on sale but not always. Moms with a sick child and elderly folks in to get medicines are a good chunk of the customers. Folks without transportation are a few people, sure. In one store, some of the food traffic was simply because we were in a small town with limited groceries: Some of the food was nearly as cheap as the local places. We got a boost of traffic because of football games at a college about 25 minutes away. The second store was a 24 hour store, and though the town had 24 hour grocery stores, they weren't next to us at night. We were not far from a small college as well. And again, same sorts of customers, usually picking up one or two things. Even more extra bonus points on holidays, since we were always open (at both stores). I think people figured we'd be less busy.
- oddthink 7y agoNot in my experience. I have both a CVS and a normal grocery store (a Morton Williams) across the street. CVS beats the grocery store on milk price (e.g. Horizon) by ~$0.50/gal and on breakfast cereal (e.g. Cheerios) by ~$1. Whole Foods 365 brand organic milk is slightly cheaper than CVS, but it's a slightly longer walk and has longer lines and is in a basement, so I tend not to bother. (I probably should go there more often.)
- Shivetya 7y agoWell until SNAP[1] is blocked from being spent on snacks and sodas these sites will always be in use. The list of foods that are acceptable encourage these stores to focus on the high profit side of the list which equates to what many would see as pure junk. Plus in some areas you cannot get a grocery in due to zoning or regulatory agencies which can increase the costs of worker and compliance needs beyond normal. There are many rules regarding handling of produce and raw foods that drug store type sellers never have to meet. [1] https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/eligible-food-items https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/eligible-food-items
- alexhutcheson 7y agoZoning in Manhattan has made it essentially impossible to build a new grocery store in a normal location. Pretty much all recently-built grocery stores are in basements, due to a "zoning hack" that makes that compliant: https://twitter.com/MarketUrbanism/status/1054518549971111936 https://twitter.com/MarketUrbanism/status/105451854997111193... This is unfortunate, because Manhattan clearly has excess demand for good grocery stores, and the incumbents (Gristedes, etc.) are terrible.
- schoolboard 7y agoWhen I lived there we called Gristedes "Grosstedes" and Gourmet Garage "Greedy Garage"... 125th street Fairway made up for it but it was Hell getting through there ...
- alexhutcheson 7y agoHeh, we call it "Gristicky". I'm consistently shocked that anyone shops there. Expired food on shelves, wilted or moldy produce, long waits for slow checkout clerks, and prices that are easily 3x what comparable items cost at Trader Joe's. Those grocery stores would easily be extinct with more meaningful competition. The only thing that keeps them in business is the "natural monopoly" caused by the fact that most Manhattanites don't have cars and aren't willing to travel very far for groceries.