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To think British grocery chains had been pushing online services for many years and consumer acceptance was growing at a snails pace until Covid hit. I love us

• Silhouette 6y ago
  But my wife and I are foodies and we also love browsing the aisles to see what’s new and tempting. That is one advantage to going in person. Another is simply that you can check the quality of what you're getting to some extent before you commit to buying it. For example, the "best before" dates on a lot of fruit and veg have been... optimistic, let's say kindly... during the recent hot spell. Shopping online, you just get that somewhat arbitrary indicator. In person, at least you can see that half the fruit in the punnet is looking past its best even though the date is still four days away, and perhaps you'll decide not to buy that fruit today and maybe to get something else instead. The low-paid store workers rushing around with their over-sized trolleys trying to collect half a dozen different customers' orders at once while being monitored for performance are obviously never going to care as much about picking the fresh-looking fruit or the less fatty piece of meat as the customer who's going to be eating those things or serving them to their family.
  • robjan 6y ago
    One of the biggest problems with this is everyone always chooses the newest produce so even if something has plenty of time left it ends up being rejected. The fix is stock rotation but it takes a lot of effort to ensure older produce gets sold first while keeping the shelves full. It probably caused a huge amount of food waste.
    • Silhouette 6y ago
      That is certainly a concern, though I am somewhat lacking in sympathy (with the economic cost to the supermarkets) given that I think this is a problem they have largely brought upon themselves. People buy the newest stock they can get because the older stock on the shelves so often has a pathetic usable lifetime once taken home. When I was a child, we routinely did one family shop per week in my household. A few decades later, I consider myself lucky if vegetables I bought from a supermarket more than one or two days ago are still fit to eat, and in my household we probably average 2-3 large (but obviously not as large) shops per week if we're only using supermarkets. For these among other reasons, we often now prefer to shop locally for fresh food from the specialists nearby when we have enough time to do the rounds. Clearly vegetables haven't radically changed; those I buy from local farm shops and the like still last just fine. But the supermarkets have now implemented such complicated logistics, presumably because it saves them money, that there have been horrible consequences for the quality and longevity of the produce they sell. I don't know enough about the industry to fully understand the motivations behind those complicated logistics, but if it's just a race to the bottom to shave a little off the supply costs and increase the profit margin accordingly, maybe it's time our government stepped in to regulate in the interests of avoiding all of that food waste and perhaps other environmental costs.