4 ms·

"Hey, let's try something new!" without a plan for success is just a recipe for failure. I honestly don't understand the desire for municipal grocery stores at

"Hey, let's try something new!" without a plan for success is just a recipe for failure. I honestly don't understand the desire for municipal grocery stores at all. Grocery stores famously operate on super slim margins, so it's not like they're raking in the dough. Many of them are often run extremely well. In Texas, HEB is so beloved that a lot of people consider it far better at disaster recovery operations than the actual government. I'm not against plans to better help people afford groceries, but somebody needs to at least explain how the plan is economically rationally viable, not just "let's try something new!"

itishappy 7mo ago
Simple fix really, HEB should just open up stores up north.
hnthrowaway0315 7mo ago
I have a feeling that those slim margins don't really mean that Walmart is making e.g. 3 bucks on every 100 bucks (https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/profit-margins https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/profit...). There gotta be a lot of accounting magics working here. Otherwise you can't explain why they simply don't sell everything and buy bonds. I don't have a theory so hopefully some finance people can explain.
- tacostakohashi 7mo ago
  If they can make 3 bucks per hundred of sales, and do that more than once per year... then that beats a bond that pays only 3 percent per year...
  - hnthrowaway0315 7mo ago
    Yeah that could be the explanation.
  - RickJWagner 7mo ago
    Found the economist. Or maybe the mathematician, I’m not sure. Astute.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
AnimalMuppet 7mo ago
There are two errors. Error 1: "Something must be done, this is something, therefore this must be done." Yeah, but "this" is something stupid, with no real-world chance of working. Error 2: "We will not do anything until we can prove that it will work." You can analyze things to death and waste years in the process, and never do anything. Somewhere in between is the right answer. You see plausible success, but still far from certain. Then you experiment. Now, is New York striking the right balance? I have no idea. I'm not privy to their internal discussions. But I know that, if it fails, everyone is going to mock them for trying. That is, everyone is going to assume they fell into error 1. But did they? Getting the balance right still means that the experiments fail a fair amount of the time.

itishappy 7mo ago

Simple fix really, HEB should just open up stores up north.

hnthrowaway0315 7mo ago

I have a feeling that those slim margins don't really mean that Walmart is making e.g. 3 bucks on every 100 bucks (https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/profit-margins https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/profit...). There gotta be a lot of accounting magics working here. Otherwise you can't explain why they simply don't sell everything and buy bonds. I don't have a theory so hopefully some finance people can explain.

tacostakohashi 7mo ago
If they can make 3 bucks per hundred of sales, and do that more than once per year... then that beats a bond that pays only 3 percent per year...
- hnthrowaway0315 7mo ago
  Yeah that could be the explanation.
- RickJWagner 7mo ago
  Found the economist. Or maybe the mathematician, I’m not sure. Astute.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

AnimalMuppet 7mo ago

There are two errors. Error 1: "Something must be done, this is something, therefore this must be done." Yeah, but "this" is something stupid, with no real-world chance of working. Error 2: "We will not do anything until we can prove that it will work." You can analyze things to death and waste years in the process, and never do anything. Somewhere in between is the right answer. You see plausible success, but still far from certain. Then you experiment. Now, is New York striking the right balance? I have no idea. I'm not privy to their internal discussions. But I know that, if it fails, everyone is going to mock them for trying. That is, everyone is going to assume they fell into error 1. But did they? Getting the balance right still means that the experiments fail a fair amount of the time.