https://www.the-sun.com/news/8460253/giant-foods-president-ira-kress-retail-crime-spike/
THE president of Giant Foods has spoken out against bands of thieves stealing groceries and warned that stores could close from the increase in retail crime. Retail theft has become a nationwide is…
Omg.... You fired all the check out people and now your mad that people are stealing from a faceless for profit company!
Will anyone think of the investors?
I'm torn on this one. On one hand, fuck the money grubbing corporations that got themselves into this mess. On the other these closures are creating food deserts.
I'll make it easy for you. It is the money gubbing corporations creating the food deserts.
I don't personally steal at self-checkout, but if saw anyone stealing I'd just ignore it. As far I'm concerned, they deserve to be stolen from. Zero interest in hearing the crocodile tears of those who were complicit in price gouging.
As the meme goes, if you saw someone stealing food, no, you didn't. Poor people gotta eat too.
Every dollar stolen from the store gets added to the prices you pay going forward, they absolutely do not let it come out of profits.
I hear what you're saying, but we're not talking about a single-mother sneaking diapers out because she needs them or a Jean Valjean-type taking bread because they're hungry...
This is OCR (Organized Retail Theft) where a team of 3+ people coordinate with phones, distractions, and a driver, to quickly get as many high-dollar, shelf-stable items out of a store as possible to resell on Facebook marketplace/eBay/etc. It's typically at least $1000 per store.
If you hate large organizations, you should hate the greed of criminal rings like this, because we all absolutely pay more because of it...
EDIT: I'm just talking about what the article is referring to. I'm not saying companies don't pass the costs on to consumers, and I'm not casting moral judgement.
We'd pay more anyway, they're just butthurt that the margins are smaller. You think the prices are going to come down if the theft stops?
I’ll have no choice but to close a store.
Yeah, because hiring staff back and getting rid of self help checkouts is impossible?? How would they even go about that?
Or, and here's a radical idea, drop your prices so people can actually afford to pay for the food??
That last one is more of a problem. Grocery margins are usually very slim. In most cases, a grocery store can't reduce their prices by any significant amount and still remain profitable.
All grocery store margins are tight. Historically, grocery stores are not enormously profitable. Most of the price gouging that you've seen in food lately has been at the manufacturer level, not the retailer level. That's why you don't see a lot of price difference between substantially identical items at different stores in the same region; the same size box of Cheerios is going to have roughly identical pricing at both Piggly Wiggly and Kroger. You start seeing price differences when you go to an upscale store like Amazon's Whole Foods (prices go up sharply), or when you're buying in bulk at Costco or restaurant supply stores (such as Gordon Food Service). That's also why you see self-checkouts everywhere now; once one company cuts their labor costs by introducing them, everyone has to, because otherwise they can't remain competitive. ...And then prices stabilize across the industry at roughly the same very slim margins. The company that cuts costs first sees a slight initial uptick in profit, and then competition forces them to cut their margins back again.
At the store level, there's not a helluva lot that can be done. The obscene profits are farther upstream.
See this as an example. Grocery stores are making profit in volume, but not a lot of profit per item. Typical margins are 1-3% per item. That means that, if you cut off every single bit of profit that a grocery store makes, your $200 worth of groceries would cost you... $198. Maybe as little as $194. Saving you a whopping $2-6. But when you have hundreds of transactions each day, that 1-3% per transaction adds up to profitability for the store.
I was thinking of the supermarket duopoly we have here in New Zealand were the two major players own 85% of the total market. So it might not be comparible to this type of store? Margins here are around 20% so that's coloured my read of this story. The obcene profits here are at the retailer and they pressure the wholesellers to reduce prices to where they can even exceed a 20% margin. We're definitly in a "It would be a shame if your product couldn't be found on our shelves" situation. They own everything from small country town stores to large city supermarkets.
...Ah. That's super shitty. I'm in a pretty small town--about 5000 people--but we still have three large grocery stores (if you count the WalMart as a grocery store), and a small, higher-end health food store. There's heavy competition, which keeps prices down, but also leads to wage stagnation for workers, and means that poor people get fucked by rising food prices.
It's funny how this wasn't a problem back in the days before customers were expected to act as unpaid employees.
Yeah it's not the customers at fault here. Nobody asked for the cashiers to be cut down to 1 or 2 (ever) and replaced with self checkouts.
I was at one such shitty grocery store the other day. We'll call it Roger but with the letter 'K' omitted. They have these large self checkouts with conveyors. Up until about 2 weeks ago, you could scan your items at a normal rate like the regular cashiers do. It was convenient, and it was glorious. The older self checkouts were horribly slow and were only meant for a basket's worth of groceries, so this was a welcome, but very temporary, improvement.
An employee told me they recently "cranked up the security" as he came over for the third time because that bathroom scale with delusions of grandeur kept calling for backup. You can only scan items once every 3 seconds and have to wait between each one. I've got a cart full of groceries, and they expect me to scan them at a snail's pace. If you scan too many items (5 apparently?), you have to walk to the end and bag them even though there's plenty of goddamned room on the conveyor. Then walk back and scan a few more. Rinse, repeat. Until recently, you could scan your whole cart, load it on the conveyor, pay, and then bag everything up at once like a normal person.
I was absolutely livid, grabbed what few groceries I'd already bagged, put them back in my cart, abandoned the transaction, and waited in line for the one lonely human cashier.
She was confused because some of my stuff was already bagged. Told her why and she just sighed and said 'yeah'. I jokingly said I'd like to give the manager an earful and she said I should, but it won't do any good. And she was likely right because this reeks of corporate heavy handedness.
Needless to say, I'm never going back to Roger with a K in front again. I only went there for the fuel points and because it was close to my workplace, but it's no longer worth it.