The difference between European countries and America is becoming so stark. Anyone reading or watching global news has to see how backwards this country is and that it’s only getting worse.
Can you imagine an American grocery store chain letting its cashiers sit down?
What cashiers? We have to check ourselves out.
Am I the only one who prefers that experience most of the time?
I wouldn’t mind if they passed the savings on to the consumer… But they won’t.
Bingo, if these bananas are only going up in price then you’re going to pay someone to punch the code in for me.
Seriously, there are a lot of things to hate but self-checkout is not one of them. Not having to interact with humans, being able to make sure everything is scanned correctly yourself, and being able to scan at your own pace is great. The only problem is when they don’t have enough self-checkouts. Sure beats having a one or two conventional checkout open out of the 25 or so they have in the store. I would prefer they pass the savings on to the consumer, but that’s the only fault I can find with self-checkout, well, that and the stupid weight sensor but more and more stores aren’t requiring that stupid “place item in bagging area” thing anymore.
Well it’s all fine and dandy until you try to buy some spinach, fumble around on the touchscreen for a while until you figure out how to add something manually, then can’t find spinach anywhere and finally ask for help, feeling like a total idiot who can’t use a touchscreen interface that a boomer soccer mom could figure out, but then you figure out it was listed under “leafy green spinach” so now you’re mad at both at yourself and whoever decided that was a good idea.
Stuff like that has never been unique to self-checkout. I remember in my teens in the 90s you’d run into things like the credit card system being down or the check-checking system being down when you went through the line with a physical cashier, or some barcode not scanning because it’s some niche product that didn’t make it into the system. Or you only had a $50 on you and the cashier was struggling to make change because it was too early/too late in the day, so you had to hold on while they flagged down someone who could help them open another register to break it. Or there was a coupon being weird, or, or or…there was always something now and again. If not for you, for someone ahead of you in line.
Basically, minor inconveniences always happen now and again regardless of your method of checkout or payment. Feeding your own anxiety by stressing out whether you look stupid because a touchscreen has stumped you for this or that reason is unproductive.
Like–yeah, I get it. I’ve felt frustration too. I have felt the same things you talk about.
But I consider my own feelings a “me” thing? I’ve always felt that was a thing I had to overcome in myself, my own impatience, my own frustration over an everyday minor blunder. My own fears that I look “stupid”.
Blaming the world around me (such as the self-checkouts) for being imperfect is…unrealistic, to me? There will always be minor things, minor delays–it’s just a facet of life that will never change.
So it’s always seemed to me that it’s more productive to be zen about it. Especially when looking at my own memories I remember just as many minor checkout “upsets” when going through a line with a physical cashier as I have encountered in the self-checkout. Small errors happen regardless of system, so why not learn to flow with it?
If I’m paying the same costs for things… Why wouldn’t I want someone who’s better at scanning the shit than I am to do the job? Why do I want to fumble with knowing the vegetable codes? Or waiting 8 minutes for an employee to come over when the scanner freaks out because the 3 oz item isn’t in the bag… even though it’s definitely in the fucking bag. I also have to wonder if theft goes up considerable with more self-checkouts in play. That means that costs can actually go up over time… no?
They can be an okay experience… But a lot of times they’re not.
This was only an experience one time, but I was waiting in line to checkout at Walmart and listed to the registers’s beeps. I could hear about one beep per second from 3 or 4 registers combined. (all the ones they had staffed.) I could scan faster than a single register that day.
That being said, I hate the turn to self checkout. A conglomerate like Walmart has no excuse to not pay and staff properly. Or give me a discount for providing my labor.
The machines ALWAYS bitch about not putting something in the bag or putting something in the bag not scanned. The system is too slow. I hate how slow I have to scan stuff.
One reason I shop at Aldi’s. Their cashiers sat down. I respect that. I shop there.
American
The Fred Meyer (Kroger) in my neighborhood has 4-5 armed and body armored security guards stationed at the entrance and exits. They ask to check your receipts at the exit and search all your bags.
Its actually illegal to force someone to stop since its not a private club like Costco, so you can just tell them no and keep walking. Thats not well known though so you have stormtroopers checking old ladies papers and searching all their belongings.
Oregon allows off duty officers to moonlight as armed guards so a lot of them are cops from various departments. During the 2020 protests there were a few Federal Protective Service agents patrolling the store.
I think we shop at the same Freddy’s.
US grocery chains all push their own brands, and if they called out shrinkflation they wouldn’t be able to get in on it themselves.
Should probably post the actual article title
I worked at Albert Heijn in my teens and they stopped selling coca cola as they couldn’t agree on a price.
Cola wanted to increase the consumer price to €1,35 for 1.5 liter bottles.
It took quite some time before the store had coca cola in stock.
I bought a bottle a couple weeks ago as we had some friends over and i laughed so hard out of misery. That same fucking bottle now costs €2,49 at Albert Heijn.
Store brand is 89 cents, which is what we used to pay for original cola .5 liter bottles.
Guys, it’s just water with a bit of flavouring in it. We should all just collectively stop buying these famous brands and watch them burn. Lol
Walmart is the only one that does, but they only do it to bully them into selling at almost no profit.
Most American grocery chains are enjoying record profits, they’re complicit.
“French supermarket chain is using ‘shrinkflation’ stickers to pressure PepsiCo and other suppliers”
Wait till you hear about the plastic bag crazy. Pretty much all the chains got rid of them in my area and began selling the reusable bags. At about 2.50 each. One store I liked used to have old cardboard boxes but they want you to buy the reusable bags as they make about 2 dollars in profit per bag and the average costumer buys 1 bag per 100 in groceries. That alone is a2% increase on average in profits for the grocery chain. That is huge for them.
Worse is that they take about 50 times the energy to produce and they figure the average bag is only used 5 times before they end in a land fill. The net result is a 2.5% increase in your grocery bill and almost 10 times the increase in GHG compared to a plastic bag.
Who throws out reusable bags after 5? I’ve had the same set of cloth bags for like 15 years!
It’s worse… sometimes you forget your bag or go to buy something unplanned. And after a decade you have more reusable bags at home than you will ever be able to use up in your life.
Yeah we try to keep at least three in both cars at all times to avoid that!
Same here. My oldest are about 18 years old now. And I use them for everything, not only to go shopping. I have the feeling they don’t understand the reuse part of reusable.
Statically the majority. Supermarkets are selling a bag per about 100 in purchases. From that you can deduce that the majority of people are only using them a few times.
UK supermarkets sold 1.5 billion reusable bags in 2019. That is 57 per household per year.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/13/world/reusable-grocery-bags-cotton-plastic-scn/index.html
I’ve been using the same set of bags for 8 years now. That’s a whole lot of plastic reduced.
Your one of the rare ones. Overall it has been far worse which is concerning. Now that the supermarkets know they can make a fairly significant profits as well, they are quite happy to sell extra bags.
In 2019 UK supermarkets sold 1.5 billion reusable bags. That is 57 per household. Greenpeace estimated you need to reuse a cotton bag some 7100 times before it is the equivalent of plastic. I hope you did not buy cotton as you likely will need to have those bags for life to offset the energy needed to produce them.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/13/world/reusable-grocery-bags-cotton-plastic-scn/index.html
One of the bags is made by my daughter from reused cotton and the other two are made from hemp.
It’s not only about energy though. For me it was about not using plastic anymore.
And to be fair, the tote my daughter made is just superior. I love it. It has a square base with some straps sewn on the inside of the walls to fixate bottles and four handles, two long for shoulder carry and two shorter for regular carry.
It good you are trusting but that is not the norm. Plastic is ugly to be sure but it does not have a huge GHG impact which is the biggest threat by far at the moment. People should be encouraged to reuse to be sure but we definately should not enact policy that is overall far worse.
My wife and I have compact, roll up shopping bags, she always has one in her handbag, mine is in my backpack, for the past 10 years. The only time we used bags from a store was when we shopped for seafood in Hong Kong’s wet markets.
Alright, this is just some silly shit right here. I have 8-10 reusable bags in my car I use every time I go to the grocery store. I’ve been using them for years. I threw away one so far. Who the fuck only uses them 5x?
UK supermarkets stats in 2019 showed some 1.5 billion used in 2019. That is 57 or household every year. So the vast majority are just throwing them away. Most likely they just don’t want to carry them around and opt out to buy new ones. This is particularly likely if you use public transportation I suspect.
The “reusable” bags sold at supermarkets in Canada at least are really shitty. You’re lucky to get 5 uses before the handles rip off or groceries punch right through the flimsy plastic fabric.
If you’re serious about reusing bags you buy your own well made bags, but if you forgot to bring them or made an impulse buy congratulations, you now own a set of overpriced, very low quality bags… At least you’ll be rid of them in a week or two lol
I use them for tasks like giving away vegetables from my garden but honestly that was a fine use for the “non-reusable” bags, we reused them constantly. They even got recycled into deck boards, the new “reusable” ones just end up in the dump.
Walmart sells the shit ones that wouldn’t last in the US. Most places I go don’t. I wouldn’t buy those. Last time I went on vacation and didnt think to bring any I just didn’t use a bag and carried armfuls of groceries in instead of buying that flimsy crap.
I don’t understand people who live in areas that don’t allow plastic bags anymore who wouldn’t think to buy some decent ones. They just go back in my car after I unload groceries and they last for years. It’s such a weird thing to not be able to handle.
they did this in my area, except the chains retaliated by making their free disposable bags ‘reusable’ (re:thicker), which of course, no one ever does. the end result is the exact same problem only now worse because the bags take longer to decompose.
Around here it’s unthinkable to go to the store without your own bags. Depending on my load I take a backpack, folding boxes of the same set of cloth bags that I’ve been using for 8 years. It’s rare to se people buy a reusable plastic bag these days.
The sales in the supermarkets say different. Are you watching how many are sold each day?
UK households in average are using 57 a year. Someone is buying them.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/13/world/reusable-grocery-bags-cotton-plastic-scn/index.html
In 2018. Times have changed since then. The store that I frequent just doesn’t sell bags anymore, not even reusable. They sell a foldable cartboerd box if you really need something to carry your groceries. Most people who shop there use foldable crates. Those who don’t come by car use backpacks or those old lady shopping trolleys.
That is probably even worse. Cardboard is rarely recycled and also has a large environmental footprint. The stats are really saying otherwise particularly the profits the supermarket chains are making on this policy.
I just looked up the numbers for Belgium (where I live). A quick search so I only found some old data. Of the cardboard that is collected nearly 78% got recycled in 2012. I bet the figures are higher these days.
Yes of the cardboard that is recycled, 78% may end up as some new item. But I bet only 10% of actual cardboard actually ends up in recycling centers.
I bet you area goes to the cotton reusable at a few dollars each. Getting an extra percentage on your margin is huge for supermarkets even if it makes no environmental sense.
Who cares about GHG for bags? The goal is to reduce waste, so you should evaluate it based on the amount of materials used.
Far more material is used in reusable bags and they are thrown out far earlier than it takes to cover the equivalent. Not only is this creating more GHG, it is also creating more tons of waste overall.
And GHG will kill us far sooner then plastic bags.
The marginal GHG from a thicker bag is completely and entirely negligible. The waste footprint is outsized given the GHG footprint.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
“Obviously, the aim in stigmatizing these products is to be able to tell manufacturers to rethink their pricing policy,” Stefen Bompais, director of client communications at Carrefour, said in an interview.
Carrefour CEO Alexandre Bompard, who also heads French retail industry lobby group FDC, has repeatedly said consumer goods companies are not cooperating in efforts to cut the price of thousands of staples despite a fall in the cost of raw materials.
In this he is backed by French finance minister Bruno Le Maire, who in June summoned 75 big retailers and consumer groups to his ministry urging them to cut prices.
“Lindt & Sprüngli increased its prices groupwide on average by 9.3% in line with local cost structures,” a company spokesperson told Reuters.
France, like other European countries, has been trying for months to ease consumer pain in the face of a surge in the cost of living, strong-arming big business to freeze or cut food and transport prices — with mixed results.
Le Maire said last month that consumer goods companies and retailers had agreed to bring forward annual price negotiations — which would normally have taken place next year — to September.
The original article contains 549 words, the summary contains 195 words. Saved 64%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Sure, Colruyt group just stops stocking certain brands from time to time. It’s weird to see because they keep the spot empty until the issue is resolved.
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Yeah don’t idolize retail chains, they’re absolute scum
I wouldn’t be so stoked about it. Retail chains use alp kinds of dirty tactics to get products cheaper, this is probably one of them.
Yes it happens but no one makes press releases about it.
