| ▲ | whatamidoingyo 4 days ago |
| Protip: look for an Asian market in your area for food. I get an entire shopping cart full of food for $60-100 and that lasts for ~2 weeks. When I go to Publix (or any other grocery store), I get like 2-3 bags for $60... Discovering the Asian market has been one of the best financial things to happen to me. Although I'm not really sure how their prices are so low. If someone could answer, that would be awesome! |
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| ▲ | mattmaroon 4 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| I believe Asian markets are basically an inversion of the regular grocery store pricing model. Regular grocery stores sell all the stuff around the perimeter (meat, dairy, produce, baked goods, etc.) at relatively high margins and all the shelf-stable packaged stuff in the middle at relatively low margins. It makes sense, one store may have better or worse produce or meat or bakery items or deli items etc. than another, but their Heinz Ketchup can only be cheaper or more expensive. The packaged goods at Asian markets in many cases cannot be purchased anywhere other than an Asian market. No frozen pandan leaves at Costco. So I think they just mark up the packaged goods more and the produce less. |
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| ▲ | nemomarx 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | You can get a nice deal if you alternate, yeah - generic "staples" at your local giant or whatever, Asian market for fresher or unique stuff, dry spices from an Indian grocery... It's only comfort keeping people going to the same store every time. And I guess the hassle of doing two trips a week or something. | |
| ▲ | VoodooJuJu 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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| ▲ | aeblyve 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I would love to learn more about the unit economics of groceries. How is it that a small grocery store can sometimes provide things (much) more cheaply than a megacorporation? [0] If the latter was functioning well in a competitive market, I would expect their play to be on lower margins but higher volume. [0] Mostly I'm referring to offal TBF, which I think most firms are happy to make any money on at all. |
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| ▲ | pjc50 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | The megacorp can provide cheap food, it just doesn't want to. In practice they adjust the margins in a data-driven way on individual goods. UK supermarkets actually provide pretty cheap fresh produce, because the market is pretty competitive. I think the most ridiculous I've seen was a 1kg bag of carrots for 20p. Many countries or locations do not have highly competitive supermarkets. Oh, and there's both volume and self-discrimination effects at work. In my supermarket shopping in the Asian food section is often cheaper as they sell big bags of rice and spices, to more cost-conscious consumers. See also: Costco. | | |
| ▲ | K0balt 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | It’s just price gouging. There is an item I sometimes buy that is about $1.60 at supermarkets, but is consistently $.85 at nearly all rural Colmados. Same brand, same product , shelf stable , mass produced, large volume mover, imported product. Supermarkets have just collectively decided to sell it for 2x the “rational” market price because it went up with Covid and people kept buying it. Colmados don’t do data driven pricing, and just do a flat markup on the stuff the suplicadoras bring them. Data driven pricing is just selective price gouging under a different name. | |
| ▲ | hansvm 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Costco is an interesting one to me. They're widely touted as being cheaper, but most foods there have some sort of upscaling factor -- "organic", some sort of regional variation like "sockeye" salmon instead of farmed atlantic, a few extra steps of processing, etc. Rice, pasta, and fruit are all usually more expensive than other alternatives, even at bigco grocery competitors. You have to be a little careful if that's where you do all your shopping. | | |
| ▲ | aprilthird2021 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Costco used to be cheaper bc of the bulk factor, but nowadays I think of it as a good curator. The products are usually good quality. Even if more expensive | | |
| ▲ | mentalpiracy 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | A good example of this is their meat department, specifically beef as an example. You will generally find that Costco is not any cheaper than your regular supermarket, but the product you’re getting is graded USDA Prime or better. There was a great comment on Reddit from someone who worked in the meat department that highlighted this comparison with specific examples but alas I am unable to find it. | |
| ▲ | hollerith 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | >curation . . . The products are usually good quality. Costco has a strong record of getting me to buy food products that are appealing to me for a while, but that I now consider bad for my health. About the only food products I will still eat that I can buy at Costco are boneless poultry white meat, Kerrygold butter, olive oil and fresh asparagus. Costco stocks many fruits and vegetables, but most of them are much too high in sugar to be good for me, I now realize. (Berries are on the low side in sugar content, but Costco does not stock frozen raspberries or blackberries, and I avoid fresh berries because they're about 50 times as moldy as frozen ones.) Examples of foods that I eat a lot of that I cannot get at Costco are cabbage, radish and (frozen) tart cherries. In contrast, Whole Foods carries most of the 3 dozen or so foods that are good for me to eat according to my current understanding of nutrition (but not the tart cherries). I would probably be significantly healthier if many years ago I'd never become a Costco member and stuck to Whole Foods and Trader Joe's. | | |
| ▲ | aprilthird2021 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I also largely go there for Kerrygold butter, meats, oils, and other bulk household goods. But the occasional furniture purchase, automotive thing, car rental, etc. It's a good deal for the price of the annual membership |
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| ▲ | GoatInGrey 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > The megacorp can provide cheap food, it just doesn't want to. This fails to explain why Walmart, the world's largest retailer, runs a profit margin of less than 3%. |
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| ▲ | tekla 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > How is it that a small grocery store can sometimes provide things (much) more cheaply than a megacorporation? Megacorps have overheads for managing insane supply lines and lots more stringent enforcement with their product, and generally have much more oversight for things like labor. The tiny grocery store uses the kid as free labor after school to keep costs down (I was one of those kids), and generally cares less about the quality of the product at the individual level. | |
| ▲ | Aurornis 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > How is it that a small grocery store can sometimes provide things (much) more cheaply than a megacorporation? I frequent Asian markets everywhere I’ve lived for certain ingredients, but not for my main grocery shopping. For regular groceries I don’t think there’s any secret. The markets with extra cheap groceries are just carrying different products at different price points. | |
| ▲ | nine_zeros 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > How is it that a small grocery store can sometimes provide things (much) more cheaply than a megacorporation? Mega corporations need to increase their returns to shareholders year after year. Mom and pops don't have anyone else to please but themselves - they're often ok with retaining same returns as last year | |
| ▲ | scottiebarnes 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | A lot of manual labor and optimization on the marginal things. Ex: Raspberries start to get funky. Bad ones get picked out, good ones get regrouped into a new tray package. Ripe avocados with limited shelf life? Go into deep cold refrigerator overnight, back out the next day. Discount deal on volume, on everything ("2 for $X"). Cash only. etc. | |
| ▲ | tossandthrow 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It is likely partly due to cost optimization (the shelf are rarely that organized in these stores) and the fact that they don't sell fresh produce. | |
| ▲ | tayo42 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The thing I don't get is farmers markets being more expensive. | | |
| ▲ | tekla 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Farmers markets are incredibly shitty inefficient ways of getting food from farm to consumer. Also the people who shop at them tend to be much much richer. | |
| ▲ | ac29 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | People shopping at farmers markets are presumably less price sensitive than the general grocery buying public. | |
| ▲ | aprilthird2021 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Farmers markets are often just diverting goods from the grocery store closer to you, for an upcharge (bc moving the goods one more time) |
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| ▲ | VoodooJuJu 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [dead] | |
| ▲ | hansvm 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | When you control most of the market it works out a little differently. People can only eat so much food, but you can price gouge them relatively easily. | | |
| ▲ | kasey_junk 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Kroger, the largest grocery in America and one that routinely sets of anti-monopoly interdictions have a profit margin of 1.76%. What profit margin line would you suggest counts as price gouging? | | |
| ▲ | FuriouslyAdrift 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | And they do $150B - $200B of gross per year. It's a massive business. I worked at Kroger Central Marketing decades ago when they rolled out the savings cards (which was a way for them to raise prices across the board AND track purchases in real time per shopper) and the strategizing over milk prices for a 1/2 a cent per gallon change was insane. | |
| ▲ | hansvm 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Doesn't that also count the investment losses they made last year, the cost of gobbling up other companies, the interest from the debt they acquired with previous expansionary practices, etc? | | |
| ▲ | kasey_junk 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Sure, but you can run the numbers for basically every grocery in America. The industry considers 3% margins to be outstanding. | | |
| ▲ | hansvm 2 days ago | parent [-] | | That reads more as an indictment against hyperscaled grocers than an argument that the current price gouging is unavoidable. | | |
| ▲ | kasey_junk 2 days ago | parent [-] | | You can get the same numbers out of small scale grocers too. It’s a brutal retail business with low margins and easy replacement. It’s probably the last industry I’d look to for price gauging accusations. The typical argument against monopoly grocer situations is that they are problematic for how they deal with _vendors_ not customers. |
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| ▲ | mattmaroon 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's crazy how narrow big retail profit margins are in general. What a brutal business. | |
| ▲ | ac29 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Just to clarify, that is their net margin. Their gross margin was slightly above 30% last quarter. | | |
| ▲ | kasey_junk 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Grocery stores have lots of operations costs. Real estate, employees (Kroger employs ~400k people), cold chains, logistics, etc. Feel free to set the bar for price gouging via gross margin, but then you are just suggesting that you don’t want operational efficiency in grocery store price comparisons. |
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| ▲ | TuringNYC 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >> Protip: look for an Asian market in your area for food. Second this! Especially for things like produce and herbs. You literally get 10-20x the cilantro, etc at an Asian market for the same price (I think they are loss leaders.) And oh the aroma....you dont know fresh herbs until you step into a Patel Brothers and get truly fresh cilantro. We've gotten to a point where we know what to get where and shop accordingly. |
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| ▲ | seanmcdirmid 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The produce quality is often a bit lower. But in the last 5 years, all the grocery stores at least here in the Seattle area have had produce degrade, and they are pretty much the same as H-mart with higher prices. |
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| ▲ | nyjah 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Where I live, if I don’t shop at fancy grocery stores 30-40min away, it’s generous to call the produce ‘produce’. Literally never knew onions could look this bad. A lot of the citrus is like deflated in the inside, the bananas are trash, and a single bell pepper is $3. I could go on and on. Just think we enshittified the food situation and now it’s more expensive and way worse quality. | |
| ▲ | morkalork 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Something unique to the city I'm in is there are some stores that only sell produce. I have no idea how they make it work economically other than locations with cheap rent and being an outlet for distributors but they manage to to have better quality and prices than grocery stores. |
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| ▲ | schrectacular 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| My local Asian grocer does one key thing I know of to save/make money: lots of the workers live in a local dorm that he rents and are fed with leftovers from the bakery and nealy spoiled produce. |
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| ▲ | whatamidoingyo 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Smart. The one in my area also has a restaurant and they also sell baked goods. I think they're definitely doing well for themselves. |
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| ▲ | Zaheer 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I find the produce prices often to be absurdly lower. These items are cheaper to begin with but if you're making fresh food consistently then it probably adds up. The biggest difference I've observed is that the asian grocery stores buy tier 2/3 produce rather than the big supermarkets that have perfect looking produce. |
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| ▲ | kwertyoowiyop 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Exactly! The big supermarkets have tomatoes that look perfect, but taste like wax. The Asian groceries have lumpy odd-colored tomatoes that actually taste good. | | |
| ▲ | freedomben 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | We've had a garden and orchard for most years for quite some time now (several decades) and this is one of the most stark and interesting things I've observed as well. Garden produce is nearly always smaller, lumpy-looking, and by appearances alone looks to be quite inferior. However, they taste great compared to those "perfect" veggies and fruits in the grocery stores. In mid-winter when the home-grown produce is gone and we go back to buying from the store (or when on trips and such), it's often a big disappointment. If you're willing to spend $$$ on organic produce at mid to higher end stores, you can get close to the quality (though never on strawberries and raspberries IME), but the cost can be pretty ridiculous to the point of feeling wasteful. | | |
| ▲ | kccqzy 4 days ago | parent [-] | | I've recently had some of the best strawberries and it costs $1/each. Grown in the same city I live in: in fact Google Maps says the distance between the grocery store and the strawberry farm is four miles. |
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| ▲ | tayo42 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Like heirloom tomatoes? Those are everywhere now? |
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| ▲ | gitremote 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Protip: look for an Asian market in your area for food. ... Discovering the Asian market has been one of the best financial things to happen to me. Whenever I see this protip, I feel bad for struggling Asians getting validated that they and their extended family already fully optimized all their opportunities. |
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| ▲ | tonyhart7 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Asian always min maxxing their whole life, the moment you hit adulthood it hit you hard that you always been capped for life |
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| ▲ | mupuff1234 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Protip #2: frozen veggies and fruit. Cheaper, supposedly healthier (flash frozen), easy to make, zero preparation, and never need to worry about it going bad. |
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| ▲ | aprilthird2021 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| They make the money on the imported goods which are harder for their core audience to find and more expected to have a markup. |
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| ▲ | insane_dreamer 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I don't care if it saves me money, I'm not giving my hard earned cash to Walmart/Kroger/Albertsons/OtherMegaCorp. Not to mention that what they sell at Walmart is mostly unhealthy garbage that I would be a negligent parent if I fed that to my family. I do make an exception for Costco because from everything I've read they're a pretty standout company as far as treating their employees go, and they curate well. We get some stuff there. But mostly we shop at small(er) local grocery stores when possible, especially for things like meat, eggs, milk, all of which we can get local (better quality and why ship stuff like that around the world; luckily we're in the PNW). And of course that includes local Asian stores for rice, fresh fish, etc. We don't buy "fancy" food (no wagyu steaks and the like; we eat a lot of legumes) but we do try to get the healthiest local option when possible (not fanatically so, we're not on Portlandia), and we could probably cut our monthly food bill by at least 30% if we bought the cheapest food at Walmart/Safeway. So we cut back spending in other ways - rarely eat/drink out, entertainment, etc. I'm sure we could do better. But I guess what I'm trying to say is that it really costs in both time and money to eat healthy. We're lucky that we can, but it's also a matter of what we prioritize in our spending. |
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| ▲ | anonzzzies 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I pickle, ferment and sauce a lot of things. Then I look for things that can be made in very large quantities and then preserved frozen/cooled (a lot of times just in the cellar). A lot of these things are from Asia and are great and very cheap and I'm love them for taste as well; curry's (I make 10 liters at a time; from scratch, very very cheap except my time but I like cooking), auntie dumplings (prep + freeze; just watch tv while making 100s of them) etc. Lovely food and cheaper than most things. |
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| ▲ | dakna 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Same here, our freezer has lots of home made dumplings in dinner size packages. Pancakes also work well for us, we usually put fresh chopped greens into them. We still eat the Bok Choy pancakes prepared months ago, usually when we just want a quick side for leftovers. |
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| ▲ | ramon156 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| In my country its called an international market. It's a beautiful place where you buy an entire bag of garlic for ~8 euros. There's also vegetables I hadn't heard of before I entered there |
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| ▲ | archagon 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Why Fruits and Veggies Are So Crazy Cheap in Chinatown: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11981063 |
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| ▲ | goshx 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Publix is expensive. Even Walmart will save you a good amount. |
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| ▲ | devmor 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Publix is expensive for general items but the sales are often incredible, I will stop by just to get BOGO items and return to Kroger or Lidl for everything else. |
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| ▲ | FuriouslyAdrift 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Or go to Aldi... |
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| ▲ | TechDebtDevin 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| [flagged] |
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| ▲ | whatamidoingyo 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Huh? I'm guessing you didn't mean to reply to me? | | |
| ▲ | TechDebtDevin 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | You're talking about getting in a car and driving to a specialized grocery store to "save money". I'm saying you could also just by produce and save money. | | |
| ▲ | whatamidoingyo 4 days ago | parent [-] | | That was the point of my post. I'm not buying potato chips and dip; I'm buying produce, meat, and herbs. These items are way cheaper at the Asian markets I go to. |
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| ▲ | torlok 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's probably a bot. |
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