Germany's main supermarket chain is Metro and, from the statistics and information I've seen, the number and size of Metro stores in Germany far exceeds the number and size of Carrefour stores in France.
Yes, there can be some cultural dietary reasons why one nation may be fatter than others but that alone doesn't explain why, in those same countries, obesity is INCREASING.
The French laugh at us in the UK because they do not comprehend why we care so little about the quality of the food we eat. To the French, food quality is very important and central to their culture, as it is in the Mediterranean countries like Spain, Greece and Italy. And in those same countries supermarket penetration is much lower, simply because the populations don't want to buy their foods from just one place.
When I want to buy a steak, I have two or three tiers to choose from: cheap, factory farm meats, more expensive "natural" cuts (grass fed, no growth hormones, etc...) all the way up to expensive organic prime (or choice) cuts.
Did you know that the best quality steaks come from beef that has been hung for 28 days or so? And did you realise the majority of supermarkets don't do that with their meat? And who in a supermarket could you ask the question to and get an informed answer?
I have an incredible array of fruits and vegetables, both local and imported to choose from. If the supermarket doesn't have something I want, I can go to the farmers market on the weekend and talk to the grower.
Exactly, and that's the way it should be. I really am all for consumer choice and if the working mother of three screaming kids needs a single place to park up and do her weekly shopping then who am I to say otherwise. But supermarkets are NOT about consumer choice because they have driven small local producers out of business and force their producers to grow certain varieties with long shelf lives.
Not only that but fresh fruit and vegetables have to conform to very tight restrictions on size and look, meaning that a lot of perfectly good fruit and vegetables are rejected and either used as animal feed or ploughed back into the soil.
Compare how the fruit and vegetables at the local market look to those in a supermarket. At the market it can be all shapes and sizes but there's nothing wrong with it.
A member of my family is sensitive to gluten. Well, the local supermarket has a pretty big gluten free section and the food in the rest of the store is labelled well enough that we can make smart choices. How good do you think food labeling was in 1970?
But none of that is anything to do with supermarkets, with all respect. Or it might even be argued that proper food labeling has come about because of the amount of processed foods that supermarkets sell.
And clearly, if there's a demand for gluten-free products then if a supermarket wasn't supplying those, someone would be at a local level.
I would not trade the current system for the one of 40 years ago.
I'm not suggesting that. Supermarkets have a place for busy people who don't have the time to shop in multiple locations. But the trade off for the convenience is less choice and lower quality fresh foods.
Well yes, and apparently most customers didn't think spending so much of their income on food was as wonderful as you do.
And precisely when did these customers make this conscious decision? Rather than blindly walking into it...
If I offered now to sell you a brand new 40" HD TV for 100 pounds/euros/dollars, you'd probably take it from me - but you'd be wondering how I could manage to sell it so cheap, and maybe even be more than a little suspicious. Why weren't we more suspicious about supermarkets before they came into every town?
And they shouldn't have that choice?
Of course they should, I don't agree with the nanny state at all. But I've never once seen a supermarket that stocks as wide a range of fresh produce as it does processed stuff. And UK supermarkets are seriously pushing ready meals because that is where they see growth & where they make some of their biggest profit margins.
Right. And I'm sure that if the stores raised their prices to the "proper" level, you would not at all be complaining about price gouging and how the poor can't afford to feed themselves.
Every consumer with a brain has a concept of what is the "right" price to pay for something. No, if prices were hiked then anyone would end up buying less...
And you believe it's right to sell processed foods at the lowest prices to the poor so they develop bad diets & health problems, with all the associated (depending on where you live) problems with health insurance or the strain on the public-funded health services?
Yes, that's quite possible - in the same way as when I visit Spain regularly, the street markets that visit towns once a week are able to sell vegetables & fruit much cheaper than local supermarkets as well.
If the specialist store can't figure out a way to attract customers then it deserves to close.
Oh, come on, you *REALLY* can't believe that's the only cause, can you? What if the specialist store just *CANNOT* cut its overhead so low that it can compete with hypermarket prices? Or maybe it's in a town or city centre where it's not so easy to park to go in it?
I've got two delis, a butcher, a baker and a whole foods store all within a five minute drive of my house. They've all managed to stay in business despite the fact that my region hosts four different supermarket chains (Wal-Mart, Wegmans, Weis and Price Chopper)......
Yes, there are independent vendors that manage to stay open and again, there are (fortunately) reasons for that. Maybe it's because they're in a business district and catch a lot of office staff? Maybe there's a lot of people living round there and walking to a local store is more easier that getting in a car or using public transportation?
Just because some still survive does not mean they are not being driven out of business.
Are you really shocked that a retail store is expanding their inventory?
You didn't mean to say that - what you meant to say was "moving into new markets".
Expansion of inventory implies more choice in a product category but my experience is there is less choice - how many varieties of apples does your local hypermarket stock, for example? And how many of those varieties are native to your part of the world?
Moving into new markets implies saturation in the markets you are in and having to expand to keep the shareholders happy.
Is it a crime to stock more than five different kinds of potato chips or something?
You're missing the point. What they stock is what is convenient for *THEM* to stock and convincing consumers, by price-cutting and special offers, that that is what they want also.
Many varieties of potato chips can be stocked because they are processed foods with long shelf lives. But I can guarantee they stock a much smaller range of fresh fruit and vegetables.
Are you surprised that a greeter gets paid minimum wage?
Based on the excessive price-cutting that supermarkets do, no, I'm not surprised at all.
What makes a WalMart cashier better than a cashier anywhere else?
Nothing, but once again you miss the point. If you go into a small specialist store (and I don't mean chain store), there will usually be someone in there who knows his/her trade and can advise the customer through years of experience - for example, I can go to a local butcher and get him to pre-cut the meat for me a certain way or advise me on certain cuts of meat. You don't get that from a poorly-trained supermarket worker.
Any place I worked up through graduation paid minimum wage, and working most anywhere beats working in food service.
In which case you've strengthened my argument by admitting that supermarket staff are poorly paid.
So why all the outrage? Anyone else forcing all their competitors to compete would be a hero.
Competition with who, precisely? Sorry, I don't know the names of many US retailers but how many commercial shopping areas do you know contain, say, both a Wal-Mart and K-Mart? It's not about competition, it's about putting enough of a range of stuff in one place at a low enough price so that the consumer doesn't go elsewhere.
In the UK, four supermarket chains (Tesco, Walmart-owned Asda, Sainsbury & Morrisons) control 80% of grocery sales. They've reached saturation point in groceries, so now they're moving into other markets and expanding overseas. They MUST do that to satisfy the shareholders.
At the same time, they're price-cutting with each other and passing those cuts onto the suppliers - despite a grocery price war here in the UK for several years now, not one supermarket has made lower profits year-on-year. Because of the power they wield, they bully suppliers into lower and lower prices, that damages their efficiencies and business.
You really do need to get a grip with the bigger picture.
Well, duh. The superstores are general stores. They don't have the shelf space to stock every conceivable title or product. That's why you go to a real book/clothing/electronics/whatever store.
Well, double duh. It works like this - a supermarket stocks a limited range of the highest selling items (20% of a range makes 80% of profits) and sells them at a lower price than a local specialist store. This takes most of the profit away from the specialist store so it closes. This leaves a supermarket selling a small range of items, albeit at a lower cost. And they do that *BECAUSE* they don't have the shelf space to stock a wider range.
You aren't forced to do anything as a consumer unless you are too lazy to look for alternatives. Heck, this is the information age -- you can be lazy and shop at the same time if you have a computer, internet connection and credit card.....
For your information, I've done *PRECISELY* that, at least when it comes to fresh foodstuffs. In case you didn't pick it up before, I'm in the UK so don't have the same scales of distance you have in the US but, being an avid cook at home, I wanted better tasting fresh food to eat rather than the stuff in supermarkets - so for a while now I've been buying all my fresh meat, vegetables and fruit from local farm shops.
No, it's not "green" because I've had to travel further to them and, kilo for kilo, it's more expensive than in a supermarket. But overall our food budget has dropped because I'm not filling the trolley with "2 for 1" offers that I don't need and the food tastes better because it's locally produced, local varieties suitable for the climate and soil conditions, and hasn't travelled so far. But I have been more creative with my cooking, eaten far more healthily and wasted virtually nothing.
I don't claim to be some kind of saint, I still buy washing powder, mouthwash, toilet rolls, etc. from the local supermarket but, then, boycotting them completely was never my aim - I just wanted better tasting fresh food and to put some money back into the local economy.
Everyone keeps going on about 'mom and pop' and 'buy local' but the experience I've had with local businesses in places like these is that they get away with charging obscene prices because they're the only game in town. Milk - costs more at the local mom and pop store because you have to drive 20 minutes in any direction to find a competitor.
"Cheap" is not the same as "good". It's a circular situation because a local producer to you has to pay the same prices as you and has to offer a competitive wage within the local economy to hire workers. But when it comes to foodstuffs, what's grown are local crop varieties that hopefully taste good, flourish in the soil conditions of that area and are fresher when they get to the store shelves because they've traveled a lot less. And that system used to work because people used to spend a higher proportion of their incomes than they do now.
But supermarkets came on the scene and due to their size and power were able to dictate terms to food suppliers - about what varieties are grown, having minimum production volumes, etc. The result is cheaper foodstuffs but of lower quality and less choice because supermarkets want food that looks nice in displays and keeps fresh longer. Have you not noticed how much fresh fruit and vegetables on supermarket shelves is picked before it's fully ripened (and therefore before it's got its full flavour) simply so it lasts longer?
People would drive an hour to get to a real store - a Walmart or a Target or a Best Buy - and stock up for a week or weeks at a time.
And what will they stock up on? Processed foods that have long shelf lives - sorry, but you can't stock up three week supplies of fresh fruit and vegetables because it doesn't last that long.
So Walmart comes around and wants to build a store in your podunk town and suddenly hippes and 'progressives' from the city are telling you to oppose it because it 'destroys local business'. What? Mom and pop were trying to destroy us slowly with high prices and terrible selection for years, and now someone wants us to help them out because Walmart comes in and charges us a reasonable price for something? AND has a better selection? No thank you.
Again, this goes back to my original argument. You're missing the point because you do not accept that foodstuffs are *TOO* cheap, that's the problem.
You know what else you get with a Walmart? It's a little slice of civilization compared to what you can find out there.
What about the cameras in the ceilings tracking your every move in case you steal something? And the security guard at the door eyeing you up as you enter and leave?
And it's certainly not my experience that people pushing trolleys around a hypermarket are more communicative than those working in a local shop - everyone seems to be having a miserable time and wants to fill their trolley as quickly as possible in order to get out of the place.
Even at the checkout you've got some poor sap on minimum wage sat in a chair for hours on end before he/she can take a toilet break - I've actually made a point of speaking to, and being polite to, checkout operators and it doesn't take much for them to tell you how absolutely miserable they are in their jobs.
That odd DVD rental machine in the front? A Godsend to someone who has no video rental store.
Go and ask the poor sap on the DVD counter to recommend you a good family movie for the evening. Or go to the fresh meat counter and ask the person working there to recommend a good cut of beef for, say, an Irish Stew. They are all untrained saps designed to sell you as much stuff as possible...
So now they do cell phones too? If you live in a city, yeah, it's superfluous. If you live in the middle of nowhere it's another Godsend (as long as your nowhere has T-Mobile anyway). To have a place that will sell you something for a fair price and give you a decent selection of phones? Listen, you all may take it for granted, but plenty of people d
I won't claim to be a Wal-Mart expert, I've been round a few of them when I visited the US on several occasions but that's it. However, what I saw didn't seem to be a whole lot different to Tesco or Asda (owned by Wal-Mart) over here.
But have you not noticed how you can only buy the most popular-selling books, magazines, music, DVDs, etc. in the superstores?
There's a well-known saying that "20% of the product range makes 80% of the profits" and, in many cases, high sales of certain items acts as a subsidy to less popular items being produced and sold.
So the supermarket stocks the high-volume stuff only but manages to suck away most of the profits from, say, a specialist bookshop by stocking a smaller range of books. That in turn means that the outlets for less popular titles are reduced and leads to them being non-profitable to the point where they're not made any more.
This idea that supermarket price-cutting is in the interests of the consumer or that the supermarkets offer more choice is a complete fallacy - they stock the high profit, high volume sales items with a strategy to force consumers to just buy those items they stock.
I think you're right in one sense in that manufacturing would always have moved to Asia and the other parts of the world with a cheap labour, no matter what the likes of Wal-Mart and Tesco did or didn't do.
But agriculture and food production has been trashed by them completely.
If I go back 40 years to when I was a boy, my parents spent a far greater proportion of their income on foodstuffs than I do now, they bought it from local markets, butchers, greengrocers, etc. and it was treated with far more respect in that very little of it was ever wasted.
But now the fresh food that's brought to the shelves of supermarkets isn't the stuff that tastes the best but the stuff that looks nicest and has the longest shelf life so it can survive being transported halfway across the world.
The other factor to take into account is that our UK town centres used to have multiple butchers, greengrocers and weekly markets - so there was true competition on price & quality. Nowadays supermarkets source their foods from the same suppliers and just have it labelled differently.
Look at the bigger picture & it is very disturbing... the destruction of local businesses, extinction of local varieties of fruit & vegetables.
Plus here in the UK, our corrupt local authorities taking (in effect) backhand bribes when it comes to granting building permissions for hypermarkets. Not to mention the fact that they levied parking charges in town centres where local businesses used to thrive but nobody did anything about taxing the hypermarkets with their acres of free parking for customers.
And whilst I believe obesity is, in most cases, about lack of self control, it's startling to see that the countries with the highest obesity problems are those that have let hypermarkets run rife with stores full of processed & preprepared foodstuffs - UK, Germany, USA...
The Czech Republic is also climbing the "Europe's Fattest Nations" lists at the same time as our biggest retailer, Tesco, is expanding into it...
And France and Italy, who have refused to bow to the hypermarkets, happen to have the lowest obesity problems in Europe...
They won't have to register though, what will happen is they will simply say to that they are fully licensed until 2012.
Okay, point taken on that. But then a pirate user who suddenly becomes legal will probably start using things like Automatic Updates for the convenience, and then becomes visible, to a degree, to Microsoft.
FWIW, I'm mostly Linux guy so it doesn't bother me either way - but I know enough about MS to know they don't give anything away free without there being some alterior motive.
I use Linux most of the time (my job even centres around it) but I quite like XP and have a few games and apps running on it that I either can't run or run well in Linux.
Both have their strengths & weaknesses, but neither are religious icons - just tools to get a job done.
Why did it take Walmart to figure out what the consumer wanted?
It's nothing to do with what the consumer wants. It's using your considerable financial power to undercut the prices of everyone else until they disappear from the marketplace & leave you a monopoly with the ability to charge you want.
Why do people have so much difficulty in looking beyond the pounds/dollars/euros that they're saving in order to see what these huge retailers are trying to do?
In the UK, our biggest supermarket is Tesco with Asda (owned by Wal-Mart) in second place. Now that these companies have trashed any form of local retailer, they have to expand into new areas to swell their profits; this is why they now offer mobile phones, home insurance, pharmaceuticals and even home mortgages in some instances.
When is the populace going to wake up & realise that cheap is not necessarily best? These companies will not be satisfied until you use them for everything you need, right from birth to death - yet they also pay minimum wages & have dubious practices when it comes to employee rights.
They already have low tech measures (people) watching customers move the store to see what path they take, and how long they spend in each area, etc. Using technology to do this lets them do more people at once... but I find it hard to get too offended about a store that wishes to track me and what I do on their own premises.
A store that is big enough to give you a loyalty card has probably already done enough damage to your social environment - what about the small family-owned businesses that have been trashed by out-of-town hypermarkets?
Here in the UK, we have a saying of "clone towns" where small businesses in town centres were trashed as a result of price-cutting out-of-town hypermarkets leaving a lot of empty properties that the big chain stores and theme bars could move into - thus many town centres in the UK look identical now.
And what about all the local varieties of fruit, vegetables and livestock that are now nearing extinction because supermarkets only want to stock tasteless crap with long shelf lives that can be shipped from acorss the world?
I think you are seriously underestimating what these stores have done and what they're capable of just to increase their profits.
If current users of pirated MS software now have to register for a free software license that lasts until 2012, then in 2012 MS will be able to use those registration details to go back and ask them if they've now purchased a valid license for their software.
Not that I'm an MS fan but people who pirate software these days when there are usually very good legally free alternatives are hypocrites who deserve all they get.
I can't speak for the OS X people but this has precisely *ZERO* effect on Linux.
Yes, there are a few zealots wherever you go but most people use Linux because it does what they need an OS to do & a policy change from Microsoft isn't going to change that.
There is *NO* war between Linux & Windows but as long as there are people out there saying that Linux isn't ready for the desktop, then there will be some groups of developers trying to make it more suitable for those people.
There are pro-marijuana groups that may be doing nothing illegal in the limelight by producing leaflets and holding rallies that are subject to the scrutiny of law enforcement.
That's probably an extreme example because I doubt any corporation would want any of their products associated with a pro-marijuana group as it would be bad for their image - branding is everything these days.
Yes, but I guess identity theft is possible with just about any personal information held on a database.
Plus I always find it amusing that many people who get paranoid about biometric data will still carry things like store loyalty cards that seem to do nothing more harmful than give purchase discounts.
The big supermarkets here are looking to use RFID chips in their loyalty cards so not only do they already know about everything you buy & when you buy it, but where you are at any one moment in time.
I can vote out a government that misuses my data but what can I do about an evil corporation doing it?
It's voluntary here, at least for the moment - and the reason I signed up was a trade off between an iris image on a database somewhere and the ability to jump queues at immigration, I didn't (and still don't) consider the terrorist issue completely relevant.
If I'm honest, I see the prevalence of (predominantly American) corporations gobbling up or destroying anything unique in this country as far more of a threat to the fabric of my society than a few Muslim loonies with bombs strapped to them.
I signed up for IRIS because holding an image of a scan of the back of my eye on a database somewhere seems far less intrusive or harmful than my fingerprints or DNA.
Not that I have, or ever am likely to, commit a crime ever but an iris scan isn't going to put me at the scene of a crime or give much away to a private health insurance company looking for any excuse to up my premiums.
Plus the fact that the Data Protection Act over here offers some protection, provided you understand what it does & doesn't do.
A few of our airports have them for inbound passengers, Gatwick in London being one of them.
I found them quite useful to avoid the customs queues when I flew back into the UK but a lot of that is because so few other people registered to use them. It also took me three or four uses before I'd worked out the optimal positions to look into the mirrors, I would imagine that if a lot of people signed up to use them, it would be slower than going via a human customs officer.
Plus, as I implied earlier, about 50% of the time they were Out Of Order anyway, so the benefits seem quite negligible.
...that of course being Miner Willie from the ZX Spectrum classics Manic Miner & Jet Set Willy.
I'm not criticising anyone's love of the Mario franchise of games but having gamed for 30-odd years from the ZX Spectrum through the Commodore Amiga and now to PCs, I think I've only ever played one Mario game for a short period of time on a friend's NES.
So my platform gaming heroes were Zool, Superfrog, Manic Miner and Wally Week (from Automania & Pyjamarama).
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Germany's main supermarket chain is Metro and, from the statistics and information I've seen, the number and size of Metro stores in Germany far exceeds the number and size of Carrefour stores in France.
Yes, there can be some cultural dietary reasons why one nation may be fatter than others but that alone doesn't explain why, in those same countries, obesity is INCREASING.
The French laugh at us in the UK because they do not comprehend why we care so little about the quality of the food we eat. To the French, food quality is very important and central to their culture, as it is in the Mediterranean countries like Spain, Greece and Italy. And in those same countries supermarket penetration is much lower, simply because the populations don't want to buy their foods from just one place.
When I want to buy a steak, I have two or three tiers to choose from: cheap, factory farm meats, more expensive "natural" cuts (grass fed, no growth hormones, etc...) all the way up to expensive organic prime (or choice) cuts.
Did you know that the best quality steaks come from beef that has been hung for 28 days or so? And did you realise the majority of supermarkets don't do that with their meat? And who in a supermarket could you ask the question to and get an informed answer?
I have an incredible array of fruits and vegetables, both local and imported to choose from. If the supermarket doesn't have something I want, I can go to the farmers market on the weekend and talk to the grower.
Exactly, and that's the way it should be. I really am all for consumer choice and if the working mother of three screaming kids needs a single place to park up and do her weekly shopping then who am I to say otherwise. But supermarkets are NOT about consumer choice because they have driven small local producers out of business and force their producers to grow certain varieties with long shelf lives.
Not only that but fresh fruit and vegetables have to conform to very tight restrictions on size and look, meaning that a lot of perfectly good fruit and vegetables are rejected and either used as animal feed or ploughed back into the soil.
Compare how the fruit and vegetables at the local market look to those in a supermarket. At the market it can be all shapes and sizes but there's nothing wrong with it.
A member of my family is sensitive to gluten. Well, the local supermarket has a pretty big gluten free section and the food in the rest of the store is labelled well enough that we can make smart choices. How good do you think food labeling was in 1970?
But none of that is anything to do with supermarkets, with all respect. Or it might even be argued that proper food labeling has come about because of the amount of processed foods that supermarkets sell.
And clearly, if there's a demand for gluten-free products then if a supermarket wasn't supplying those, someone would be at a local level.
I would not trade the current system for the one of 40 years ago.
I'm not suggesting that. Supermarkets have a place for busy people who don't have the time to shop in multiple locations. But the trade off for the convenience is less choice and lower quality fresh foods.
Well yes, and apparently most customers didn't think spending so much of their income on food was as wonderful as you do.
And precisely when did these customers make this conscious decision? Rather than blindly walking into it...
If I offered now to sell you a brand new 40" HD TV for 100 pounds/euros/dollars, you'd probably take it from me - but you'd be wondering how I could manage to sell it so cheap, and maybe even be more than a little suspicious. Why weren't we more suspicious about supermarkets before they came into every town?
And they shouldn't have that choice?
Of course they should, I don't agree with the nanny state at all. But I've never once seen a supermarket that stocks as wide a range of fresh produce as it does processed stuff. And UK supermarkets are seriously pushing ready meals because that is where they see growth & where they make some of their biggest profit margins.
Right. And I'm sure that if the stores raised their prices to the "proper" level, you would not at all be complaining about price gouging and how the poor can't afford to feed themselves.
Every consumer with a brain has a concept of what is the "right" price to pay for something. No, if prices were hiked then anyone would end up buying less...
And you believe it's right to sell processed foods at the lowest prices to the poor so they develop bad diets & health problems, with all the associated (depending on where you live) problems with health insurance or the strain on the public-funded health services?
Yes, that's quite possible - in the same way as when I visit Spain regularly, the street markets that visit towns once a week are able to sell vegetables & fruit much cheaper than local supermarkets as well.
If the specialist store can't figure out a way to attract customers then it deserves to close.
Oh, come on, you *REALLY* can't believe that's the only cause, can you? What if the specialist store just *CANNOT* cut its overhead so low that it can compete with hypermarket prices? Or maybe it's in a town or city centre where it's not so easy to park to go in it?
I've got two delis, a butcher, a baker and a whole foods store all within a five minute drive of my house. They've all managed to stay in business despite the fact that my region hosts four different supermarket chains (Wal-Mart, Wegmans, Weis and Price Chopper)......
Yes, there are independent vendors that manage to stay open and again, there are (fortunately) reasons for that. Maybe it's because they're in a business district and catch a lot of office staff? Maybe there's a lot of people living round there and walking to a local store is more easier that getting in a car or using public transportation?
Just because some still survive does not mean they are not being driven out of business.
Are you really shocked that a retail store is expanding their inventory?
You didn't mean to say that - what you meant to say was "moving into new markets".
Expansion of inventory implies more choice in a product category but my experience is there is less choice - how many varieties of apples does your local hypermarket stock, for example? And how many of those varieties are native to your part of the world?
Moving into new markets implies saturation in the markets you are in and having to expand to keep the shareholders happy.
Is it a crime to stock more than five different kinds of potato chips or something?
You're missing the point. What they stock is what is convenient for *THEM* to stock and convincing consumers, by price-cutting and special offers, that that is what they want also.
Many varieties of potato chips can be stocked because they are processed foods with long shelf lives. But I can guarantee they stock a much smaller range of fresh fruit and vegetables.
Are you surprised that a greeter gets paid minimum wage?
Based on the excessive price-cutting that supermarkets do, no, I'm not surprised at all.
What makes a WalMart cashier better than a cashier anywhere else?
Nothing, but once again you miss the point. If you go into a small specialist store (and I don't mean chain store), there will usually be someone in there who knows his/her trade and can advise the customer through years of experience - for example, I can go to a local butcher and get him to pre-cut the meat for me a certain way or advise me on certain cuts of meat. You don't get that from a poorly-trained supermarket worker.
Any place I worked up through graduation paid minimum wage, and working most anywhere beats working in food service.
In which case you've strengthened my argument by admitting that supermarket staff are poorly paid.
So why all the outrage? Anyone else forcing all their competitors to compete would be a hero.
Competition with who, precisely? Sorry, I don't know the names of many US retailers but how many commercial shopping areas do you know contain, say, both a Wal-Mart and K-Mart? It's not about competition, it's about putting enough of a range of stuff in one place at a low enough price so that the consumer doesn't go elsewhere.
In the UK, four supermarket chains (Tesco, Walmart-owned Asda, Sainsbury & Morrisons) control 80% of grocery sales. They've reached saturation point in groceries, so now they're moving into other markets and expanding overseas. They MUST do that to satisfy the shareholders.
At the same time, they're price-cutting with each other and passing those cuts onto the suppliers - despite a grocery price war here in the UK for several years now, not one supermarket has made lower profits year-on-year. Because of the power they wield, they bully suppliers into lower and lower prices, that damages their efficiencies and business.
You really do need to get a grip with the bigger picture.
Well, duh. The superstores are general stores. They don't have the shelf space to stock every conceivable title or product. That's why you go to a real book/clothing/electronics/whatever store.
Well, double duh. It works like this - a supermarket stocks a limited range of the highest selling items (20% of a range makes 80% of profits) and sells them at a lower price than a local specialist store. This takes most of the profit away from the specialist store so it closes. This leaves a supermarket selling a small range of items, albeit at a lower cost. And they do that *BECAUSE* they don't have the shelf space to stock a wider range.
You aren't forced to do anything as a consumer unless you are too lazy to look for alternatives. Heck, this is the information age -- you can be lazy and shop at the same time if you have a computer, internet connection and credit card.....
For your information, I've done *PRECISELY* that, at least when it comes to fresh foodstuffs. In case you didn't pick it up before, I'm in the UK so don't have the same scales of distance you have in the US but, being an avid cook at home, I wanted better tasting fresh food to eat rather than the stuff in supermarkets - so for a while now I've been buying all my fresh meat, vegetables and fruit from local farm shops.
No, it's not "green" because I've had to travel further to them and, kilo for kilo, it's more expensive than in a supermarket. But overall our food budget has dropped because I'm not filling the trolley with "2 for 1" offers that I don't need and the food tastes better because it's locally produced, local varieties suitable for the climate and soil conditions, and hasn't travelled so far. But I have been more creative with my cooking, eaten far more healthily and wasted virtually nothing.
I don't claim to be some kind of saint, I still buy washing powder, mouthwash, toilet rolls, etc. from the local supermarket but, then, boycotting them completely was never my aim - I just wanted better tasting fresh food and to put some money back into the local economy.
Everyone keeps going on about 'mom and pop' and 'buy local' but the experience I've had with local businesses in places like these is that they get away with charging obscene prices because they're the only game in town. Milk - costs more at the local mom and pop store because you have to drive 20 minutes in any direction to find a competitor.
"Cheap" is not the same as "good". It's a circular situation because a local producer to you has to pay the same prices as you and has to offer a competitive wage within the local economy to hire workers. But when it comes to foodstuffs, what's grown are local crop varieties that hopefully taste good, flourish in the soil conditions of that area and are fresher when they get to the store shelves because they've traveled a lot less. And that system used to work because people used to spend a higher proportion of their incomes than they do now.
But supermarkets came on the scene and due to their size and power were able to dictate terms to food suppliers - about what varieties are grown, having minimum production volumes, etc. The result is cheaper foodstuffs but of lower quality and less choice because supermarkets want food that looks nice in displays and keeps fresh longer. Have you not noticed how much fresh fruit and vegetables on supermarket shelves is picked before it's fully ripened (and therefore before it's got its full flavour) simply so it lasts longer?
People would drive an hour to get to a real store - a Walmart or a Target or a Best Buy - and stock up for a week or weeks at a time.
And what will they stock up on? Processed foods that have long shelf lives - sorry, but you can't stock up three week supplies of fresh fruit and vegetables because it doesn't last that long.
So Walmart comes around and wants to build a store in your podunk town and suddenly hippes and 'progressives' from the city are telling you to oppose it because it 'destroys local business'. What? Mom and pop were trying to destroy us slowly with high prices and terrible selection for years, and now someone wants us to help them out because Walmart comes in and charges us a reasonable price for something? AND has a better selection? No thank you.
Again, this goes back to my original argument. You're missing the point because you do not accept that foodstuffs are *TOO* cheap, that's the problem.
You know what else you get with a Walmart? It's a little slice of civilization compared to what you can find out there.
What about the cameras in the ceilings tracking your every move in case you steal something? And the security guard at the door eyeing you up as you enter and leave?
And it's certainly not my experience that people pushing trolleys around a hypermarket are more communicative than those working in a local shop - everyone seems to be having a miserable time and wants to fill their trolley as quickly as possible in order to get out of the place.
Even at the checkout you've got some poor sap on minimum wage sat in a chair for hours on end before he/she can take a toilet break - I've actually made a point of speaking to, and being polite to, checkout operators and it doesn't take much for them to tell you how absolutely miserable they are in their jobs.
That odd DVD rental machine in the front? A Godsend to someone who has no video rental store.
Go and ask the poor sap on the DVD counter to recommend you a good family movie for the evening. Or go to the fresh meat counter and ask the person working there to recommend a good cut of beef for, say, an Irish Stew. They are all untrained saps designed to sell you as much stuff as possible...
So now they do cell phones too? If you live in a city, yeah, it's superfluous. If you live in the middle of nowhere it's another Godsend (as long as your nowhere has T-Mobile anyway). To have a place that will sell you something for a fair price and give you a decent selection of phones? Listen, you all may take it for granted, but plenty of people d
I'm glad you mentioned books.
I won't claim to be a Wal-Mart expert, I've been round a few of them when I visited the US on several occasions but that's it. However, what I saw didn't seem to be a whole lot different to Tesco or Asda (owned by Wal-Mart) over here.
But have you not noticed how you can only buy the most popular-selling books, magazines, music, DVDs, etc. in the superstores?
There's a well-known saying that "20% of the product range makes 80% of the profits" and, in many cases, high sales of certain items acts as a subsidy to less popular items being produced and sold.
So the supermarket stocks the high-volume stuff only but manages to suck away most of the profits from, say, a specialist bookshop by stocking a smaller range of books. That in turn means that the outlets for less popular titles are reduced and leads to them being non-profitable to the point where they're not made any more.
This idea that supermarket price-cutting is in the interests of the consumer or that the supermarkets offer more choice is a complete fallacy - they stock the high profit, high volume sales items with a strategy to force consumers to just buy those items they stock.
I think you're right in one sense in that manufacturing would always have moved to Asia and the other parts of the world with a cheap labour, no matter what the likes of Wal-Mart and Tesco did or didn't do.
But agriculture and food production has been trashed by them completely.
If I go back 40 years to when I was a boy, my parents spent a far greater proportion of their income on foodstuffs than I do now, they bought it from local markets, butchers, greengrocers, etc. and it was treated with far more respect in that very little of it was ever wasted.
But now the fresh food that's brought to the shelves of supermarkets isn't the stuff that tastes the best but the stuff that looks nicest and has the longest shelf life so it can survive being transported halfway across the world.
The other factor to take into account is that our UK town centres used to have multiple butchers, greengrocers and weekly markets - so there was true competition on price & quality. Nowadays supermarkets source their foods from the same suppliers and just have it labelled differently.
Look at the bigger picture & it is very disturbing... the destruction of local businesses, extinction of local varieties of fruit & vegetables.
Plus here in the UK, our corrupt local authorities taking (in effect) backhand bribes when it comes to granting building permissions for hypermarkets. Not to mention the fact that they levied parking charges in town centres where local businesses used to thrive but nobody did anything about taxing the hypermarkets with their acres of free parking for customers.
And whilst I believe obesity is, in most cases, about lack of self control, it's startling to see that the countries with the highest obesity problems are those that have let hypermarkets run rife with stores full of processed & preprepared foodstuffs - UK, Germany, USA...
The Czech Republic is also climbing the "Europe's Fattest Nations" lists at the same time as our biggest retailer, Tesco, is expanding into it...
And France and Italy, who have refused to bow to the hypermarkets, happen to have the lowest obesity problems in Europe...
It's more than a coincidence.
They won't have to register though, what will happen is they will simply say to that they are fully licensed until 2012.
Okay, point taken on that. But then a pirate user who suddenly becomes legal will probably start using things like Automatic Updates for the convenience, and then becomes visible, to a degree, to Microsoft.
FWIW, I'm mostly Linux guy so it doesn't bother me either way - but I know enough about MS to know they don't give anything away free without there being some alterior motive.
I use Linux most of the time (my job even centres around it) but I quite like XP and have a few games and apps running on it that I either can't run or run well in Linux.
Both have their strengths & weaknesses, but neither are religious icons - just tools to get a job done.
Why did it take Walmart to figure out what the consumer wanted?
It's nothing to do with what the consumer wants. It's using your considerable financial power to undercut the prices of everyone else until they disappear from the marketplace & leave you a monopoly with the ability to charge you want.
Why do people have so much difficulty in looking beyond the pounds/dollars/euros that they're saving in order to see what these huge retailers are trying to do?
In the UK, our biggest supermarket is Tesco with Asda (owned by Wal-Mart) in second place. Now that these companies have trashed any form of local retailer, they have to expand into new areas to swell their profits; this is why they now offer mobile phones, home insurance, pharmaceuticals and even home mortgages in some instances.
When is the populace going to wake up & realise that cheap is not necessarily best? These companies will not be satisfied until you use them for everything you need, right from birth to death - yet they also pay minimum wages & have dubious practices when it comes to employee rights.
Wake up, people!
They already have low tech measures (people) watching customers move the store to see what path they take, and how long they spend in each area, etc. Using technology to do this lets them do more people at once... but I find it hard to get too offended about a store that wishes to track me and what I do on their own premises.
A store that is big enough to give you a loyalty card has probably already done enough damage to your social environment - what about the small family-owned businesses that have been trashed by out-of-town hypermarkets?
Here in the UK, we have a saying of "clone towns" where small businesses in town centres were trashed as a result of price-cutting out-of-town hypermarkets leaving a lot of empty properties that the big chain stores and theme bars could move into - thus many town centres in the UK look identical now.
And what about all the local varieties of fruit, vegetables and livestock that are now nearing extinction because supermarkets only want to stock tasteless crap with long shelf lives that can be shipped from acorss the world?
I think you are seriously underestimating what these stores have done and what they're capable of just to increase their profits.
Of course, there's another way to look at this.
If current users of pirated MS software now have to register for a free software license that lasts until 2012, then in 2012 MS will be able to use those registration details to go back and ask them if they've now purchased a valid license for their software.
Not that I'm an MS fan but people who pirate software these days when there are usually very good legally free alternatives are hypocrites who deserve all they get.
I can't speak for the OS X people but this has precisely *ZERO* effect on Linux.
Yes, there are a few zealots wherever you go but most people use Linux because it does what they need an OS to do & a policy change from Microsoft isn't going to change that.
There is *NO* war between Linux & Windows but as long as there are people out there saying that Linux isn't ready for the desktop, then there will be some groups of developers trying to make it more suitable for those people.
There are pro-marijuana groups that may be doing nothing illegal in the limelight by producing leaflets and holding rallies that are subject to the scrutiny of law enforcement.
That's probably an extreme example because I doubt any corporation would want any of their products associated with a pro-marijuana group as it would be bad for their image - branding is everything these days.
If there is an award for "Best Word Describing The Sounds Made By A Male Onanist", you're "FAP" wins it hands down... allegedly.
Yes, but I guess identity theft is possible with just about any personal information held on a database.
Plus I always find it amusing that many people who get paranoid about biometric data will still carry things like store loyalty cards that seem to do nothing more harmful than give purchase discounts.
The big supermarkets here are looking to use RFID chips in their loyalty cards so not only do they already know about everything you buy & when you buy it, but where you are at any one moment in time.
I can vote out a government that misuses my data but what can I do about an evil corporation doing it?
It's voluntary here, at least for the moment - and the reason I signed up was a trade off between an iris image on a database somewhere and the ability to jump queues at immigration, I didn't (and still don't) consider the terrorist issue completely relevant.
If I'm honest, I see the prevalence of (predominantly American) corporations gobbling up or destroying anything unique in this country as far more of a threat to the fabric of my society than a few Muslim loonies with bombs strapped to them.
I signed up for IRIS because holding an image of a scan of the back of my eye on a database somewhere seems far less intrusive or harmful than my fingerprints or DNA.
Not that I have, or ever am likely to, commit a crime ever but an iris scan isn't going to put me at the scene of a crime or give much away to a private health insurance company looking for any excuse to up my premiums.
Plus the fact that the Data Protection Act over here offers some protection, provided you understand what it does & doesn't do.
...when the damn things are working, anyway!
A few of our airports have them for inbound passengers, Gatwick in London being one of them.
I found them quite useful to avoid the customs queues when I flew back into the UK but a lot of that is because so few other people registered to use them. It also took me three or four uses before I'd worked out the optimal positions to look into the mirrors, I would imagine that if a lot of people signed up to use them, it would be slower than going via a human customs officer.
Plus, as I implied earlier, about 50% of the time they were Out Of Order anyway, so the benefits seem quite negligible.
...that of course being Miner Willie from the ZX Spectrum classics Manic Miner & Jet Set Willy.
I'm not criticising anyone's love of the Mario franchise of games but having gamed for 30-odd years from the ZX Spectrum through the Commodore Amiga and now to PCs, I think I've only ever played one Mario game for a short period of time on a friend's NES.
So my platform gaming heroes were Zool, Superfrog, Manic Miner and Wally Week (from Automania & Pyjamarama).