Why would we combine Whole Foods and Trader Joe's? Whew, at least it's not bigger than Target and Walgreens combined though! It is however about 40% the size of Kroger... so there is that.
Yeah I'm honestly not sure why people would be surprised at this comparison - Whole Foods and Trader Joe's are specialty stores. Nobody goes into them just to buy a head of lettuce.
Trader Joe's has their own in-store brands for tons of products, which has spawned various guides on what should/shouldn't be bough there (https://www.thepennyhoarder.com/save-money/what-to-buy-at-tr... for example). CVS, on the other hand, is a far more general store. They both sell food, but they're not in the same market segment - so the comparison is strange.
I don't live in the US, but I've been to Whole Foods when visiting and certainly felt like a perfectly normal grocery store, not too different from most other grocery stores I've been to. What makes it a specialty store and why wouldn't you go there to buy a head of lettuce?
>Nobody goes into them just to buy a head of lettuce.
wtf are you talking about? I do this (with other greens and vegetables). If anything, the people shopping at WF/TJ don't want a head of lettuce because it's a stupid product, but I think you're using that as an example...but using head of lettuce just makes me believe you don't understand the demographic.
It's not very surprising. When you take a broad meta-category like "groceries" and have 10x the number of locations, it isn't shocking that they would move more product.
Trader Joe's and Whole Foods target specific demographics. I live in a metro area of about 300k people and there are 1 each Trader Joe's and Whole Foods. There are probably 40-50 CVS outlets. Their sole income driver is margin on food. CVS focuses on market saturation -- their profit driver is drugs (a market in which they vertically integrate distribution) that are mostly 3rd party paid. They survive in food deserts because the money made on drugs offsets heavy shrink losses.
My guess is they might fill a supermarket niche more in denser urban areas. I don't know first hand but it cluld make sense.
I heard accounts of ironically Whole Foods which is referred to as "whole paycheck" in other areas being the cheap option in some areas. I would guess traffic vs stock would also influence prices in non-obvious ways. With perishables, more expensive real estate, high traffic, and customers more likely to buy everything by foot they may be less of a speciality niche in urban areas than suburbs.
I almost always go to CVS when I need to get a few small items in a hurry (I usually use Amazon Fresh for groceries), so I'm not surprised about this at all. Going to CSV is much easier than fighting the crowd at Walmart since there's only a handful of people there at any given time.
Ditto. My wife and I are stereotypically the perfect WF/TJs customers: ecologically-minded hippie-ish DINKs in an upper-middle-class suburb. We live a 3 minute drive from both, and she works a short walk from a Roche Bros (which serves a similar demographic).
Yet, despite the poorer selection and higher prices, the majority of groceries that enter our house come from CVS. Why? My wife visits one regularly to pick up prescriptions, and they have just enough of what we buy, at sufficiently justifiable prices, that she can get enough of what we need without an extra trip to a different store.
The most convenient store is the one you're already at.
I didn’t even realize I needed to justify periodically buying food there until I read this thread. As if their success somehow means there’s something nefarious going on or they’re taking advantage of people. There’s a CVS everywhere.
That's a pity, because doing grocery shopping at CVS is like doing grocery shopping at a gas station / convenience mart: there's a $1-3 markup on damn near everything. And I imagine the people that are forced to shop at a drugstore are probably poor to begin with, so, that hits them even worse.
If you can't afford transportation you're limited to what you can walk to. In the area I live you cannot bring more than one bag with you on public transportation and it takes almost an hour to get across town on the bus. It would be cheaper to buy marked up food from a gas station or drugstore than pay for a taxi ride or waste half a day riding the bus.
Edit: essentially, a lot of the time it is expensive to be poor.
I can confirm that. I live near a block of apartment homes that are populated by lower income residents. There's a CVS and a gas station/cstore within walking distance, but the grocery stores and department stores (Target, Walmart) are all more than 2+ miles away. The buses are infrequent and expensive.
Anecdata: I have money and property and plentiful transportation (three vehicles for the two of us). Live miles from town.
I drive to one or more grocery stores infrequently to get what I want. Buy quality food and freeze/store it in my large house. Garden provides some more. Waste is composted and feeds the gardens.
Meals cost me a buck or two to prepare from my plentiful stock. All because I can afford to. Food is a negligible fraction of my budget.
Whether or not he meant to his comment illustrates the problem perfectly: those with the means to do so can eat healthy food and absorb the cost/time/distance inherent in that, those that cannot will suffer and chose whatever they can get. Good healthy food at a sustainable price is hard to come by in the US. There are food deserts everywhere. Good food is treated clearly as a lifestyle luxury. Let them eat cake indeed.
I get where your comment is coming from, but I think they acknowledged that their situation is somewhat privileged. Quote: "All because I can afford to."
It's the old adage about it being expensive to be poor, only in reverse.
You don't have to be wealthy to do that, but you do have to have the storage space and to shift your mindset in a more long-term direction. It's also a lot of work. I grew up relatively poor, but in a rural area, so we had enough land to put in a garden, and we slaved away all summer and fall picking and processing food that got stacked up in the basement cold-cellar and in the freezer. We also bought meat in bulk, either a half or a whole beef from a local farmer, so you had to plan for that lump sum expense and, again, have the freezer space ready to take hundreds of pounds of meat when it went to the slaughter house. We'd also try to shoot a deer or two each year to supplement that, and catch a mess of trout that we'd can up. Then there were the trips to the pick-your-own berry fields, where you'd pick a hundred pounds of strawberries, and then have to freeze them or turn them into jam, and the trips to the orchards where you could pick grain sacks full of the dropped apples for a dollar apiece; then you had to go home and sort out the bad ones. My aunt had a Sam's Club membership, so a couple times a year we'd go with her and load up on staples - again, you've got to save up for it, and then you have to have the storage.
You can do that kind of thing when you are relatively settled and have roots and connections in a community, and the know-how to do all that home-making. We didn't have any money, but we were rich in a lot of other ways. If you are isolated and precarious, living reactively day-to-day, it makes something that is already hard nigh on impossible.
Also, “proper” grocery chains are often much more expensive (with lower quality items) in poor areas where residents can’t afford transportation. In those areas, CVS might not a terrible choice.
Kroger used to be so bad in our neighborhood that we drove 30 minutes (past upscale krogers) because their business model of abusing stranded populations was abhorrent.
There’s a weird misconception about poor people here. I’m willing to bet the vast amount of people on SNAP have a car and a job. Being poor doesn’t require an abject state.
Chronic stress (such as from financial stress and working multiple jobs) actually does severely impact your executive function and decision-making ability. It's hard to make dispassionate decisions when you're exhausted and scared. There's been studies about it.
Obviously it's possible to overcome that, and some people are better at it than others. But the burden is real. When you're coming off a double shift, it's really hard to make the decision to spend an extra 45 minutes walking round-trip, or two hours hopping on and off buses, when you could just hit the Walgreen's near your apartment and get home to your family.
The effects of financial stress on your mental wellbeing are pretty well documented and can manifest in ways such as inability to focus/concentrate, chronic fatigue, spotty memory from stress etc.
> Being poor doesn’t mean you can’t plan and are helpless.
obviously not. But anecdotally what I see where I live is that it is a large enough inconvenience that it makes an impact. If you work 8 hours, then have to spend 2-3 hours getting groceries you already have a 10-11 hour day not counting any other commuting you need to do. What if you have kids you need to get off a bus from school?
trying to blanket say anyone not willing to make that trip just isn't trying isn't fair.
It is well documented that low-income areas have less access to good education, healthcare, and other facilities. blaming the residents doesn't help them improve their quality of life. Not everyone will make it out of that.
Unless you don’t have a fridge, when you have to make a two hour trip for food, you’re gonna make sure you got just about everything for the whole week. There might be some milk or egg runs, but in those cases one might pay a premium once in a while.
We’re not making two hour trips every day after work for food. No poor person I knew did that when I was poor. I did it mostly on weekends when there was lots of time.
I think because if someone does their grocery shopping at a drug store, then they probably live in a food desert which are typically in lower income areas.
This is known as the poverty tax. People in poverty pay more for necessities than people who are not in poverty because they can't easily get to places where they can buy more for their money.
Where real estate is expensive the only grocery stores that can stay afloat are fat margin chains that cater to upscale customers. The poor people are then forced to shop at CVS or wherever, sure it's more expensive than Walmart or a proper grocery store but it's still cheaper than whole paycheck.
WF (or Trader Joes for that matter) simply doesn't sell value priced versions of a lot of items. CVS will sell it at a ripoff. It probably comes out close to a wash put poor people are poor, not stupid. If the numbers worked out in favor of WF they would be shopping there. Also, nobody(TM) does their entire shopping at CVS. People will drag their asses elsewhere on a regular basis to buy certain items that are cheap. Many convenience stores, bodegas, etc. will sell a couple staples or classes of items dirt cheap in order to attract business. You buy your regular items where they are cheap (e.g. $1.50/gal brand name milk from the bodega that buys about to expire milk from a restaurant supplier for pennies and passes on the savings to create foot traffic) and buy everything else at CVS.
This is a massive misconception and nicely illustrates how much people are influenced by branding and merchandising. Whole foods 365 brand is actually cheaper than many grocery store generics. The data is available online if you want to explore this further.
Assuming this is true: If you visit WF, your entire shopping needs won’t be met by the available 365-branded foods, which means you’ll either have to shop at multiple stores (extremely difficult if you are poor) or buy the remaining products at severely marked up prices, negating any savings the 365-brands products might have offered. In particular, produce, meats and other fresh products are absurdly marked up in WF.
can you give some examples of products you can't find at WF? I only ask because WF is the closest grocery to me and I don't have a problem getting everything I need. Granted, fresh fruit and vegetables don't have the 365 brand, but I'm assuming you don't mean that? I think the 365 brand is more about staples like milk, eggs, juice? Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong though, I'm sure I'm biased.
The only things that come to mind are some household items. Grease cleaners, motor oil, actual OTC drugs (cough, aspirin, etc.), actual full size brooms, pest control and few other things.
In my experience, every time I've been to Whole Foods they don't have basic produce, condiments and sauces, etc that I would expect to have at a normal grocery store. Common vegetables are just missing from the store for no apparent reason. And their selection of anything Asian is awful, much worse than even Safeway. It might be a regional thing (I live in a city) but where I live Whole Foods is expensive, bizzarely limited in selection, and caters to a very specific lifestyle and diet - I get the impression it caters to people for whom cooking for themselves is a special occasion and not a daily thing.
Which common vegetables? Can you be specific? At my local WF, not only do I feel their vegetable section to be complete, but the quality is much higher than other regional/national chains.
>I get the impression it caters to people for whom cooking for themselves is a special occasion and not a daily thing.
I'm really confused, you think WF caters to people who don't cook for themselves, but you feel like it's missing condiments and sauces? That's weird, people who cook for themselves probably aren't looking to smother their food with ketchup.
I mean, I live in an area where there’s a Whole Foods within two blocks’ walking distance of two other grocery stores (one mid-market, one down-market.)
I think this isn’t actually that uncommon; people don’t see Whole Foods as actually satisfying the demand for “a grocery store” in an area (as it doesn’t carry many of the things people expect a larger grocery store to carry—it may have decent produce, deli, bakery, etc. sections, but its grocery section is rather lacking in anything other than up-market “bougie” brands) so if there’s an existing other grocery store, and then a Whole Foods also gets built, that doesn’t much decrease the traffic to the other grocery store to the point that it would close down.
The only problem is property developers marketing a new neighbourhood that only has a Whole Foods as being “close to a grocery store”, and people believing them and moving there. That Whole Foods was probably already there before the neighbourhood was, serving as an outlet to travel to for the larger region that that the new neighbourhood is located in; but the other parts of the region were being served by grocery stores located closer to them, and this new neighbourhood actually doesn’t have one of those.
> your entire shopping needs won’t be met by the available 365-branded foods
Absolutely false. That is the entire stated purpose of the 365 brand. What 365 does not cover is produce and meat. Meat is definitely more expensive at Whole Foods as they do not use it as a loss leader like other stores. I also sometimes wonder if one of the founders being vegan had something to do with that. Produce at WF is definitely about merchandising. The lower priced produced is very well hidden.
> shop at multiple stores (extremely difficult if you are poor)
Poor people don't have legs? I was poor for most of my life. I rode a bicycle to the grocery store. And the 365 brand stuff is mostly non-perishables. You can shop for non-perishables every couple of weeks.
Admit it. You just do not like the brand and identity the Whole Foods represents. It has nothing to do with the actual products or prices.
"Just walk/bike to multiple stores if you're poor, lol!"
No. In so many ways, no. If the trade off is to save a few dollars by running around for multiple hours per week to go to multiple stores (uses gas! or takes a long time!), or just going to the nearest cheap store to get everything they need, they're going to Walmart.
It has nothing to do with brand and identity and everything to do with not wasting precious time and money.
Better than what? In my area within just a few miles I can get to 5 different produce markets that offer world-class quality produce at rock bottom pricing. Organic or not, anything you want to eat.
So, I used to work for whole foods in school. Management made a big deal about how if you used you employee discount and bought 365 brand stuff it was almost the same cost as shopping brand name at giant. As I recall about 5$ a month more. Admittedly this was 20 years ago but it still seems true when I go to whole foods once a year or so.
This seemed like an extraordinary claim to me, so I tracked down an analysis by Consumer Checkbook for the Boston area. The basket of goods they examined cost over 20% more at Whole Foods than at e.g. Stop and Shop, and over 50% more than at Market Basket.
For the chains I am familiar with those results line up exactly with my preexisting impression of those stores as far as cost goes.
Walmart has staples dirt cheap but a much more limited selection. Market Basket has "proper grocery store selection" and can match Walmart in prices except for the things that really lend themselves to discounts for buying in bulk (like those big boxes of eggs) which they simply don't sell. Hannaford and Price Chopper make up the part of the curve leading to the mid range which is occupied by Stop and Shop, Shaws/Star, etc. and then at the top of the price distribution is all the stores I try to avoid at all costs.
They mention large variation of prices between stores of the same chain. I strongly suspect that this correlates with how wealthy the community the store is located in is (which leads to increased cost to run the store). Where I live Aldi is the high priced upscale store. Where my parents live Stop and Shop is the high priced upscale store and Shaws/Star Market is generally cheaper.
The fact that Walmart ranked poorly does not surprise me. There are no good Walmarts in the Boston area. Walmart doesn't throw a lot of grocery effort into stores with lots of local competition. The one near me is really good. The one in Quincy is laughably bad. Tewksbury is good but I'm not sure if they consider that "the Boston area".
CVS is has a high/low pricing scheme, so most of the items you see aren't being purchased at full price and people really only buy them on sale. You have to play their games with stacking ECB, coupons and sales though, so it's work.
I had to stop buying at CVS because of this, it was driving me crazy. I would pick up some over the counter medication and it'd ring up for an extra 5 or 10 bucks. Just walked out one day and now I get my medications at walmart or my closer neighborhood pharmacy.
Oh yeah they put stuff like that stuff on BOGO all the time, which just shows how much they're marking up the normal price if they can give you a free one and still make money.
Keep in mind that Walmart is able to beat everyone in price not by having less of a markup but by purchasing in huge volumes to get a lower wholesale price to begin with. Off the top of my head our typical store margin is between 20-30%. So yes, pretty high. That doesn't tell the what the company actually pays I'm sure. But markup isn't where we make the money.
Most sales, and particularly BOGO are loss-leaders to get people to sign up for the loyalty card. That's where the money comes from because now we have your phone number and email address and purchase history to sell. Every one of those coupons that prints on the receipt is a paid advertisement. CVS gains by promoting those products. By gamifying coupon use. And those ExtraBuck coupons aren't discounts but more like short-term microloans that CVS keeps the interest on.
I think maybe urban stores might skew the stats a bit. There's so much demand for groceries within a short walk of all the local condo buildings that my local Walgreens has set up a fresh sushi counter. The cheaper, giant grocery stores are all located in low income areas where land is cheap, but there's 8 CVS, 5 7-Eleven, and 2 Walgreens within a quarter mile walk of where I live and work.
So when I run out of flour, I have a decision to make: would I rather sit in traffic for 30 minutes, wait for instacart/amazon fresh delivery, or go to CVS/Walgreens? I suspect there are many people like me who pay the markup every day because it's less of a hassle.
I remember the weekly shopping cadence growing up in a relatively rural new england town, but there was still always the inevitable "milk run" when you ran out of something unexpectedly. With smallish high rise condos it's hard to store a lot of food (kitchen designers assume you don't need a pantry or full size freezer for some reason).
Another factor is that in this age of instant gratification if I were to buy a week's worth of perishables items would go bad because it's so easy to have a shitty day and say screw it, let's go out, get takeout or get delivery (369 restaurants will deliver to me via uber eats) instead of cooking.
Not saying that it's a healthy way to live, but it's become a strong pull over the 10 years since I've made the transition to fully urbanized life. The way we cope, especially after having a baby, is to shop at the local butchers, bakers and markets for fresh stuff every few days and order delivery of heavy bulk goods periodically.
Accidentally running out of flour, coffee filters, half and half, etc., is probably an inevitable side effect.
Well until SNAP[1] is blocked from being spent on snacks and sodas these sites will always be in use. The list of foods that are acceptable encourage these stores to focus on the high profit side of the list which equates to what many would see as pure junk.
Plus in some areas you cannot get a grocery in due to zoning or regulatory agencies which can increase the costs of worker and compliance needs beyond normal. There are many rules regarding handling of produce and raw foods that drug store type sellers never have to meet.
Zoning in Manhattan has made it essentially impossible to build a new grocery store in a normal location. Pretty much all recently-built grocery stores are in basements, due to a "zoning hack" that makes that compliant: https://twitter.com/MarketUrbanism/status/105451854997111193...
This is unfortunate, because Manhattan clearly has excess demand for good grocery stores, and the incumbents (Gristedes, etc.) are terrible.
When I lived there we called Gristedes "Grosstedes" and Gourmet Garage "Greedy Garage"... 125th street Fairway made up for it but it was Hell getting through there ...
Heh, we call it "Gristicky". I'm consistently shocked that anyone shops there. Expired food on shelves, wilted or moldy produce, long waits for slow checkout clerks, and prices that are easily 3x what comparable items cost at Trader Joe's.
Those grocery stores would easily be extinct with more meaningful competition. The only thing that keeps them in business is the "natural monopoly" caused by the fact that most Manhattanites don't have cars and aren't willing to travel very far for groceries.
I worked at CVS for years before moving overseas. It has been 5 or 6 years since I worked there. I worked at 2 different stores.
All sorts of folks buy from CVS, mostly stuff on sale but not always. Moms with a sick child and elderly folks in to get medicines are a good chunk of the customers. Folks without transportation are a few people, sure. In one store, some of the food traffic was simply because we were in a small town with limited groceries: Some of the food was nearly as cheap as the local places. We got a boost of traffic because of football games at a college about 25 minutes away.
The second store was a 24 hour store, and though the town had 24 hour grocery stores, they weren't next to us at night. We were not far from a small college as well. And again, same sorts of customers, usually picking up one or two things.
Even more extra bonus points on holidays, since we were always open (at both stores). I think people figured we'd be less busy.
Not in my experience. I have both a CVS and a normal grocery store (a Morton Williams) across the street. CVS beats the grocery store on milk price (e.g. Horizon) by ~$0.50/gal and on breakfast cereal (e.g. Cheerios) by ~$1.
Whole Foods 365 brand organic milk is slightly cheaper than CVS, but it's a slightly longer walk and has longer lines and is in a basement, so I tend not to bother. (I probably should go there more often.)
This is a matter of scale. The more interesting metric would be a per-store figure, where TJ and WF outsell CVS by a factor of 5–7x.[1] I'm surprised that it's not higher.
> The eyebrow-raising figure probably comes down to an issue of scale – last year CVS and Walgreens each had close to 10,000 stores in the US, while Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods each had fewer than 500 locations.
Nah I think the more interesting metric would be total sales to populations served by both CVS and one or both of TJ and WF. There may be many more CVSes, but, owing to their small size, there are also many more CVSes serving a given population than there are WFs and TJs, such that those populations have the ability to choose one or the other.
I'm not sure. Each individual TJ's and especially WF store is much larger than the grocery section of an individual CVS. Even the smallest TJ's I've been in (Back Bay) is larger than the largest CVS grocery section I've been in (3 aisles?). I would expect the per-store figure to be obviously in TJ's/WF's favor.
I feel like the most appropriate metric would control for total population served (to discount both the fact that WF and TJ's don't exist everywhere CVS does, and that there are more CVSes per capita than the others where two or more of the three exist).
Sorry, to clarify, I’m surprised my per-store calculation isn’t higher for WF/TJ. As you point out, the food aisles at CVS are minimal versus an entire store.
In Canada the corollary is 'Shoppers Drug Mart' and ever since they merged with the national grocer chain, I can get >50% of my groceries i.e. milk, bread, cheese, meat (I mean none of it is super high quality but often good enough) because it's across the street! And there is no lineup.
I've noticed a similar thing happening with prepared food. If there are Wawa stores in an area, there usually aren't as many sandwich or salad places nearby as you'd expect. Where I work, your options are basically Wawa or bottom-tier fast-food chains (McDonald's, Taco Bell, etc.). I really wish there were more health-oriented quick-service options (even a Chipotle would be nice), but I don't think they can compete against a place like Wawa since it's good enough for the vast majority of people.
For people scratching their heads wondering what the heck Wawa is, I have no idea what the West Coast equivalent would be. Sheetz is another similar chain on the East Coast, if that rings any bells...
Wawa is a chain of large convenience stores, mostly in the Mid-Atlantic region. They typically have a sandwich counter inside, which I think is most comparable to having an in-store Subway.
Ask someone from Pennsylvania or New Jersey what they think of Wawa. In my experience, their eyes generally light up and they start raving in a way that most people don't talk about a gas station convenience store.
It's because they have real food, whereas most gas station convenience stores only sell junk.
24 hours a day, you can get hot soup, quesadillas, sandwiches, salads, burritos, etc. in a matter of minutes for a reasonable price. There's really nothing else like it.
Wawa was a grocery chain long before they were a gas station, and I know they are imagining a future without the ICE. It's one of the ways they'll crush the BPs and Exxon that are first and foremost gas stations.
I'm not sure WholeFoods and Trader Joes are good representations of grocery stores nationwide. Both are classified as "Specialty and natural food stores" and have drastically fewer stores than the supermarket chains.
This is part of what I was in the middle of commenting. This article seems like it's trying to force together a narrative from unrelated datapoints. TJs is one of the smallest grocery store chains and WF is just a bit bigger, meanwhile CVS is the largest drugstore chain. It is also unclear to me how "retail food marketshare" is measured. Is it just comparing overall revenue among chains that sell groceries? Sales of, specifically, grocery food items? Share of people who have shopped for groceries at these stores?
Just because someone buys a grocery item from CVS does not remotely imply that CVS is their primary grocery store.
Interesting that even if you put fresh produce in a 'food desert' that people don't buy it.
I wonder if a lot of this has to do with how family life is going. It is not the 1960's any more and we don't have the whole family sat around the table at dinner time with mum having been home all day keeping the house in order.
For people who don't have a dining room and people to cook for, why lovingly prepare a meal from fresh produce when junk food can be eaten instead? Price isn't everything. Neither is cooking skills or familiarity with what vegetables look like. Ready meals rule in an atomised society.
In the 1960s mom might have started dinner 3 hours before it hit the plate, before anyone else got home. Even recipes listed as 'quick' take at least 20-30 mins to prep, call it another 30 mins to eat, and then 15 mins to clean. In a world where wages are stagnant while housing costs rocket, and both parents need to work, free time is at an all time low.
Not a lot of people have that kind of time to prepare a healthy meal, especially when they get home exhausted from work or have to get ready to work second or third shift, and might be trapped in a car two hours a day. Who has time to shuck corn, mash potatoes, and peel rutabagas? It becomes far more attractive to pop in the take and bake lasagna and throw the tin out afterward and actually have some time to spend with your kids before you put them to bed.
Have the larger American grocery stores opened small convenience stores?
This has happened in several European countries. For example, in the UK Tesco has opened many "Tesco Express" shops in towns and cities. They are fairly small, but they can take advantage of Tesco's huge distribution system to stock a wide range of products, including fresh food. Prices are the same as the large shops, but the 20% of products they stock are the dearer ones.
>> A representative of the company, which launched an initiative in 2014 to become the first pharmacy to quit selling cigarettes, indicated via email that they see food as the next frontier.
Wow. What leadership. It only took a couple generations for a place that sells medicine to stop selling cigarettes. It should be only a quick thirty or forty years before they stop selling the deep fried salt cakes. Are they still selling homeopathic "remedies"?
There are lots of pharmacies in this world. I seriously doubt CVS was the first to do anything. Somewhere out there, probably in Utah, there had to be a pharmacy that didn't sell cigarettes prior to 2014.
Has anyone attempted a mobile grocery store that drives to food deserts on a fixed schedule? It could say be a container with a single aisle, stocked with the basics and a checkout at one end.
I don't think so, because "Food deserts" are what happens when the demand for ideologically congenial explanations for socially inconvenient facts greatly exceeds the supply. There is an assumed causal directionality which turns out to not be supported.
Most places are food deserts not because market forces don't work there, but because they do: People in those areas do not want to buy fresh vegetables and raw ingredients for cooking. They prefer to buy packaged/processed foods, regardless of cost or health comparisons they are making, or not making. This makes traditional grocery stores less worth it, so they leave if they can't make do.
There's a lot of literature on food deserts (as typically stated) being more or less a meme since 2015, here's one example with a couple studies to back it:
> Another study, published this week as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, looked across the country and found that no more than a tenth of the variation in the food people bought could be explained by the availability of a nearby grocery store. The education level of the shoppers, for example, was far more predictive.
And so on. So no I don't think your idea would work particularly well past the novelty stage :(
This is disheartening. I can see how once people switch to junk food, for lack of availability or other reason, it becomes hard to go back. Junk foods are designed to be addictive (salty, fatty, convenient,...)
In Massachusetts, convenience stores and gas stations seem to be the only things open at night. I wonder if grocery stores do better in places like upstate NY where the grocery stores are also open 24hr.
In one neighborhood I lived in in NYC, the only local supermarket closed down to make way for a Walgreens. They tried to reassure the community that they would stock staples like (terrible) bread and milk, but obviously no fresh food like vegetables.
This neighborhood was not a poor one. Million dollar condos (forget houses), all around.
The core problem is zoning. NYC makes it either impossible or prohibitively expensive to find an acceptable site for a large-format grocery store. In Manhattan, all recently built grocery stores have had to be in basements to work around restrictive zoning: https://twitter.com/MarketUrbanism/status/105451854997111193...
However, there are only so many buildings with acceptable basement layouts, and only so many neighborhood that are profitably enough to merit the additional capital and operational cost of a supermarket in a basement.
Does it have to be worse quality? If anything, a more uniform distribution of stores should allow development of pretty tight local supply chains, that could provide fresh(er) food.
Weird that metro supermarkets are so rare in the US. All over the EU in major cities people do most of their shopping in small, well-stocked (for their size) supermarkets.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 169 ms ] threadTrader Joe's has their own in-store brands for tons of products, which has spawned various guides on what should/shouldn't be bough there (https://www.thepennyhoarder.com/save-money/what-to-buy-at-tr... for example). CVS, on the other hand, is a far more general store. They both sell food, but they're not in the same market segment - so the comparison is strange.
wtf are you talking about? I do this (with other greens and vegetables). If anything, the people shopping at WF/TJ don't want a head of lettuce because it's a stupid product, but I think you're using that as an example...but using head of lettuce just makes me believe you don't understand the demographic.
It's not very surprising. When you take a broad meta-category like "groceries" and have 10x the number of locations, it isn't shocking that they would move more product.
Trader Joe's and Whole Foods target specific demographics. I live in a metro area of about 300k people and there are 1 each Trader Joe's and Whole Foods. There are probably 40-50 CVS outlets. Their sole income driver is margin on food. CVS focuses on market saturation -- their profit driver is drugs (a market in which they vertically integrate distribution) that are mostly 3rd party paid. They survive in food deserts because the money made on drugs offsets heavy shrink losses.
I heard accounts of ironically Whole Foods which is referred to as "whole paycheck" in other areas being the cheap option in some areas. I would guess traffic vs stock would also influence prices in non-obvious ways. With perishables, more expensive real estate, high traffic, and customers more likely to buy everything by foot they may be less of a speciality niche in urban areas than suburbs.
Yet, despite the poorer selection and higher prices, the majority of groceries that enter our house come from CVS. Why? My wife visits one regularly to pick up prescriptions, and they have just enough of what we buy, at sufficiently justifiable prices, that she can get enough of what we need without an extra trip to a different store.
The most convenient store is the one you're already at.
Why so?
Edit: essentially, a lot of the time it is expensive to be poor.
I drive to one or more grocery stores infrequently to get what I want. Buy quality food and freeze/store it in my large house. Garden provides some more. Waste is composted and feeds the gardens.
Meals cost me a buck or two to prepare from my plentiful stock. All because I can afford to. Food is a negligible fraction of my budget.
It's the old adage about it being expensive to be poor, only in reverse.
You can do that kind of thing when you are relatively settled and have roots and connections in a community, and the know-how to do all that home-making. We didn't have any money, but we were rich in a lot of other ways. If you are isolated and precarious, living reactively day-to-day, it makes something that is already hard nigh on impossible.
Kroger used to be so bad in our neighborhood that we drove 30 minutes (past upscale krogers) because their business model of abusing stranded populations was abhorrent.
You plan your trip to take advantage of transfer tickets and such. Sometimes you walk a mile or two or you bike or you bum a ride from someone.
Being poor doesn’t mean you can’t plan and are helpless.
Sure it’s not ideal and I prefer being able to shop ad hoc at my leisure, no doubt. But when I had to I made do.
Chronic stress (such as from financial stress and working multiple jobs) actually does severely impact your executive function and decision-making ability. It's hard to make dispassionate decisions when you're exhausted and scared. There's been studies about it.
Obviously it's possible to overcome that, and some people are better at it than others. But the burden is real. When you're coming off a double shift, it's really hard to make the decision to spend an extra 45 minutes walking round-trip, or two hours hopping on and off buses, when you could just hit the Walgreen's near your apartment and get home to your family.
it kinda does though.
The effects of financial stress on your mental wellbeing are pretty well documented and can manifest in ways such as inability to focus/concentrate, chronic fatigue, spotty memory from stress etc.
obviously not. But anecdotally what I see where I live is that it is a large enough inconvenience that it makes an impact. If you work 8 hours, then have to spend 2-3 hours getting groceries you already have a 10-11 hour day not counting any other commuting you need to do. What if you have kids you need to get off a bus from school?
trying to blanket say anyone not willing to make that trip just isn't trying isn't fair.
It is well documented that low-income areas have less access to good education, healthcare, and other facilities. blaming the residents doesn't help them improve their quality of life. Not everyone will make it out of that.
We’re not making two hour trips every day after work for food. No poor person I knew did that when I was poor. I did it mostly on weekends when there was lots of time.
But being poor DOES mean lowered efficiency with respect to an astonishing number of steps involved to achieve the desired outcome.
And when you have enough of these lowered efficiencies at one time and they begin to compound like interest...
Not always a pretty picture.
WF (or Trader Joes for that matter) simply doesn't sell value priced versions of a lot of items. CVS will sell it at a ripoff. It probably comes out close to a wash put poor people are poor, not stupid. If the numbers worked out in favor of WF they would be shopping there. Also, nobody(TM) does their entire shopping at CVS. People will drag their asses elsewhere on a regular basis to buy certain items that are cheap. Many convenience stores, bodegas, etc. will sell a couple staples or classes of items dirt cheap in order to attract business. You buy your regular items where they are cheap (e.g. $1.50/gal brand name milk from the bodega that buys about to expire milk from a restaurant supplier for pennies and passes on the savings to create foot traffic) and buy everything else at CVS.
>I get the impression it caters to people for whom cooking for themselves is a special occasion and not a daily thing.
I'm really confused, you think WF caters to people who don't cook for themselves, but you feel like it's missing condiments and sauces? That's weird, people who cook for themselves probably aren't looking to smother their food with ketchup.
I mean, I live in an area where there’s a Whole Foods within two blocks’ walking distance of two other grocery stores (one mid-market, one down-market.)
I think this isn’t actually that uncommon; people don’t see Whole Foods as actually satisfying the demand for “a grocery store” in an area (as it doesn’t carry many of the things people expect a larger grocery store to carry—it may have decent produce, deli, bakery, etc. sections, but its grocery section is rather lacking in anything other than up-market “bougie” brands) so if there’s an existing other grocery store, and then a Whole Foods also gets built, that doesn’t much decrease the traffic to the other grocery store to the point that it would close down.
The only problem is property developers marketing a new neighbourhood that only has a Whole Foods as being “close to a grocery store”, and people believing them and moving there. That Whole Foods was probably already there before the neighbourhood was, serving as an outlet to travel to for the larger region that that the new neighbourhood is located in; but the other parts of the region were being served by grocery stores located closer to them, and this new neighbourhood actually doesn’t have one of those.
What do you regard as the grocery section?
I go to the grocery store weekly and all I buy, pretty much, are bread, dairy, and produce.
Do you mean stuff like breakfast cereal and peanut butter?
https://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/about-our-products/product-...
Absolutely false. That is the entire stated purpose of the 365 brand. What 365 does not cover is produce and meat. Meat is definitely more expensive at Whole Foods as they do not use it as a loss leader like other stores. I also sometimes wonder if one of the founders being vegan had something to do with that. Produce at WF is definitely about merchandising. The lower priced produced is very well hidden.
> shop at multiple stores (extremely difficult if you are poor)
Poor people don't have legs? I was poor for most of my life. I rode a bicycle to the grocery store. And the 365 brand stuff is mostly non-perishables. You can shop for non-perishables every couple of weeks.
Admit it. You just do not like the brand and identity the Whole Foods represents. It has nothing to do with the actual products or prices.
No. In so many ways, no. If the trade off is to save a few dollars by running around for multiple hours per week to go to multiple stores (uses gas! or takes a long time!), or just going to the nearest cheap store to get everything they need, they're going to Walmart.
It has nothing to do with brand and identity and everything to do with not wasting precious time and money.
Price at kroger/safeway: 1.99
https://www.checkbook.org/boston-area/supermarkets/articles/...
Walmart has staples dirt cheap but a much more limited selection. Market Basket has "proper grocery store selection" and can match Walmart in prices except for the things that really lend themselves to discounts for buying in bulk (like those big boxes of eggs) which they simply don't sell. Hannaford and Price Chopper make up the part of the curve leading to the mid range which is occupied by Stop and Shop, Shaws/Star, etc. and then at the top of the price distribution is all the stores I try to avoid at all costs.
They mention large variation of prices between stores of the same chain. I strongly suspect that this correlates with how wealthy the community the store is located in is (which leads to increased cost to run the store). Where I live Aldi is the high priced upscale store. Where my parents live Stop and Shop is the high priced upscale store and Shaws/Star Market is generally cheaper.
The fact that Walmart ranked poorly does not surprise me. There are no good Walmarts in the Boston area. Walmart doesn't throw a lot of grocery effort into stores with lots of local competition. The one near me is really good. The one in Quincy is laughably bad. Tewksbury is good but I'm not sure if they consider that "the Boston area".
It's contrary to advertisments who make you think you are saving money by buying "cheap processed foods".
Most sales, and particularly BOGO are loss-leaders to get people to sign up for the loyalty card. That's where the money comes from because now we have your phone number and email address and purchase history to sell. Every one of those coupons that prints on the receipt is a paid advertisement. CVS gains by promoting those products. By gamifying coupon use. And those ExtraBuck coupons aren't discounts but more like short-term microloans that CVS keeps the interest on.
So when I run out of flour, I have a decision to make: would I rather sit in traffic for 30 minutes, wait for instacart/amazon fresh delivery, or go to CVS/Walgreens? I suspect there are many people like me who pay the markup every day because it's less of a hassle.
Another factor is that in this age of instant gratification if I were to buy a week's worth of perishables items would go bad because it's so easy to have a shitty day and say screw it, let's go out, get takeout or get delivery (369 restaurants will deliver to me via uber eats) instead of cooking.
Not saying that it's a healthy way to live, but it's become a strong pull over the 10 years since I've made the transition to fully urbanized life. The way we cope, especially after having a baby, is to shop at the local butchers, bakers and markets for fresh stuff every few days and order delivery of heavy bulk goods periodically.
Accidentally running out of flour, coffee filters, half and half, etc., is probably an inevitable side effect.
Plus in some areas you cannot get a grocery in due to zoning or regulatory agencies which can increase the costs of worker and compliance needs beyond normal. There are many rules regarding handling of produce and raw foods that drug store type sellers never have to meet.
[1] https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/eligible-food-items
This is unfortunate, because Manhattan clearly has excess demand for good grocery stores, and the incumbents (Gristedes, etc.) are terrible.
Those grocery stores would easily be extinct with more meaningful competition. The only thing that keeps them in business is the "natural monopoly" caused by the fact that most Manhattanites don't have cars and aren't willing to travel very far for groceries.
All sorts of folks buy from CVS, mostly stuff on sale but not always. Moms with a sick child and elderly folks in to get medicines are a good chunk of the customers. Folks without transportation are a few people, sure. In one store, some of the food traffic was simply because we were in a small town with limited groceries: Some of the food was nearly as cheap as the local places. We got a boost of traffic because of football games at a college about 25 minutes away.
The second store was a 24 hour store, and though the town had 24 hour grocery stores, they weren't next to us at night. We were not far from a small college as well. And again, same sorts of customers, usually picking up one or two things.
Even more extra bonus points on holidays, since we were always open (at both stores). I think people figured we'd be less busy.
Whole Foods 365 brand organic milk is slightly cheaper than CVS, but it's a slightly longer walk and has longer lines and is in a basement, so I tend not to bother. (I probably should go there more often.)
More like 20x.
FTFA: last year CVS and Walgreens each had close to 10,000 stores in the US, while Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods each had fewer than 500 locations.
> The eyebrow-raising figure probably comes down to an issue of scale – last year CVS and Walgreens each had close to 10,000 stores in the US, while Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods each had fewer than 500 locations.
[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CzhWggSef2pbRMJam1m2...
I feel like the most appropriate metric would control for total population served (to discount both the fact that WF and TJ's don't exist everywhere CVS does, and that there are more CVSes per capita than the others where two or more of the three exist).
Sometimes a drug/convenience store is just a drug/convenience store.
In Canada the corollary is 'Shoppers Drug Mart' and ever since they merged with the national grocer chain, I can get >50% of my groceries i.e. milk, bread, cheese, meat (I mean none of it is super high quality but often good enough) because it's across the street! And there is no lineup.
WF and TJ are niche supermarket chains, its just another dumb headline. https://www.statista.com/statistics/818602/online-and-offlin...
But my fear is growing...
For people scratching their heads wondering what the heck Wawa is, I have no idea what the West Coast equivalent would be. Sheetz is another similar chain on the East Coast, if that rings any bells...
Ask someone from Pennsylvania or New Jersey what they think of Wawa. In my experience, their eyes generally light up and they start raving in a way that most people don't talk about a gas station convenience store.
24 hours a day, you can get hot soup, quesadillas, sandwiches, salads, burritos, etc. in a matter of minutes for a reasonable price. There's really nothing else like it.
Just because someone buys a grocery item from CVS does not remotely imply that CVS is their primary grocery store.
The USDA has better numbers representing the market. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-markets-prices/retailin...
I wonder if a lot of this has to do with how family life is going. It is not the 1960's any more and we don't have the whole family sat around the table at dinner time with mum having been home all day keeping the house in order.
For people who don't have a dining room and people to cook for, why lovingly prepare a meal from fresh produce when junk food can be eaten instead? Price isn't everything. Neither is cooking skills or familiarity with what vegetables look like. Ready meals rule in an atomised society.
Not a lot of people have that kind of time to prepare a healthy meal, especially when they get home exhausted from work or have to get ready to work second or third shift, and might be trapped in a car two hours a day. Who has time to shuck corn, mash potatoes, and peel rutabagas? It becomes far more attractive to pop in the take and bake lasagna and throw the tin out afterward and actually have some time to spend with your kids before you put them to bed.
This has happened in several European countries. For example, in the UK Tesco has opened many "Tesco Express" shops in towns and cities. They are fairly small, but they can take advantage of Tesco's huge distribution system to stock a wide range of products, including fresh food. Prices are the same as the large shops, but the 20% of products they stock are the dearer ones.
Apparently the difference is 1-5p on most items, so less of a problem than the American situation.
Wow. What leadership. It only took a couple generations for a place that sells medicine to stop selling cigarettes. It should be only a quick thirty or forty years before they stop selling the deep fried salt cakes. Are they still selling homeopathic "remedies"?
There are lots of pharmacies in this world. I seriously doubt CVS was the first to do anything. Somewhere out there, probably in Utah, there had to be a pharmacy that didn't sell cigarettes prior to 2014.
Most places are food deserts not because market forces don't work there, but because they do: People in those areas do not want to buy fresh vegetables and raw ingredients for cooking. They prefer to buy packaged/processed foods, regardless of cost or health comparisons they are making, or not making. This makes traditional grocery stores less worth it, so they leave if they can't make do.
There's a lot of literature on food deserts (as typically stated) being more or less a meme since 2015, here's one example with a couple studies to back it:
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/09/upshot/giving-the-poor-ea...
> Another study, published this week as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, looked across the country and found that no more than a tenth of the variation in the food people bought could be explained by the availability of a nearby grocery store. The education level of the shoppers, for example, was far more predictive.
And so on. So no I don't think your idea would work particularly well past the novelty stage :(
This neighborhood was not a poor one. Million dollar condos (forget houses), all around.
However, there are only so many buildings with acceptable basement layouts, and only so many neighborhood that are profitably enough to merit the additional capital and operational cost of a supermarket in a basement.