I'm very price aware though it's not the only factor in where I shop. Publix provides a much nicer environment than my local Kroger so I prefer Publix and pay a premium but I still go to Kroger about once a month for the CarbMaster store brands and cauliflower rice. There are also a couple of regional chains I sometimes to go if they're having a good sale, usually on meat, to stock up.
I have about 20 different grocery stores within 10 min driving distance (4 within 3 min). I buy different things at around 5 of them, depending on what prices/selection/quality are better where.
I live near a Walmart and a Fred Meyer (Kroger) and really have to shop at both because because neither has complete selection of what I buy. Safeway tends to be too expensive, and the smaller chains like Winco and Grocery Outlet are meh.
I could probably shop solely at Walmart but their meat, deli and bakery are far inferior.
The American grocery market is far less consolidated than e.g. the Canadian one. Perhaps there is a minimum size necessary for an efficient grocery chain, or perhaps Canadian anti-trust enforcement is far too lax.
Without defending the current consolidation, numbers from the 1960s may be outdated as advances in computerized supply chains, for example, have taken hold.
My pet theory as much of the United State's recent... troubles? Stagnation? Is due to lack of antitrust enforcement.
There simply isn't meaningful competition in so many areas of society today, business included. To the point I think an entire generation has forgotten what operating in a competitive environment is like. Both as consumers and producers.
I watch friends who simply have no concept that there is an option outside of the mainstream grocery store chain they go to - as they drive past 2-3 ethnic stores on the way there, all of which are much cheaper on average for items they both carry. These same friends complain about inflation, but take zero action on their part to even learn about other options - much less pursue them. When I ask the response is usually something along the lines of "I've always went to place X for the past 20 years, why would I change now?".
It's going to take shaking a lot of people out of their comfort zones for healthy competition to return to society.
> There simply isn't meaningful competition in so many areas of society today, business included. To the point I think an entire generation has forgotten what operating in a competitive environment is like. Both as consumers and producers.
Yes. There's a whole school of thought, headed by Peter Thiel, that "competition is for losers" and "monopolies are good."[1]
Before 1980 antitrust enforcement was pretty good. But then Robert Bork and the Chicago School got a stranglehold on mindshare and convinced policy makers that "monopolies are good."
That's still the prevailing mindset but the tide is now just beginning to turn back toward sanity.
Greedflation is a word that's been seen a lot lately and it implies that corporations are greedy and that's why we see inflation, but the reality is that corporations are only able to be greedy because they don't have meaningful competition and therefore no market forces to push their prices down.
Mergers like this create less competitive markets.
I wonder, besides classical antitrust stuff (which doesn't seem to work at all), is there some sort of measures that would make the process inverse, making giant corporations want to disperse into smaller autonomous companies?
Regulation. If you forbid verticals on a market, you might prevent mergers or create splits. E.g. american cinema where studios are forbidden from having their own saloons and are forced to license their products. Currently made irrelevant by the streaming services where the rule does not apply.
"You must do this" style regulation like GDPR does raise barriers of entry.
"You can't do this," style regulation like trust busting doesn't seem like it would involve raising barriers to entry. It seems like it would lower them.
On GDPR, broadly speaking it's more "you can't" than "you must".
Don't keep people's data and you're fine.
Granted, some businesses need to keep some data as a matter of doing business. But the problem that pre-gdpr businesses have with the rules is that they were set up with the mindset that keeping everything is free.
A startup need merely nuke stale accounts. So it's an advantage over the incumbents, who have to figure out deletion in databases that weren't designed for it.
The startup now has to spend $X more implementing handling those regulations rather than building an MVP and finding PMF. This might be the difference between success and failure. Thus there will be fewer successful startups than in the world without the regulation.
Conversely a big corporation will lose some % of profit to dealing with the regulation (or perhaps it will just raise prices if it’s not competitive). But it’s not an existential concern.
It is made to be a barrier to competition. Good luck setting up an in compliance web store based on the current sales tax rules that Amazon basically brought to us.
Could you try to clearly explain how regulation against vertical integration raises the barrier to competition? I can't come up with any explanation where it doesn't lower the barrier.
Vertical integration is a value add. By restricting it, you make it harder for challengers who want to start with vertical integration. Example: vertical integration restrictions prohibit car manufacturers from operating dealerships. Tesla used vertical integration in other states to lower costs and create a cheaper electric car business. With tighter rules against vertical integration you may not have tesla.
If the goal of regulation is to prevent vertical integration, it is not really helpful to say "oh, but doing this will prevent vertical integration!". Yes, of course it will, that's what we said it should do.
You might think this is a bad idea, but it's not a downside of the regulation.
If I introduce regulation to prevent vertical integration, how is preventing vertical integration not the end goal of that regulation? I really don't understand what you're trying to say.
It's easy to say it's defined until your forced to define it to others.
If vertical integration is illegal, does that mean:
1) Farms can't sell directly to customers via their own store?
2) A restaurant or grocery store needs to use Uber or Door Dash to deliver?
3) A logistics company can't own any warehouses
4) A store can't own any distribution centers or logistic systems.
5) A website can't self-host, either on their own server or via a dedicated server. It must be hosted via SaaS.
I'm sure there's more examples that blur the line of vertical integration that can be hard to determine in a fair, just manner.
What about industries where it is difficult or impossible to crack without a large investment? In that case, new competitors might arise from established companies expanding vertically, but very few can come from brand new companies.
Might be the kind of thing where more nuanced legislation helps, e.g. allowing vertical expansion if there are few existing competitors but disallowing it for healthy markets.
> What about industries where it is difficult or impossible to crack without a large investment? In that case, new competitors might arise from established companies expanding vertically, but very few can come from brand new companies.
Established companies are always free to create a new company which is structured in a way that it is not vertically integrated. And so what if a large investment is required? If established companies cannot integrate vertically, the field is open for investments by people who cannot subsidize their prices to beat the competition.
I fear that structuring the companies that way will eliminate the advantage of being vertical and so the investment would revert to not being worth it.
Blame the state and local governments (and especially the disparity among them) for that. Amazon and other big realtailers just said it's not fair that we have to deal with sales tax if smallecommerce.com doesn't.
Sales tax is a perfect example of how the government will never give up tax revenue it has come to depend on. The original proposal is that sales tax was fair, because the local business is using local resources (land, employees, infrastructure). Obviously not true with an out-of-state web store. Delivery companies already pay local taxes for the actual shipping, so there shouldn't be any claim against the retailer itself. Use tax, in many areas, was already designed to handle this case, but the government decided that it's easier to go after Amazon than to rely on taxpayers being honest.
Corporate income taxes are already terrible for health and create awful incentives. Ultimately corporate profits go to individuals so we should only tax them at that point. (Or have just a consumption tax, which kind of solves all these problems)
After citizens united the feedback loop of corruption became too strong.
Company pays for candidates advertisements so they can win primary -> can only vote on candidates that companies voted for first -> politicians are responsive to their benefactors -> politicians de-regulate/ignore mergers/grid lock themselves -> companies are able to centralize more power -> company increases their influence over the government to get even more influence...
This un-virtuous cycle means the only way out is unions (or french-ery).
We have openly corrupt supreme court justices who laugh in our face and say "what are you gonna do about it?" Pelosi said "I can trade stock on companies I regulate" and basically said "what are you gonna do about it?"
Government intervention can only come after we have an answer for corrupt politicians saying "what are you gonna do about it?"
Kroger and Albertsons are gonna merge... "what are you going to do about it?"
Corporations actually don’t spend that much on advertising. It’s mostly super PACs that benefit from Citizens United. Many of them are funded by wealthy individuals, not corporations.
Currently the SEC disclosure work scales sub-linearly with size. Because you only need to report on 'material information' and what counts as material is about relative size.
Forcing companies to report on any effort above 1 mil might make reporting on big companies so horrible they prefer to split up?
I feel like some of my groceries are decently competitive markets. But brand momentum and just information insensitivity keeps me (and others) from buying a different product just because their price went up less. And if the price increase is inevitable, then by delaying your price increase compared to competitors only gives you a limited window for gaining customers based on the better price.
In such a world, if your competitors are doing greed-flation, it might prove that you are leaving money on the table unless you also join.
Sadly this logic effectively yields collective action between competitors without any illegal agreements.
Where does intervention come from? Theoretically the government regulates commons and so the government should intervene and regulate commons when the public good requires it.
Why can't the government intervene? Because these companies have gotten so large they have literally hundreds of millions of dollars to spend preventing intervention.
It is very hard to 'prove' this greed-flation. The coordination happens only through the market in this theory, so there is no damming communication evidence, or even testimony that can prove this is what happened.
Perhaps something to make customers more price-sensitive by making price comparison easier or by forcing more disclosure around when price-increases happen.
The best solution is to stop high inflation. That lengthens the window you can keep prices lower than your competitors, to take market share. But inflation is very difficult to affect.
> SCOTT MORTON (Yale economist who focuses on anti trust): In a concentrated market, one firm could announce it's going to raise prices because of inflation. And its rivals might look at that and say, oh, this is a good excuse to raise prices. They're raising prices, so we should match. And we should announce we're raising prices also. We call this tacit collusion. And in a setting like this one, where inflation might be giving firms permission to raise prices and then they follow each other, that could cause price increases.
> WOODS (host): So bottom line - companies raise prices when they can. That's what companies have always done. And what keeps them from doing it is usually competition. But even when we have uncompetitive markets like in the meat industry where prices are high, that is not the big driver of inflation in the economy right now. But that does not mean that it is a good thing to let monopolies keep their monopoly power. Fiona says it is good public policy to crack down. That means scrutinizing mergers, investigating possible collusion and splitting companies if needed.
> SCOTT MORTON: Is it a good idea to do? Absolutely. Because it brings down prices in general because markups are lower when there's more competition. It raises quality. It raises innovation. It increases productivity. It increases the efficiency of the economy. So there's many, many ways in which antitrust enforcement and competitive markets benefit consumers. More vigorous antitrust enforcement is a long-run project. It's not going to change prices in 2022.
My understanding in reading the article is that the economist was making a distinction that doesn't make sense to me, which is that the cause is distinct from what enables it.
It seems that what was said is that supply chain shocks and tacit collusion are the cause, but they are enabled and amplified by lack of competition.
"I feel like some of my groceries are decently competitive markets."
I think the few number of grocery, food and consumer packaged goods companies, artificially create the feeling or appearance of competitive markets with many brands.
No, there just are lots of grocery chains. I can think of Publix, Kroger, Trader Joes, Whole Foods, Target, Walmart, Lidl, and Aldi all within driving distance of my house.
Every store has their branded option and in some cases like TJs it's almost all their stuff. So even if there's only 2 name brands there's lots of options.
And companies don't compete solely against existing companies. They compete against the possibility of new entrants. So a duopoly can't price much higher than the cost of a couple of their customers getting together to launch a competitor.
Anecdatally what I've noticed is that branded food has increased much faster than bulk or generic items. But that's not really a bad thing. That's market dynamics rewarding a company for being good at what they do.
Capitalist philosophy is about maximizing profit and minimizing expenditures. One is led to believe that the end result is a flourishing competitive environment but, in reality, the best way to achieve the above is to collude with your "competitors". Better yet, create your own competition, and then "compete" against them.
There's been a similar trend among drug stores as well. Bartell Drugs for example was a staple pharmacy here in Seattle until it was taken over by Rite Aid, where it became a hollow shell of its former self and rapidly falling apart. Companies buy out the competition, push up prices, kill local competition and then hold a monopoly over regions where they can freely mandate whatever price they want.
That's been an interesting one to watch from here, being right next to both a Bartell's and a (horrifyingly awful) CVS. The Bartell's pharmacy disintegrated immediately when Rite Aid got around to touching it. The rest of the store has been a slow decline, as stock becomes more and more generic, but somehow it's still the best place nearby for that mid-day snack break. (Maybe that says more about what's nearby than anything else?) Though I doubt it will stay that way for too much longer.
The archive link is how I read it. Puzzled by why the account is suddenly suspended. It looks like the author is essentially the driver of the website. Too much traffic from the Hacker News link?
Nope, you’re thinking of Aldi Nord/Aldi Süd. Both are present in Germany and in the US (with one under the "Trader Joe’s" brand, other countries are served by just one of them.
In Switzerland we have a duopoly since forever, Coop vs Migros. Aldi and Lidl are also players but it is still mainly a duopoly. And that worked quite well, at least for the ~25 years I lived there.
Yes, you’re correct they are both cooperative type of organization. They are also integral part of the Swiss culture and identity, and are present all over the country, it’s not uncommon to find a Migros in a small village where you wouldn’t expect one.
Note that Switzerland is really a weird country, it’s difficult to compare it with other places.
Looking at Finnish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S_Group which is cooperative of cooperative. The prices aren't that much better than the competing group of privately owned shops.
And I always wondered if the goal is to provide service to customers/"owners" why are they expanding outside their geographical areas like to other countries.
A similar situation exists in Australia. It feels like we are the land of the duopoly, not at all helped by the cosy relationship between regulators, business, and government.
In export-oriented industries, countries often (forcibly) merge all (or many) of their relevant companies into one (or few) companies in order to make them more efficient and internationally competitive. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
One interesting trend is how they killed off coupons. Now the only option seems to be the store-run digital coupons. These require navigating a (usually) pretty terrible app that makes it hard to use. Manufacturer coupons, that the store can't control, seem mostly gone.
Then, in store, it's often difficult to tell if sale prices require a digital coupon.
Thus, many items are sold at a higher price than the buyer expected.
I think my success rate with grocery store digital coupons is about 80%-90%. I don't bother to ask the self checkout attendant or the unstaffed CS line to fix the bill when a coupon doesn't go through, which I'm assuming is factored into the margins.
Agreed, you actually have to seek them out now now instead of them being stuffed in your mailbox and it's rare for them to be for staples. I just accept just food will cost more (and switched to Costco) and try to make it up on household stuff.
A good number of digital coupons are manufacturer coupons. (I work in this space)
Kroger is usually pretty good about adding shelf tags that highlight the digital coupon.
I much prefer digital coupons to paper coupons that I always seem to forget. But I understand that there is a significant portion of the population who prefer paper coupons instead.
As for the topic of the post, I absolutely think regulators need to step in block the Kroger / Albertsons merger. We need more competition, not less.
You've put words together to provide a meaning that seems impossible. 'gripping' ... 'about grocery stores'. I think I need to get this -- if only for the possibility that your description might be accurate.
I know it sounds strange, but the author went to work at a Whole Foods and decided to trace groceries back to their source and analyze the entire grocery store, logistics chain, and system along the way.
Starting about ten years ago the grocery store chain started closing all their stores in town (we had 4), and they eventually consolidated into one large store.
I'm sure it is easier (read: cheaper) to run one store and all, but now everyone in the city has to come to one store, they don't have enough people working there when it's busy, it's just a huge mess.
They brag about spending 8 million dollars to make it better for shoppers and then have two checkouts open. And they don't even fix things like shattered glass on the milk cooler doors, it is just such a dumpy looking place.
Practically speaking your only option is to shop somewhere else or open a competitor. Unfortunately if you live in a small town it’s inevitable that service quality will be lower because of lack of competition.
Personally, I think the state should run its own grocery stores. Have urban ones subsidize the rural ones. We'd have to nationalize Publix though, just for the name.
Thought experiment: what if we banned all acquisitions and mergers? A corporation could be like a "person" in that regard, strictly not for sale. I think the process of determining which acquisitions or mergers are acceptable vs. not to be completely arbitrary and impossible to judge the correctness of.
I think banning all would be really hard to pull off (what if company owner dies/retires ? What if it is acquisition vs letting people go and bankrupcy?), but I'd very much like to see much stricter policies, especially on markets dominated by few big players already.
There is nothing consumer friendly about big player buying out another part of the market and the consolidation will not be used to lower prices for the consumers, at the veryleast in long run
There is probably some threshold where consolidation is good for economy and consumers. This likely comes down to market share. Hard to say where upper bound would be, but 25-33% at least seems reasonable. If consolidation means more efficiency with less overheads and more buying power.
That will be heavily industry-dependent. That kinds of consolidation gets you cartels like OPEC cutting production to keep the price of oil high, completely going around supply and demand.
I think it's overall better to accept some inefficiency vs that.
125 comments
[ 1.1 ms ] story [ 242 ms ] threadIt means Kroger has a nearly Comcast like monopoly where I live.
You likely have those near you. If not, the tenth is Target.
https://www.axios.com/2023/04/20/most-popular-grocery-stores...
Grocery shoppers are also extremely fickle and price sensitive. As far as mergers in the US go, I'd be surprised if this was blocked.
Are they? Don't most people just go to the one that's closest to their neighborhood?
I know I do. And I see people from my neighborhood in there every time. Good way to quickly catch up.
I could probably shop solely at Walmart but their meat, deli and bakery are far inferior.
The American grocery market is far less consolidated than e.g. the Canadian one. Perhaps there is a minimum size necessary for an efficient grocery chain, or perhaps Canadian anti-trust enforcement is far too lax.
There simply isn't meaningful competition in so many areas of society today, business included. To the point I think an entire generation has forgotten what operating in a competitive environment is like. Both as consumers and producers.
I watch friends who simply have no concept that there is an option outside of the mainstream grocery store chain they go to - as they drive past 2-3 ethnic stores on the way there, all of which are much cheaper on average for items they both carry. These same friends complain about inflation, but take zero action on their part to even learn about other options - much less pursue them. When I ask the response is usually something along the lines of "I've always went to place X for the past 20 years, why would I change now?".
It's going to take shaking a lot of people out of their comfort zones for healthy competition to return to society.
Yes. There's a whole school of thought, headed by Peter Thiel, that "competition is for losers" and "monopolies are good."[1]
[1] https://www.wsj.com/video/peter-thiel-why-monopolies-are-a-g...
That's still the prevailing mindset but the tide is now just beginning to turn back toward sanity.
Mergers like this create less competitive markets.
"You must do this" style regulation like GDPR does raise barriers of entry.
"You can't do this," style regulation like trust busting doesn't seem like it would involve raising barriers to entry. It seems like it would lower them.
Don't keep people's data and you're fine.
Granted, some businesses need to keep some data as a matter of doing business. But the problem that pre-gdpr businesses have with the rules is that they were set up with the mindset that keeping everything is free.
A startup need merely nuke stale accounts. So it's an advantage over the incumbents, who have to figure out deletion in databases that weren't designed for it.
Conversely a big corporation will lose some % of profit to dealing with the regulation (or perhaps it will just raise prices if it’s not competitive). But it’s not an existential concern.
For example if something requires producing 10 000 pages of legalese it will block new companies and be not so problematic for large ones.
Or when company needs to heavily research what exactly they can offer/sell and it requires massive effort (it technically is "you can't do this" one).
You might think this is a bad idea, but it's not a downside of the regulation.
If vertical integration is illegal, does that mean: 1) Farms can't sell directly to customers via their own store? 2) A restaurant or grocery store needs to use Uber or Door Dash to deliver? 3) A logistics company can't own any warehouses 4) A store can't own any distribution centers or logistic systems. 5) A website can't self-host, either on their own server or via a dedicated server. It must be hosted via SaaS.
I'm sure there's more examples that blur the line of vertical integration that can be hard to determine in a fair, just manner.
Might be the kind of thing where more nuanced legislation helps, e.g. allowing vertical expansion if there are few existing competitors but disallowing it for healthy markets.
Established companies are always free to create a new company which is structured in a way that it is not vertically integrated. And so what if a large investment is required? If established companies cannot integrate vertically, the field is open for investments by people who cannot subsidize their prices to beat the competition.
Sales tax is a perfect example of how the government will never give up tax revenue it has come to depend on. The original proposal is that sales tax was fair, because the local business is using local resources (land, employees, infrastructure). Obviously not true with an out-of-state web store. Delivery companies already pay local taxes for the actual shipping, so there shouldn't be any claim against the retailer itself. Use tax, in many areas, was already designed to handle this case, but the government decided that it's easier to go after Amazon than to rely on taxpayers being honest.
But I do very much like the idea.
Company pays for candidates advertisements so they can win primary -> can only vote on candidates that companies voted for first -> politicians are responsive to their benefactors -> politicians de-regulate/ignore mergers/grid lock themselves -> companies are able to centralize more power -> company increases their influence over the government to get even more influence...
This un-virtuous cycle means the only way out is unions (or french-ery).
We have openly corrupt supreme court justices who laugh in our face and say "what are you gonna do about it?" Pelosi said "I can trade stock on companies I regulate" and basically said "what are you gonna do about it?"
Government intervention can only come after we have an answer for corrupt politicians saying "what are you gonna do about it?"
Kroger and Albertsons are gonna merge... "what are you going to do about it?"
On either side of the aisle.
Forcing companies to report on any effort above 1 mil might make reporting on big companies so horrible they prefer to split up?
It's real simple. Want a lower tax rate? Do a demerger.
In such a world, if your competitors are doing greed-flation, it might prove that you are leaving money on the table unless you also join.
Sadly this logic effectively yields collective action between competitors without any illegal agreements.
Why can't the government intervene? Because these companies have gotten so large they have literally hundreds of millions of dollars to spend preventing intervention.
Perhaps something to make customers more price-sensitive by making price comparison easier or by forcing more disclosure around when price-increases happen.
The best solution is to stop high inflation. That lengthens the window you can keep prices lower than your competitors, to take market share. But inflation is very difficult to affect.
NPR seems to agree with both of us.
> SCOTT MORTON (Yale economist who focuses on anti trust): In a concentrated market, one firm could announce it's going to raise prices because of inflation. And its rivals might look at that and say, oh, this is a good excuse to raise prices. They're raising prices, so we should match. And we should announce we're raising prices also. We call this tacit collusion. And in a setting like this one, where inflation might be giving firms permission to raise prices and then they follow each other, that could cause price increases.
> WOODS (host): So bottom line - companies raise prices when they can. That's what companies have always done. And what keeps them from doing it is usually competition. But even when we have uncompetitive markets like in the meat industry where prices are high, that is not the big driver of inflation in the economy right now. But that does not mean that it is a good thing to let monopolies keep their monopoly power. Fiona says it is good public policy to crack down. That means scrutinizing mergers, investigating possible collusion and splitting companies if needed.
> SCOTT MORTON: Is it a good idea to do? Absolutely. Because it brings down prices in general because markups are lower when there's more competition. It raises quality. It raises innovation. It increases productivity. It increases the efficiency of the economy. So there's many, many ways in which antitrust enforcement and competitive markets benefit consumers. More vigorous antitrust enforcement is a long-run project. It's not going to change prices in 2022.
My understanding in reading the article is that the economist was making a distinction that doesn't make sense to me, which is that the cause is distinct from what enables it.
It seems that what was said is that supply chain shocks and tacit collusion are the cause, but they are enabled and amplified by lack of competition.
I think the few number of grocery, food and consumer packaged goods companies, artificially create the feeling or appearance of competitive markets with many brands.
And companies don't compete solely against existing companies. They compete against the possibility of new entrants. So a duopoly can't price much higher than the cost of a couple of their customers getting together to launch a competitor.
Anecdatally what I've noticed is that branded food has increased much faster than bulk or generic items. But that's not really a bad thing. That's market dynamics rewarding a company for being good at what they do.
Greed has to be restrained by brute force or capitalism fails through monopololization/collusion.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/489686/fruit-and-vegetab...
Edit: It appears they aren’t related corporations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migros
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coop_(Switzerland)
Note that Switzerland is really a weird country, it’s difficult to compare it with other places.
And I always wondered if the goal is to provide service to customers/"owners" why are they expanding outside their geographical areas like to other countries.
Coop and Migros have the biggest margins in Europe. Hardly the picture of competition.
Seems more like tacit collusion.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-02-23/supermarket-profits-s...
You’re right there are barely any though. Most mergers seem to be bad in hindsight. It’s acquisitions that end up working out better.
Then, in store, it's often difficult to tell if sale prices require a digital coupon.
Thus, many items are sold at a higher price than the buyer expected.
https://archive.is/YpsVv (NY Times)
https://couponsinthenews.com/2022/08/01/there-are-now-fewer-...
Kroger is usually pretty good about adding shelf tags that highlight the digital coupon.
I much prefer digital coupons to paper coupons that I always seem to forget. But I understand that there is a significant portion of the population who prefer paper coupons instead.
As for the topic of the post, I absolutely think regulators need to step in block the Kroger / Albertsons merger. We need more competition, not less.
Yes, it's there. You need to see pretty well to catch the small/thin font that says it requires a digital coupon.
See https://wehco.media.clients.ellingtoncms.com/img/photos/2022... (much larger than real-life, at least on my laptop)
https://www.journal-news.com/resizer/bV2Abp4e1e1DhAfhn3KYrdw... (a little closer to real-life, though in real-life your face isn't right on the tag.)
I'm sure it is easier (read: cheaper) to run one store and all, but now everyone in the city has to come to one store, they don't have enough people working there when it's busy, it's just a huge mess.
They brag about spending 8 million dollars to make it better for shoppers and then have two checkouts open. And they don't even fix things like shattered glass on the milk cooler doors, it is just such a dumpy looking place.
Always look on the bright side of life.
There is nothing consumer friendly about big player buying out another part of the market and the consolidation will not be used to lower prices for the consumers, at the veryleast in long run
I think it's overall better to accept some inefficiency vs that.