James,
What do you think about Aldis low prices?
Is this the future of the grocery business.
Take care.
Big Ron
Ron, retail food is in crisis.
The only reason why many more supermarkets and chains have not gone out of business of late is that the grocery business is being staffed by people who have been working under a 26 year wage freeze. These wages are frozen in order to stay in business as labor is the highest expense in retail food and the customer base has had a real wage reduction, so prices must be kept as low as possible. Retail food is shackled to the lowest rung of the economy.
However, what is putting stores out of business, as well as restaurants and non-food retailers, is crime, scaring off customers and pillaging shelves.
Aldis is an excellent example of adapting to this changing world and wherever mandatory minimum wages are instituted the grocer will have a choice of going to food service and steadily abandoning "center store" [dry groceries] or concentrating on dry groceries and abandoning customer service and one-stop shopping customer capture.
The traditional supermarket is on the extinction list. The design is from the early 1960s when grocers dedicated their facility and staff to assisting a lone mother burdened with a child or two, in making her weekly grocery purchase, made possible by refrigeration and car ownership.
With the banishment of the housewife from the social scene in the early 1980s, grocers transitioned to one-stop-shopping operations, even experimenting with interior banks, video exchanges, book sales, appliances, etc., in order to adjust to the now harried life of the working mother and the overworked husband and bachelor. Today, Walmart stands as the ultimate expression of that model, having staged an invasion of retail food from hard retail.
A place like Aldis is designed to share a parking lot with a Walmart, offering better goods in a quieter atmosphere for the same or lower price. This is achieved by eliminating variety, health and beauty aids, drugs, security and customer service personnel, which is brilliant, as Walmart's operation has foundered in the public eye on these last two shoals: it having become legendary as the rudest and most dangerous place to shop and the worst place to work. An Aldis can survive on just hatred of Walmart by 5% of the population. Now, down the street from a traditional grocer, Aldis, through intelligent buying and labor reduction, captures, in stages, all of the prepackaged sales categories, especially as brand loyalty begins to waver in the face of continued economic depression.
Cutting labor is key as paleface America drugs itself into oblivion and ebony America beats the war drums of pillage-based reparations. Aldis carries non of the sacred theft articles hungered for by ebony America and resold on bus stops and at bars. However, the light staffing dooms such outlets to looting as times get tougher. You will find few Aldis in high crime areas, very few in urban blight zones.
Traditional supermarkets are now phasing out night crews, as their available force pool is so lazy that productivity in a closed market is no better than when open for business. Since overnight employees must be paid more to work the shift it is being eliminated. This will cascade into reduced selections as such poor help are unable to manage complex lineups. When the tail-end of the Baby Boomers and the older Gen-Xers exit the grocery work force Aldis will be the standard grocery model with shoppers returning to more ancient patterns of multiple trips to more specialized retailers for their food needs. Ultimately, in the war zone that America will become, only small family businesses with fewer than 3 employees will be able to stay open as grocers, in small defensible shops, as the open grocer layout was developed to cater to a high-trust, maternal clientele, not a mongrelized mass of savages.
Aldis fills the higher end of the dollar store niche, both of which will be replaced by ethnic markets and eventually give way to food deserts as crime increases.
The traditional supermarket will only survive, in the End Time, in gated Caucasian settings which might avoid the march of anarcho-tyranny in some corner of the land. Look to Wegmans, a hybrid family catering/grocer as the future model of grocery shopping as valuables are bought almost exclusively online and door-to-door grocery shipping hits the same labor wall as the traditional grocery business.
When Your Job Sucks
link › jameslafond.blogspot.com
The Ghetto Grocer Kindle Edition
I think ordering online and getting it delivered to your door will become more and more popular, at least here in europe. Most supermarket chains have online store and delivery today here. Also amazon pantry.
Jacob, this has been taken up by various big outfits in the U.S. with Amazon and Walmart delivering food to your door. This is largely to serve those who fear shopping for crime on the low end and are overworked on the high end.
It is already breaking down.
On the low end drivers are refusing to enter certain areas or just failing to get the delivery done. On the high end "porch pirates" have been following delivery trucks and looting the delivered goods.
It is another really good idea that depends on low crime for success.
I don't shop at Trader Joe's, unless my gluten-free challenged girlfriend drags me along looking for niche items not found even in WholePachex.....but doesn't Trader Joe's have a 30 day netpay in cash with all of their suppliers? In part,one reason they've found a niche, and able to secure lower pricing and compete despite the high cost of labor. At least that's what I read awhile ago.
While central banks have hit the F9 Print key with abandon asset classes have exploded in parallel. Hyperinflation (over-valuing of housing, cars, health insurance, stocks, and college tuition, and so on) is not a good thing, despite what Joe-average six-pack thinks. Specifically, asset prices are no longer driven by fundamentals. As more American's are squeezed and put out-of-business, and more and more millennial's enjoy their serfdom via SSRIsopiates, and have little or no disposable income, I think the Aldi model seems sustainable...for a while..
Fascinating. What is your take on Trader Joe's and Grocery Outlet? My wife shops at Grocery Outlet bargain market and it seems to me there's no way the traditional stores can compete on price and they've lost the higher end to Whole Foods and Trader Joe's. Even Costco isn't really worth it anymore.
You mentioned some other grocery business ideas awhile back. Can you remind us of them?
If I were still retailing I would recommend that the kind of set-up Aldis uses—it's physical frame—be modified for clearance deals. The implosion of retail food makes it harder for manufacturers to predict sales, so companies in food service have begun picking up overrun contracts, buying trailers of close-dated gourmet food. I would make that my center store.
I am not familiar with Grocery Outlet. However, Trader Joe's is the kind of place that will linger to cater higher end customers in their enclaves. Indeed, I would not be surprised if Aldi's owned that outfit or acquires them down the road as it appears to be a higher end version of the model.
Blacks are a rather blunt instrument for social re-engineering. For surgically-precise blight remediation, better look to the MIC. Load up on the home-builders and short the insurers, then push the button.
aircrap.org/2017/10/13/california-fires-dew-directed-energy-weapons
82.221.129.208/.zv2.html
Bob,
That website is completely ridiculous. DEWs are for burning-out electronic which typically switch on a low voltage. If you put a high-enough voltage across them (that induced by a DEW), they burn-out.
he same high winds that caused those fires in California occurred 60 years earlier and the fire traversed the exact same path. It was a rare wind event that knocked-over power lines which weren't designed to tolerate that much wind.
Those sort of websites make you look cray-cray. I'm just saying.
@ PR:
This is internet, so I don't fret too much about violating conventional wisdom or propriety (I'll spare you my 9/11 theory, ha ha!). The debris just doesn't look normal. I mean, liquified car engine blocks (steel pours at 2,700Fº) with trees nearby unburned, that's inexplicable. Eyewitnesses spoke of no wind until the fire.
youtube.com/watch?v=uqH49-DuH-U
It occurred to me that posting gibberish on the internet is a great way to build a profile of different internet commentors based on their reasonable rebuttals. I've often thought you worked for a three-letter agency, Bob, or a 4-letter one like the $PLC.
Re:Online delivery.
Does nobody believe that online purchase affords the deliverer a very saleable intelligence about a person's wealth house? Even if the goods are just handed over at the front door without entry to the house. It's a worry. A bit like the dilemma of buying a safe, only as reliable as the salesman and his client-register.
As the delivery driver pool gets broader and deeper they will freelance intel to local burglars.
@ PR:
So it's unanimous, internet is a low trust forum. Shadows and fog.
I didn't see any substantive rebuttal nor explanation for the strangeness of the fires. Operation Iraqi Freedom I believe witnessed limited use of non-kinetic weaponry. "The Panama Deception" alludes to their use even as far back as 1990. That the Pentagon has spent, and continues to spend, vast sums on this technology is not controversial.
youtube.com/watch?v=vn1hFG2CnM0
There a Soldier of Fortune article many, many years ago. I think when Clinton was in office??? Maybe Bush, anyways one of the Presidentil helicoptors went down and a miltary guy, citizen, say it and rushed to the site. He said all the people on board were split open like a hot dog when you microwave it too fast. They were all dead. I think???, not sure. he even took pictures but they were confiscated by military police. I can't remember the whole thing it was a long time ago. Anyways the press did not report any of the weird stuff he directly saw. SOF traced a DEW research site near where this happened. The article gave a strong impression that this was deliberate. The President has several helicopters that take off in different directions so he can;t be targeted. Maybe they cooked the wrong chopper. The witness said he believed the chopper was cooked in some way with much melting.
As for 9-11 I don't need any conspiracies just facts. Building 7 came down the same speed as a rock dropped in air. Since gravity is the same on rocks and buildings and they both fell only in air this means building 7 was ONLY supported by air if it fell the same, and it did. Well we all know the building wasn't floating in the air so the only logical explanation is the bottom wasn't demoed out from under it.