Pop isn't food though. (Not that you said or implied it)
Complaining that pop is overpriced at some store is like complaining that candy is overpriced.
You have to be rich to be poor.
- Thread starter yesboii
- Start date
Pop isn't food though. (Not that you said or implied it)
Complaining that pop is overpriced at some store is like complaining that candy is overpriced.
QuoVadisNation
keeping your angel alive
heh. I would be glad to be the first to say openly that in real life, coca-cola is just as much a basic consumer stable as bread and water nowadays. (if not more so).
Narz
keeping it real
Yeah, like Zelig said, I don't own a car.
Unfortunately where I live now the nearest Costco is 50 minutes away by car so that's out of the question. When I lived in Queens, NY Cotsco was only six blocks away.
Fortunately the place I'm staying has a communal kitchen which buys in bulk & I can make individual orders from.
Slightly off topic, I'm think of buying one of these conversion kits to make my bike into a sort of hybrid-bicycle-moped. Can't beat 225 MPG (less than a penny a mile at current prices).
And with that much efficiency probably more eco-friendly than an electric bike (which are slow, heavy & generally sucky & those batteries in them take alot of resources to create).
yesboii
Ishin
So, if you guys did read the article...I'd like to hear some solutions regarding this problem (if you agree with the premise of the article) or I'd like to hear the reasons why those people that disagree with it think its plain wrong.
Maimonides
Emperor
It looks about right, but it ignores the obvious: consumers are willing to pay more for convenience. Your local store knows that you'd rather pay $1.49 for an item & checkout quickly than pay $.99 for that item at a store miles away that often has long checkout lines. This trend is still growing & it cuts across all income levels. It's not an evil plot against the poor. Time is very valuable.
Grocery stores have a couple of options: serve a local market or become a destination.
That local market store knows that convenience, not rock-bottom pricing, is what brings in the customers & keeps 'em coming back. They'll run some items at hot prices every week to increase volume, draw a higher customer count & maintain a good price perception, but they're not worried about canned corn being a little cheaper at the store 3 miles down the road everyday. They don't expect customers to drive miles from other market areas to shop with them.
A destination store relies on people driving miles to shop there. They have gimmicks, huge selections, hot pricing, product specialization, whatever it takes to get people to drive in from miles around. Examples are Walmart supercenters, Stew Leonard's, Jungle Jim's & some Trader Joe's locations. There's an independant grocery store in my part of the country that draws people from miles around because it's located in a town with no extra tobacco taxes & it sells cigarettes at cost. They know that people will drive for miles & wait in line to buy cheap smokes & that they'll also pick up some groceries while doing so.
It's up to everybody to decide what works best for them. I don't see any conspiracies.
The stuff about rents really is accurate, as far as I know. Although many poor immigrants suffer more because their fellow countrymen overcharge them for living in slums occupied by people of the same origin than because it's the same everywhere.
They are not familiar enough with the country to risk branching out on their own.
They are not familiar enough with the country to risk branching out on their own.
plarq
Crazy forever
Among us Asians, the lactose intolerance is about 10%.
dido
Prince
by 10% you mean 95%
yet these stupid Asian governments still encourage the consumption of milk
FriendlyFire
Codex WMDicanious
Soy Milk .
plarq
Crazy forever
by 10% you mean 95%
yet these stupid Asian governments still encourage the consumption of milk
Among my known relatives, few has such problems.
Solution: Move to a rural area where rent is cheap, and you can walk to the supermarket.
Not true. Small urban stores loose out for all the reasons stated in the article. No economies of scale in purchases or labor, higher transport costs, higher location costs. And the fact that people who do not have cars can at most buy 2 large bags or so of groceries on any trip, unless they steal a shopping cart and push it all the way home, means that they do most of their shopping at small close places. Where large efficient places don't tend to locate in densely populated poor places.
Solutions include reducing poverty directly with better job opportunities.
The poor are there because many of them make such bad choices. All those middle class poor overextending themselves on their mortgages and all those multi-millionaure poor overextending themselves on credit default swaps just show that bad decision making is an exclusive trait of the poor and that they can never have wealth until they learn to stop making bad decisions.
Well, considering this story is about Washington, D.C., it actually happens to be true. There are no supermarkets in most of Northeast, Southeast, or anywhere but Chevy Chase and the upper fringes of Northwest.
See, the thing is, this is just a horrible generalization of personal anecdotes, not a real solution.
That's right. If they were responsible people, educated themselves, went to business school, and blew a $12,000,000,000,000 hole in the world economy, then the government could help them out. As it is, though, these leeches are steaing our money for what? To feed their children? I bet they don't even have any kids in Greenwich Country Day.
Cleo
Don't worry, he didn't mean a word of it.
The article implies but doesn't seem to come out clearly and say it's all about economy of scale - either of the individual, or their upstream provider. It's like drinking liquor at a bar every night instead of going to the liquor store once every couple weeks. Or that sometimes spending more money saves more money. A cheap late-model sedan, with $50 to a mechanic to check it out before buying it, will in the long run will probably cost less than a beater vehicle at a fifth of the price but constant repair bills, towing, and being late for important events.
A solution regarding the problem? A partial one would be education about it. I disagree with the article's comment that "The poor know these facts of life." I don't think they do, or at least not in the systemic sense. Yes, obviously most cannot take advantage of the bigger savings (the late-model sedan) or get screwed by interest rates in doing so, and certainly the random body-blows of life are more painful the less you can afford them, but for anyone some small gains can lead to steadily greater gains and having a strategic sense of it all would be a huge help to them. As it stands now while they're certainly the most negatively impacted by the potential economies of scale they're the least likely to be aware of them.
It has been my (admittedly limited) experience that many poor people tend to make bad financial decisions that exacerbate their problems, so yeah, education would help.
