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Nov. 25th, 2003 11:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pearwaldorfFor Vlasic, the gallon jar of pickles became what might be called a devastating success. "Quickly, it started cannibalizing our non-Wal-Mart business," says Young. "We saw consumers who used to buy the spears and the chips in supermarkets buying the Wal-Mart gallons. They'd eat a quarter of a jar and throw the thing away when they got moldy. A family can't eat them fast enough."
This makes me shrink up inside, because it's so fucking wrong. Only in America can the distribution chain of groceries be so fucked up that it is actually cheaper to buy a gallon (think about a vat of pickles in place of your normal gallon of milk. Good lord that's a lot of goddamn pickles) of pickles and eat only a bit of it before the rest of it goes bad. Working in a big supermarket part of the Kroger Co, I see so much stuff that's marked up beyond all reason or priced to lose money to bring people into the store. (Sometimes I think I should shop for the loss leaders only as to do the maximum damage to the economy I can. :p) And most unsold merchandise (visibly stolen, banged-up) is returned to the manufacturer and credit given to the supermarket. The price of food as you buy it does not reflect the real costs, environmental and financial, that are needed to actually bring it to you, and I thnk that's a very dangerous way of doing business. It isn't sustainable over the long term, and the consequences are very real, even if most of America doesn't see them.
Read the article. It's really good.
This makes me shrink up inside, because it's so fucking wrong. Only in America can the distribution chain of groceries be so fucked up that it is actually cheaper to buy a gallon (think about a vat of pickles in place of your normal gallon of milk. Good lord that's a lot of goddamn pickles) of pickles and eat only a bit of it before the rest of it goes bad. Working in a big supermarket part of the Kroger Co, I see so much stuff that's marked up beyond all reason or priced to lose money to bring people into the store. (Sometimes I think I should shop for the loss leaders only as to do the maximum damage to the economy I can. :p) And most unsold merchandise (visibly stolen, banged-up) is returned to the manufacturer and credit given to the supermarket. The price of food as you buy it does not reflect the real costs, environmental and financial, that are needed to actually bring it to you, and I thnk that's a very dangerous way of doing business. It isn't sustainable over the long term, and the consequences are very real, even if most of America doesn't see them.
Read the article. It's really good.
