I loved this column. My response to grocery store staff who try to steer me to self-checkout is always the same, "No thanks. I am not going to be complicit in taking your job away from you." Given the profits the grocery chains are making, they can afford cashiers.
The reflexive hate on grocery chain executives is puzzling. People are paying way too much attention to Jagmeet's asinine rants.
Meanwhile, we get creamed on our phone, internet bills (while the rest of world enjoys $15/month cell plans) and the cost of dairy, which are real government-sanctioned oligopolies that get to charge way too much because there is no real competition.
Galen Weston is a choir boy when compared to Rogers, Bell and the dairy cartel.
But why care about it to the point where you’re effectively name calling random people on the internet?
I’m not even sure why you think 3% is a bad number. How much profit should a company extract when their business is buying things from one entity and selling them to another? It’s right in line with retail as a whole and grocery has a pretty consistent demand curve and massive revenues.
You’re also using net margin to get that number which includes all expenses up to and including taxes and Galen Weston’s salary. Their gross margin (revenue minus product cost) is in the low thirties and its far more fair use that number when assessing profitability on a customer, which would land you closer to $5K per family in your exercise If that family stops shopping with the company, Loblaws doesn’t get a break on rent or take it out of their executives salary. Including fixed overhead in profit assessment for an average customer doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
Your math suggests overhead expenses (those over and above direct product costs) are somehow irrelevant, as if they're nonsense. Try telling that to your creditors.
You're right - 3% is in line with other retailers. So why do grocery stores get all the anger while shoe stores, clothiers, and toy stores get a pass?
A lot of it was that groceries were undergoing massive inflation, so of course they were getting more heat. I’ve seen similar situations in the lumber industry, though they generally don’t continue over multiple years. This isn’t necessarily the grocery chain’s fault, but continuing business as usual when costs are skyrocketing along with your revenues isn’t going to win you many customer appreciation awards. Groceries are also central to everyone’s life and something that is interacted with often. A shoe or electronics store can skate because people aren’t buying shoes and electronics on a weekly basis.
That isnt. Its fact. Loblaws, etc make low margins on actual groceries. They make the money on the crap, pop chips snacks junk food pastries and all the doo hickeys they place strategically around the checkouts. The impulse items that we dont need to live or eat or have a healthy life. Their profits would be much different if we just went there for actual real food and nothing else. They profit on us eating unhealthy things, and we chose to eat them. So, who really is the bad guy here?
"Actual Human who assists the Unpaid Cashiers" is the shittiest job in the supermarket. They spend their entire shift untangling the messes that the Unpaid Cashiers have made and marinating in the molten torrent of angry shit and abuse that flows their way.
Back when the children were younger, there's no way we would even go to the real Canadian superstore because they made you unpack and pack your own bags, whilst the children were running wild. So we went to Co-Op wherein they not only pack your bags but they will deliver them to your car! How far we have come.
But what also has changed is the employee. Not only payroll taxes, but benefits, and a different work ethic.
I have heard other people argue they are doing unpaid work by checking out their own groceries, but I also think of it in terms of *time* costs: I can zip through the self-checkout quickly and get out of there, saving myself time that would otherwise be spent waiting in line.
I also like being able to more easily ensure everything is being priced the way I expect (or get the points I expect), because it can be difficult to follow the cashier’s screen while they quickly scan everything. Going through a cashier means I either have to ask them to ensure certain things went through as expected, or appeal once I get the bill after payment. That again adds to my time costs.
Then there is my natural awkwardness: people scare me! ;-)
I’ve stopped using self checkouts at the grocery store. I’m not being paid to scan my groceries and don’t like feeling forced into the self checkout which is the inevitable feeling when the express registers are all removed and self checkouts are doubled.
I’ve read that on average when people self scan their groceries they pay more due to scanning errors in favor of the store. I can’t speak to that, but mostly I’ve decided I’m not doing someone’s job for free and the store can deal with long lines at the checkout due to fewer cash registers.
I had a university course that suggested higher customer satisfaction with self checkouts because people feel like they’re doing something and they’re more engaged. Maybe that’s been their theory, but I sure reject it. I hate the long line when I have just a few items, but I have the extra 5 or 10 minutes. Their self checkouts can continue to sit mostly empty until hopefully some of them get removed.
Grapefruit is 4288. Naval oranges are 4012, just one digit higher than bananas. How would I know this? Let me count the way. Great, great column. Thank you.
A fine opinion piece Mr. Stinson which can apply to Walmart, Shopper's Drug Mart and all the rest. I say 'a pox on their houses' to those companies who want me to scan and bag my purchases - even lumber yards are doing it now! I want to speak to a human, wish them a good day, ask how their day is going and so forth which 99.9% of them seem to appreciate.
As to your point that grocery store owners are not worried about theft at the self serve, your friend is incorrect. A buddy of mine ran as Mike's Independent here in Regina and he was well aware of how much walked out through his self checkout lines - if memory serves it would have been enough to hire the staff to run the tills but corporate pressure ...
My question to you is - why is it alright to have a self check out at a drug store but not the grocery store? You are still unpaid labour and you gain nothing from doing the 'work'.
Sorry corporate Canada, I will use the human every time and continually remind you on your 'how did we do today' surveys that there need to be more humans in the system not fewer.
I have a minor irritant to report. My grievance is with the guy who apparently visited every hotel in the land and said, “I can save you money on your hot water bill. By installing showers so small that guests will be unable to turn around in them, or reach for soap or shampoo without bashing a knee or elbow, I can ensure that no one will ever want to linger in them.”
There's a glut of cheap(er) labour currently, but as our immigration policies during the Trudeau 2.0 years evolved to favour quantity over quality, many members of that cheap labour pool don't have the language skills needed for public-facing customer service jobs.
We order our groceries online and pick them up in the parking lot. It's a fantastic model where we order at our leisure at home and then just spend a few minutes waiting for our food. Definitely enjoying the lack of impulse-buying pressure.
While I prefer to engage in models of commerce that afford me the luxury of avoiding all contact and interaction with humans. Having options is wonderful.
Yes, I certainly didn't mean to say it's for everyone. Also, I probably talk more in brief niceties with the staff who bring my food to the car than I ever did with cashiers or other customers in a large Loblaws or Sobeys store.
It's actually worked surprisingly great for fresh produce — but we live in Fredericton and get the other 80-90% of our fresh produce delivered from a local farm so we're not a strong test case.
Yes, it adds up to billions of dollars - but so what?
My point above was that if they are making 2% profit on groceries and you ask for a 2% discount, they make $0 - and my question is still: would that be better...?
The other thing which obscures this topic is that grocery stores don't "just" sell groceries anymore. They sell pharmaceuticals, and eyeglasses - they have travel agencies, sporting goods, clothing departments - they sell household goods, car tires, hardware....
This is largely because they HAD to diversify, due to the extremely low margins they make while selling you food to eat.
If we drive ALL profit out of the grocery business, why sell food at all? Why not just become a Canadian Tire type store, with all the departments named above?
With my tongue fully in my cheek, I ask: why not let the government distribute the food? I'm CERTAIN they could do so without reaping a profit.
I like the option of self-checkout. My pet peeve is at the gas station when the customer at the pump ahead of me doesn't pay at the pump and makes me wait while they make the trek to pay inside.
Most of the problems described here are the consequences of a badly designed self-checkout. It's not so much that self-checkout sucks... but that badly designed self checkout sucks. Bad design can ruin everything... like a ski jacket made of lace.
Take bananas for instance... they have a bar code on them in my grocery store.. but they don't scan and you have to memorize the code because it's not the STORE bar code and they didn't bothering entering the bar code in their system.
Tiny little spot to unload your groceries... it's not like it's a law of nature that the table has to be tiny... someone designed it that way on purpose and it was dumb.
Seriously.. this one is so dumb... just make the unloading area and loading area bigger for crying out loud.
It's not like self-checkouts can be perfect.. .but that's no excuse for not fixing the obvious.
It's baffling to me that stores aren't using RFIDs. You'd load your stuff on a little coveyor belt, it goes inside a scanning machine, which would read RFID tags and automatically weigh the items that need to be weighed and then spits everything out on the other end in some sort of caged, bagged and ready to go, you pay, the cage opens and off you go...
RFID costs are low, but not negligible and grocery stores move a lot of individual items most of which already have UPC bar codes and none of which have RFID chips.
Certainly. But it’s something you’d have to get every single manufacturer of food products to do.
I’m not sure that’s likely given the comparative negligible cost of UPC barcodes and the fact that they don’t even put the banana bar code in the system or give me a decently sized countertop to use.
I loved this column. My response to grocery store staff who try to steer me to self-checkout is always the same, "No thanks. I am not going to be complicit in taking your job away from you." Given the profits the grocery chains are making, they can afford cashiers.
A Loblaws Derangement Syndrome sufferer has entered the chat.
An average family of 4 in Canada spends $16,000 per year on groceries. Of which about $600 is profit for the retailer.
The reflexive hate on grocery chain executives is puzzling. People are paying way too much attention to Jagmeet's asinine rants.
Meanwhile, we get creamed on our phone, internet bills (while the rest of world enjoys $15/month cell plans) and the cost of dairy, which are real government-sanctioned oligopolies that get to charge way too much because there is no real competition.
Galen Weston is a choir boy when compared to Rogers, Bell and the dairy cartel.
Bark up that tree if you must.
This. 💯
I never understand white knighting corporate entities. I
I never understand the white hot rage against members of an industry that make 3% margins in a good year.
But why care about it to the point where you’re effectively name calling random people on the internet?
I’m not even sure why you think 3% is a bad number. How much profit should a company extract when their business is buying things from one entity and selling them to another? It’s right in line with retail as a whole and grocery has a pretty consistent demand curve and massive revenues.
You’re also using net margin to get that number which includes all expenses up to and including taxes and Galen Weston’s salary. Their gross margin (revenue minus product cost) is in the low thirties and its far more fair use that number when assessing profitability on a customer, which would land you closer to $5K per family in your exercise If that family stops shopping with the company, Loblaws doesn’t get a break on rent or take it out of their executives salary. Including fixed overhead in profit assessment for an average customer doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
Your math suggests overhead expenses (those over and above direct product costs) are somehow irrelevant, as if they're nonsense. Try telling that to your creditors.
You're right - 3% is in line with other retailers. So why do grocery stores get all the anger while shoe stores, clothiers, and toy stores get a pass?
A lot of it was that groceries were undergoing massive inflation, so of course they were getting more heat. I’ve seen similar situations in the lumber industry, though they generally don’t continue over multiple years. This isn’t necessarily the grocery chain’s fault, but continuing business as usual when costs are skyrocketing along with your revenues isn’t going to win you many customer appreciation awards. Groceries are also central to everyone’s life and something that is interacted with often. A shoe or electronics store can skate because people aren’t buying shoes and electronics on a weekly basis.
That isnt. Its fact. Loblaws, etc make low margins on actual groceries. They make the money on the crap, pop chips snacks junk food pastries and all the doo hickeys they place strategically around the checkouts. The impulse items that we dont need to live or eat or have a healthy life. Their profits would be much different if we just went there for actual real food and nothing else. They profit on us eating unhealthy things, and we chose to eat them. So, who really is the bad guy here?
Grocery store executive?? 😁
"Actual Human who assists the Unpaid Cashiers" is the shittiest job in the supermarket. They spend their entire shift untangling the messes that the Unpaid Cashiers have made and marinating in the molten torrent of angry shit and abuse that flows their way.
Back when the children were younger, there's no way we would even go to the real Canadian superstore because they made you unpack and pack your own bags, whilst the children were running wild. So we went to Co-Op wherein they not only pack your bags but they will deliver them to your car! How far we have come.
But what also has changed is the employee. Not only payroll taxes, but benefits, and a different work ethic.
Personally, I *love* self-checkout.
I have heard other people argue they are doing unpaid work by checking out their own groceries, but I also think of it in terms of *time* costs: I can zip through the self-checkout quickly and get out of there, saving myself time that would otherwise be spent waiting in line.
I also like being able to more easily ensure everything is being priced the way I expect (or get the points I expect), because it can be difficult to follow the cashier’s screen while they quickly scan everything. Going through a cashier means I either have to ask them to ensure certain things went through as expected, or appeal once I get the bill after payment. That again adds to my time costs.
Then there is my natural awkwardness: people scare me! ;-)
I’ve stopped using self checkouts at the grocery store. I’m not being paid to scan my groceries and don’t like feeling forced into the self checkout which is the inevitable feeling when the express registers are all removed and self checkouts are doubled.
I’ve read that on average when people self scan their groceries they pay more due to scanning errors in favor of the store. I can’t speak to that, but mostly I’ve decided I’m not doing someone’s job for free and the store can deal with long lines at the checkout due to fewer cash registers.
I had a university course that suggested higher customer satisfaction with self checkouts because people feel like they’re doing something and they’re more engaged. Maybe that’s been their theory, but I sure reject it. I hate the long line when I have just a few items, but I have the extra 5 or 10 minutes. Their self checkouts can continue to sit mostly empty until hopefully some of them get removed.
Grapefruit is 4288. Naval oranges are 4012, just one digit higher than bananas. How would I know this? Let me count the way. Great, great column. Thank you.
A fine opinion piece Mr. Stinson which can apply to Walmart, Shopper's Drug Mart and all the rest. I say 'a pox on their houses' to those companies who want me to scan and bag my purchases - even lumber yards are doing it now! I want to speak to a human, wish them a good day, ask how their day is going and so forth which 99.9% of them seem to appreciate.
As to your point that grocery store owners are not worried about theft at the self serve, your friend is incorrect. A buddy of mine ran as Mike's Independent here in Regina and he was well aware of how much walked out through his self checkout lines - if memory serves it would have been enough to hire the staff to run the tills but corporate pressure ...
My question to you is - why is it alright to have a self check out at a drug store but not the grocery store? You are still unpaid labour and you gain nothing from doing the 'work'.
Sorry corporate Canada, I will use the human every time and continually remind you on your 'how did we do today' surveys that there need to be more humans in the system not fewer.
I have a minor irritant to report. My grievance is with the guy who apparently visited every hotel in the land and said, “I can save you money on your hot water bill. By installing showers so small that guests will be unable to turn around in them, or reach for soap or shampoo without bashing a knee or elbow, I can ensure that no one will ever want to linger in them.”
An excellent take on a real life situation which we can all identify with. Thanks for a fun read.
Do I have to bring up the increased (and increasing) minimum wage? You make labour more expensive in a competitive industry, and you get less labour.
There's a glut of cheap(er) labour currently, but as our immigration policies during the Trudeau 2.0 years evolved to favour quantity over quality, many members of that cheap labour pool don't have the language skills needed for public-facing customer service jobs.
We order our groceries online and pick them up in the parking lot. It's a fantastic model where we order at our leisure at home and then just spend a few minutes waiting for our food. Definitely enjoying the lack of impulse-buying pressure.
While I prefer to engage in models of commerce that afford me the luxury of avoiding all contact and interaction with humans. Having options is wonderful.
Yes, I certainly didn't mean to say it's for everyone. Also, I probably talk more in brief niceties with the staff who bring my food to the car than I ever did with cashiers or other customers in a large Loblaws or Sobeys store.
except for fresh produce I agree
It's actually worked surprisingly great for fresh produce — but we live in Fredericton and get the other 80-90% of our fresh produce delivered from a local farm so we're not a strong test case.
If we're doing the store's work for them at the self-checkout, we should get a discount (say 2%)?
Your grocery store is making a profit of between 2 and 4 percent on your groceries.
You want them to make half the profits just because they introduced a voluntary self scan option over a decade ago?
If you make it unprofitable to sell groceries, what happens next...?
while 2 to 4 percent sounds low it changes it billions of profit over all . So unprofitable does not come in.
Yes, it adds up to billions of dollars - but so what?
My point above was that if they are making 2% profit on groceries and you ask for a 2% discount, they make $0 - and my question is still: would that be better...?
The other thing which obscures this topic is that grocery stores don't "just" sell groceries anymore. They sell pharmaceuticals, and eyeglasses - they have travel agencies, sporting goods, clothing departments - they sell household goods, car tires, hardware....
This is largely because they HAD to diversify, due to the extremely low margins they make while selling you food to eat.
If we drive ALL profit out of the grocery business, why sell food at all? Why not just become a Canadian Tire type store, with all the departments named above?
With my tongue fully in my cheek, I ask: why not let the government distribute the food? I'm CERTAIN they could do so without reaping a profit.
...but would that be better?
Apples,eh? For me it was substituting the code for mixed nuts WITH peanuts!! 🤣
Is it too soon to resurrect Knob Hill Farms? It's about time to bring back that chaotic anti-Costco.
I like the option of self-checkout. My pet peeve is at the gas station when the customer at the pump ahead of me doesn't pay at the pump and makes me wait while they make the trek to pay inside.
Most of the problems described here are the consequences of a badly designed self-checkout. It's not so much that self-checkout sucks... but that badly designed self checkout sucks. Bad design can ruin everything... like a ski jacket made of lace.
Take bananas for instance... they have a bar code on them in my grocery store.. but they don't scan and you have to memorize the code because it's not the STORE bar code and they didn't bothering entering the bar code in their system.
Tiny little spot to unload your groceries... it's not like it's a law of nature that the table has to be tiny... someone designed it that way on purpose and it was dumb.
Seriously.. this one is so dumb... just make the unloading area and loading area bigger for crying out loud.
It's not like self-checkouts can be perfect.. .but that's no excuse for not fixing the obvious.
It's baffling to me that stores aren't using RFIDs. You'd load your stuff on a little coveyor belt, it goes inside a scanning machine, which would read RFID tags and automatically weigh the items that need to be weighed and then spits everything out on the other end in some sort of caged, bagged and ready to go, you pay, the cage opens and off you go...
Can we have that please?
That’ll likely be due to cost.
RFID costs are low, but not negligible and grocery stores move a lot of individual items most of which already have UPC bar codes and none of which have RFID chips.
That's a challenge waiting to be solved then.
Certainly. But it’s something you’d have to get every single manufacturer of food products to do.
I’m not sure that’s likely given the comparative negligible cost of UPC barcodes and the fact that they don’t even put the banana bar code in the system or give me a decently sized countertop to use.