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affluent Americans pay a membership fee and drive out of their way to shop at Costco, whose entire model is based on having less brand choices, but minimum quality standards. and they love this lack of choice, because decision fatigue is real.
it turns out having too many choices in consumer goods sucks, actually.
i get a lesser version of this from Aldi. for a while i was calling it grocery store socialism. just grab “the thing” and the thing is relatively inexpensive and decent. not institutional grade store brand but ok
in and out
then go home and cook whatever you want there are literally hundreds of variations of recipes for all one’s choice paralysis needs
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yeah. i work for a different co same business. no union. they work us to the bone too mostly by keeping stores at permanent skeleton crew.
so i do look upon the little advantages the eurostores have with some envy. chairs. little powered pallet jacks with a cargo bed. the efficient stocking.
the grocery industry is kind of having a moment now not sure where it’s going but it’s being hollowed out bad.
the experienced people are leaving in droves, the young ones aren’t replacing them. and everyone else is aging out
I worked in a union grocery warehouse and I can’t say it sounds better. They still treated us like shit, and when covid hit? Mandatory 12 hour shifts of timed physical labor. Those places churn through people and bodies like it’s nothing.
Costco is awesome and the membership is totally worth it if you can use it. The groceries are vastly less expensive than the grocery stores around me. Like 1/3 or less sometimes.
I 100% do not like the lack of choice at CostCo, but I do like the prices (usually) and consistent decent quality.
It’s all made at the same factory any way, so who cares about the branding?
If their food items are coming from the same factory, they really screwed something up in transit.
i apologize that you do not know how to CostCo correctly. you may return to the Kroger-Publix at anytime for a life spent in the aisle deciding between 86 permutations of jelly, foreclosed dreams and sandwiches of wistful regret. or, accept the invitation to meta-cognitive executive function.
Statistically speaking, these regular grocery stores – such as Kroger, for instance – have between 30,000 and 50,000 individual products, or stock keeping units (SKUs). A Walmart has about 100,000 SKUs. A typical Costco, on the other hand, has only about 3,800. And the increasingly popular Aldi cuts down on choice even more by carrying only about 1,400 SKUs.
join the Kirkland Signature Cult and come home to the freedom of commitment.
I shop at Aldi primarily and their prices are significantly lower than CostCo. I’d go to CostCo more if they were actually cheaper.
And just to be clear, many of the Kirkland food options are terrible. I have had enough poor tasting food items that I don’t buy much actual food there anymore. I find that my biggest reason to go to CostCo are the home goods since they are good quality and they have an excellent return policy.
aldi carries less selection choices than even costco… all you’ve done is proven my thesis: you don’t want more choices, you want less.
if you want to learn more about yourself, I’ll be here all week.
Absolutely want choice, I would only buy staples at CostCo or Aldi. I should at higher end grocery stores for everything where I do get the options I’d like. You’re smarmy dickishness was wonderful though, keep up the good work.
I love having the choice between different types of slop that all came from the same factory
God I love living in The Freest Country On Earth where I can pick between which flavor of Procter & gamble I want
How now, through the magical Free Market ™ you can also choose products from ConAgra and Mondalez
The same applies to elections.
A choice between 6 peanut butters with different branding that all come from the same factory.
You’d quickly find yourself arguing a weird and difficult position if your defense of capitalism is the quality of the pre-packaged foods. I’m sure a manifold of packagers can take tomatoes and make a version of pasta sauce you don’t think is yucky. You would also be equipped with the time, energy, and purchasing power to make your own pasta sauce if you’re so particular. You would also be part of a superstructure that doesn’t have basic life skills locked behind some sort of gender role.
I have never felt relief while checking the nutrition info, price/oz, and ingredient list of the 6 pasta sauces for 5 minutes to see which brand is cheap but not a slurry of corn syrup. If I felt confident that the pasta sauce was basically good, it came in mild, regular, spicy, and two avant garde versions I’m sure I’d be spoiled for choice. Even better if the pasta sauce union had a forum where they would take into account what sauce heads think about the state of pasta sauce. This, of course, would be instead of the board of Kellogs and Hersheys (who are probably the same people) that control all food in the US unilaterally deciding that working class families need a subscription to saw dust laden pasta sauce on the Kellogs app in order to summon a muzzled grocery store worker to unlock the locked cabinets for a tip.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but peanut butter is generally not very common in Europe. It’s usually in the “American food” section at European supermarkets.
One of Europe’s many failures.
It’s so simple. You roast peanuts, grind them, add salt to taste, bam, a rich, thick, tasty spread you can put on everything, or just eat with a spoon if you’re terminally sad.
Europe: “how about some overly sweet hazelnut paste with chocolate added??!?”
Nutella is delicious and I will die on this hill
But it’s not vegan
Hold up
It’s ground hazelnuts and sugar
What the fuck is porky adding to it to make it not vegan, I hate capitalism goddamn
Milk powder. Also it’s mostly palm oil, which is very destructively farmed.
I hate capitalism goddamn [2]
Yeah it sucks, but it’s very easy to make your own vegan variant
Nah also got to add a terminal amount of high fructose corn syrup
I’m sooo bitter that most stores near me don’t carry actual real peanut butter, and the ones that do charge $9 a jar
Word. It’s so silly. I used to live near a fancy hippy store that had a bin of roast peanuts and you’d pour as much as you wanted in to a grinder and it’d poop out fresh peanut butter. Never did it because it was kinda $$$ but i thought it was funny.
I used to know a guy who knew a food scientist and sometimes he’d show up at work and be like “my buddy had to make 20lbs of peanut butter for an experiment and he gave me the leftovers who wants some?” It was usually sooooo good.
They used to have these in regular grocery stores like A&P and Kroger. My mom used to use these exclusively since I was ADHD and wasn’t allowed anything with sugar or artificial color. It would have been fine except SHE KEPT THE PEANUT BUTTER IN THE FRIDGE 😭
Source: am old and remember when cigarettes were sold on a regular aisle.
or just eat with a spoon if you’re terminally sad.
Now what have I done that you come after me personally?
Edit:
It comes from a place of love. I have a jar of peanut butter on my bedroom table right now.
I’d say you’re wrong because I’ve been able to find it in most supermarkets in the countries in Europe I’ve visited. And it’s actual peanutbutter instead of peanutbutter + a bunch of sugar or weird supplements.
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No I’m pretty sure my wide generalisation of an entire nations consumption habits is correct
tone clarifier
not trying to be dismissive. Trying to admit fault in a cheeky way.
It’s difficult and expensive to find ones that don’t contain palm oil.
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Sure. Just it’s difficult and expensive. :)
Just checked my kitchen, the store brand peanut butter from German Aldis has around 9% of additives (sugar, palm oil and salt) and it’s the only one they stock. This whole comment chain made me look up where to find 100% peanut butter and that ratio of additives unfortunately seems to be fairly common. There are brands that are 100% peanut, but for some reason these are almost exclusively sold in 1kg jars, i guess people who look for that are really into peanut butter. I mean, i am as well, and this stuff keeps good forever, so i may just go big next time i have to restock.
Neat! The one I bought in Germany was just peanuts and salt. Bought it in a Netto
Wow! I’ve never heard of Boris Yeltsin being impressed visiting an American grocery store before!!! That’s so charming that I almost forgot about how the Russian lower classes tried to rebel against a régime that capitalists imposed on them, how the Russian rates of alcohol poisoning, suicide, and homicide leapt under capitalism, how Eastern women and youths suffered miserably under capitalism, how the capitalists illegally dissolved the Supreme Soviet and killed hundreds of people in Moscow, how the upper classes created a constitution that rendered the already hated President almost dictatorial and lead to the present government, how inequality only skyrocketed, how the lower classes starved and lost their livelihoods, how the capitalists deliberately killed overly critical journalists, and how one to ten million lower‐class Easterners died as a consequence of this market economy that the upper classes imposed on them.
thank u grocery store man
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Better than keeping a picture of a drunk looking at peanut butter.
You stupid bastard
Leave it to a liberal to come up with the take: “knowing what you’re talking about and having the corroborative evidence to support it is ‘hilarious’ and ‘kinda sad.’” Right, it’s so much better to be utterly clueless about the world and only ever have conversations by talking out your ass with shit you made up on the fly. What a pathetic way to navigate life.
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this argument doesn’t hold water bc China’s treat technology is so far ahead of the rest of the world that I don’t think it can be matched.
source: just enjoyed some huang fei hong spicy peanuts
huang fei hong is incredible. there’s no match. regular grocery store jiugiui huasheng (drinker’s nuts) in those little vaccuum bricks is acceptable but not the same
I knew i was dealing with the finest snack purveyors when i got to the bottom of the small bag and there were actual dried sichuan peppercorns and chiles. Amerikan snack jockeys won’t give you anything beyond a red 40 laced powder with “natural flavors”
I would happily take 1 good brand of peanut butter or pasta sauce over our current situation of 1 decent brand that’s 3x the price it should be or a bunch of total dogshit that costs what a decent product should.
The fucking store brand canned veggies are like $3. Fucking name brand Ramen is like $4 a pack.
I think 2 brands of peanut butter would be good. Crunchy and smooth.
Meanwhile there’s a store chain in Britain that only sells its own brand without any choice beyond that and it is incredibly fucking popular because it turns out people just like buying the thing and not caring about 12 different brands with no difference
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I don’t have the heart to tell them about the inevitability of monopolization.
“Having choices is awesome, actually.”
I agree, so if we must live under capitalism can we at least abolish tariffs? If workers cannot benefit from protectionism, neither should porky.
20 different frozen pizza brands, over half owned by Nestle.
See, Americans would be perfectly fine with production being socialized, controlled and operated by the workers, as long as there’s still 10 brands of toilet paper at the store.
It’s like the classic Simpsons episode where homer visits the Duff brewery and being impressed seeing how they are filling up barrels of Duff, Duff Lite and Duff Dry from the same pipe.
Having a choice over my consumption goods is ideal, that’s why I support the system that would let me democratically decide where I want the economy to focus and what goods to manufacture, instead of letting “the invisible hand” decide what’s profitable.
