[jareklupinski]

> Even the relatively small cost of an NFC tag is going to be a real problem given how thin most groceries' margins are (and how cheap small amounts of food can be, even now).

something that's been worrying me: how long until grocery stores stop keeping fresh fruit and vegetables because it just isn't worth it anymore?

or has produce always been a loss-leader to get people buying other things in the store...

maybe just put NFC tags on the milk and butter, and let people walk out with as many oranges as they can carry?

[Reason077]

Produce is not a loss-leader. Pretty solid margins if you compare market prices on produce with what the supermarkets sell them for.

And if you’ve been in any UK supermarket near closing time on a busy weekend day, you’ll see that they routinely sell out of many/most items before restocking overnight. Stuff that hits its best-before date gets marked down to sell. Generally speaking, there isn’t a huge amount being wasted.

[klondike_klive]

The waste is externalised. Supermarkets regularly renege on their agreements with farmers, leaving millions of tonnes of produce to rot.

Check out getfairaboutfarming.com

[Reason077]

It is certainly unfair to growers if supermarkets are reneging on purchase agreements. But the link you sent has just a single anecdotal "case study", and the site seems to be a marketing site for an organic food box supplier. Hardly by itself evidence of a systemic problem.

Besides, if a purchase agreement falls though with produce already grown, normally what happens is the produce is sold on the wholesale market instead. In that case, growers might receive a lower price, perhaps resulting in a loss, but that's not as bad as leaving it "to rot" and getting nothing at all.

Produce would typically only be dumped in the case of a huge market glut (when prices are so low that it is not even worth harvesting/transporting them), or if there are labour shortages making it difficult or uneconomical to harvest.

[unnamed76ri]

Supermarkets have put a lot into adding more organic options and just greater variety in general in their produce sections. I don’t think they lose money or that they are going anywhere.

Bananas for example sell for around $0.58/lb around here. Which seems unprofitable but you wouldn’t believe the size of the banana rooms that these grocers have at their warehouses. It is easily the largest space dedicated to a single sku in the warehouse.

[neonnoodle]

How much to swim in the banana pit?

[Mochsner]

You ever shopped at kroger? Their produce selection is so bad and/or rotten that I don't even want to buy produce when I shop there. They don't even care and I think use it to drive buying more predictable goods (like canned). Their subsidiary Pick N Save in the midwest was similar, but not near as bad as Kroger in the south.

We buy produce from the cheaper Aldi instead, or worst case, the overpriced Publix (if Aldi doesn't have it).

[delta_p_delta_x]

> We buy produce from the cheaper Aldi instead

Funnily enough, in the UK, Aldi produce is generally very fresh and still cheap. There's plenty of turnover, precisely because people shop at Aldi so much.

[bombcar]

That’s really the key I’ve found - fresh deliveries of produce are about the same everywhere; what matters is how fast the turnover is. And it varies by area which store is “the good one”.