So when I run out of flour, I have a decision to make: would I rather sit in traffic for 30 minutes, wait for instacart/amazon fresh delivery, or go to CVS/Walgreens? I suspect there are many people like me who pay the markup every day because it's less of a hassle.
Plus in some areas you cannot get a grocery in due to zoning or regulatory agencies which can increase the costs of worker and compliance needs beyond normal. There are many rules regarding handling of produce and raw foods that drug store type sellers never have to meet.
This is unfortunate, because Manhattan clearly has excess demand for good grocery stores, and the incumbents (Gristedes, etc.) are terrible.
WF (or Trader Joes for that matter) simply doesn't sell value priced versions of a lot of items. CVS will sell it at a ripoff. It probably comes out close to a wash put poor people are poor, not stupid. If the numbers worked out in favor of WF they would be shopping there. Also, nobody(TM) does their entire shopping at CVS. People will drag their asses elsewhere on a regular basis to buy certain items that are cheap. Many convenience stores, bodegas, etc. will sell a couple staples or classes of items dirt cheap in order to attract business. You buy your regular items where they are cheap (e.g. $1.50/gal brand name milk from the bodega that buys about to expire milk from a restaurant supplier for pennies and passes on the savings to create foot traffic) and buy everything else at CVS.
All sorts of folks buy from CVS, mostly stuff on sale but not always. Moms with a sick child and elderly folks in to get medicines are a good chunk of the customers. Folks without transportation are a few people, sure. In one store, some of the food traffic was simply because we were in a small town with limited groceries: Some of the food was nearly as cheap as the local places. We got a boost of traffic because of football games at a college about 25 minutes away.
The second store was a 24 hour store, and though the town had 24 hour grocery stores, they weren't next to us at night. We were not far from a small college as well. And again, same sorts of customers, usually picking up one or two things.
Even more extra bonus points on holidays, since we were always open (at both stores). I think people figured we'd be less busy.
Whole Foods 365 brand organic milk is slightly cheaper than CVS, but it's a slightly longer walk and has longer lines and is in a basement, so I tend not to bother. (I probably should go there more often.)
It's contrary to advertisments who make you think you are saving money by buying "cheap processed foods".
Why so?
Edit: essentially, a lot of the time it is expensive to be poor.
Trader Joe's has their own in-store brands for tons of products, which has spawned various guides on what should/shouldn't be bough there (https://www.thepennyhoarder.com/save-money/what-to-buy-at-tr... for example). CVS, on the other hand, is a far more general store. They both sell food, but they're not in the same market segment - so the comparison is strange.
wtf are you talking about? I do this (with other greens and vegetables). If anything, the people shopping at WF/TJ don't want a head of lettuce because it's a stupid product, but I think you're using that as an example...but using head of lettuce just makes me believe you don't understand the demographic.
It's not very surprising. When you take a broad meta-category like "groceries" and have 10x the number of locations, it isn't shocking that they would move more product.
Trader Joe's and Whole Foods target specific demographics. I live in a metro area of about 300k people and there are 1 each Trader Joe's and Whole Foods. There are probably 40-50 CVS outlets. Their sole income driver is margin on food. CVS focuses on market saturation -- their profit driver is drugs (a market in which they vertically integrate distribution) that are mostly 3rd party paid. They survive in food deserts because the money made on drugs offsets heavy shrink losses.
I heard accounts of ironically Whole Foods which is referred to as "whole paycheck" in other areas being the cheap option in some areas. I would guess traffic vs stock would also influence prices in non-obvious ways. With perishables, more expensive real estate, high traffic, and customers more likely to buy everything by foot they may be less of a speciality niche in urban areas than suburbs.
For people scratching their heads wondering what the heck Wawa is, I have no idea what the West Coast equivalent would be. Sheetz is another similar chain on the East Coast, if that rings any bells...
Ask someone from Pennsylvania or New Jersey what they think of Wawa. In my experience, their eyes generally light up and they start raving in a way that most people don't talk about a gas station convenience store.
> The eyebrow-raising figure probably comes down to an issue of scale – last year CVS and Walgreens each had close to 10,000 stores in the US, while Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods each had fewer than 500 locations.
[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CzhWggSef2pbRMJam1m2...
I feel like the most appropriate metric would control for total population served (to discount both the fact that WF and TJ's don't exist everywhere CVS does, and that there are more CVSes per capita than the others where two or more of the three exist).
Most places are food deserts not because market forces don't work there, but because they do: People in those areas do not want to buy fresh vegetables and raw ingredients for cooking. They prefer to buy packaged/processed foods, regardless of cost or health comparisons they are making, or not making. This makes traditional grocery stores less worth it, so they leave if they can't make do.
There's a lot of literature on food deserts (as typically stated) being more or less a meme since 2015, here's one example with a couple studies to back it:
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/09/upshot/giving-the-poor-ea...
> Another study, published this week as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, looked across the country and found that no more than a tenth of the variation in the food people bought could be explained by the availability of a nearby grocery store. The education level of the shoppers, for example, was far more predictive.
And so on. So no I don't think your idea would work particularly well past the novelty stage :(
Just because someone buys a grocery item from CVS does not remotely imply that CVS is their primary grocery store.
The USDA has better numbers representing the market. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-markets-prices/retailin...
Yet, despite the poorer selection and higher prices, the majority of groceries that enter our house come from CVS. Why? My wife visits one regularly to pick up prescriptions, and they have just enough of what we buy, at sufficiently justifiable prices, that she can get enough of what we need without an extra trip to a different store.
The most convenient store is the one you're already at.
This has happened in several European countries. For example, in the UK Tesco has opened many "Tesco Express" shops in towns and cities. They are fairly small, but they can take advantage of Tesco's huge distribution system to stock a wide range of products, including fresh food. Prices are the same as the large shops, but the 20% of products they stock are the dearer ones.
In Canada the corollary is 'Shoppers Drug Mart' and ever since they merged with the national grocer chain, I can get >50% of my groceries i.e. milk, bread, cheese, meat (I mean none of it is super high quality but often good enough) because it's across the street! And there is no lineup.
More like 20x.
FTFA: last year CVS and Walgreens each had close to 10,000 stores in the US, while Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods each had fewer than 500 locations.
Wow. What leadership. It only took a couple generations for a place that sells medicine to stop selling cigarettes. It should be only a quick thirty or forty years before they stop selling the deep fried salt cakes. Are they still selling homeopathic "remedies"?
There are lots of pharmacies in this world. I seriously doubt CVS was the first to do anything. Somewhere out there, probably in Utah, there had to be a pharmacy that didn't sell cigarettes prior to 2014.
I wonder if a lot of this has to do with how family life is going. It is not the 1960's any more and we don't have the whole family sat around the table at dinner time with mum having been home all day keeping the house in order.
For people who don't have a dining room and people to cook for, why lovingly prepare a meal from fresh produce when junk food can be eaten instead? Price isn't everything. Neither is cooking skills or familiarity with what vegetables look like. Ready meals rule in an atomised society.
Not a lot of people have that kind of time to prepare a healthy meal, especially when they get home exhausted from work or have to get ready to work second or third shift, and might be trapped in a car two hours a day. Who has time to shuck corn, mash potatoes, and peel rutabagas? It becomes far more attractive to pop in the take and bake lasagna and throw the tin out afterward and actually have some time to spend with your kids before you put them to bed.
This neighborhood was not a poor one. Million dollar condos (forget houses), all around.
However, there are only so many buildings with acceptable basement layouts, and only so many neighborhood that are profitably enough to merit the additional capital and operational cost of a supermarket in a basement.
WF and TJ are niche supermarket chains, its just another dumb headline. https://www.statista.com/statistics/818602/online-and-offlin...
But my fear is growing...
Sometimes a drug/convenience store is just a drug/convenience store.
