Most of my grocery shopping is done at an Albertson's that is a five minute walk from my RV park. They made quite a fuss out of rearranging the store recently, moving things from one aisle to the next. It wasn't a remodeling or an improvement; just a reshuffling.
Over the years I've memorized the prices pretty well. The store actually has great loss-leader sales, which are the only things I buy. It has always surprised me that a security guard doesn't block my entrance into the store. During all the commotion of the great reshuffling I noticed that some of the prices had gone up 25%. Or had I noticed them? Maybe my memory was playing tricks on me. Say, wait a minute, I still have a good memory. Something else was going on, and it smelled fishy.
The last few days the news media has actually done a little honest-to-goodness investigative reporting about repackaging at the grocery store. For example the food company can reduce the size of the product from 16 ounces to 14, put a dimple in the bottom of the jar, and keep the overall physical size and price the same as before. This is the first time in a long time that I felt respect for the news media. Now if only they'd stop swallowing every lie from the government about inflation, the "Recovery", global warming, progress in Afghanistan, etc.
But back to my Albertson's store: isn't reshuffling the food from one aisle to another just a scheme to knock the consumer out of the routine that their brain uses to memorize food prices? Very clever of somebody at Albertson's headquarters. Come to think of it, my local Walmart did a major reshuffling recently. I wonder how much of this is going on all over retail America. Maybe some of the guys at the corporate headquarters should go to work at the Federal Reserve or at the Commerce department.
Comments
I wonder how they manage to keep the prices up-to-date. I would renounce my anti-smartphone prejudices if there was an app like GasBuddy that worked at the grocery store.
Tom in Orlando
Oh, and as to GasBuddy, prices are supplied by the users, not by the gas stations. In addition to the price, you see information about when the price was updated. When travelling, I always check how old the price update is, and discount cheaper prices that aren't as current as higher prices for nearby stations, as experience has shown that the old cheap price was what I could have paid had I gassed up yesterday.
Tom on Orlando