[VMarcHart]

Mack, by far you have the most informative posts on this site. I love reading them. Good luck with the weigh loss and kicking the smoking habit.

By the way, I did notice some packagings have shrunk while the price have stayed the same. Sliced bread is one.

[Lanthanide]

For those interested in the grocery shrink ray, this site should be right up your alley (the site itself also has many many other interesting and probably useful articles also, so it's worth having a look around).

Grocery shrink ray at Consumerist

[MonteQuest]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Heineken', ' ')Those "stealth" price increases are awfully disturbing. One wonders where they will eventually lead---to cans of tuna the size of bottle caps?

[Kingcoal]

You know it's funny, when I was a kid in the early seventies, the portion size of everything was smaller. A small coke was about 8oz, a small fry was about half of what it is today. In the grocery store, everything was smaller also. Over the years, they started to compete by increasing portion size of everything because it was the cheapest thing they could do. Giving better service was expensive because of labor costs. Giving you more food was cheap because food was cheap. Cheap no more.

[VMarcHart]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Kingcoal', 'Y')ou know it's funny, when I was a kid in the early seventies, the portion size of everything was smaller. A small coke was about 8oz...

[vilemerchant]

If there's one thing scarier than peak oil, it's peak food. Problem is they come together :/

[Mack12345]

Thank you guys for being so positive about my post . I must admit i was kinda intimidated by posting becase I was worried that the insite that i have to provide would be considered pretty much useless .
So its very encourageing to have some of you longtimers chimeing in to let me know that my post had some merit . I did not want to waste peoples time with a useless post .

Ok now on to kpeavey's questions ..

1 . "Out of stock items. When an item is found to be out of stock for a brief period of time, do shoppers tend to skip that item or use a substitute brand? If substitution is the response, is there a tendency toward higher grade or lower grade products?"
It is my experience that at my store that if the coustomers "prefered brand" of a product is curently an out , that the coustomer wants a cheeper replacement .. IE "I want Van Camps chili but your out .. damn .. Gimmie some of that cheep Great Value chili insted I guess .."

2 . "Discontinued items. I've projected in other posts that companies will discontinue product lines in order to streamline their operations. This would result in those items being discontinued at the store level without fanfare. Has this been occurring? To what extent? Does the store find a replacement product or simply frill the shelves with more of what they still carry?"
I see this as kinda going both ways at my store ..
Examples being .. SPAM for instance ... My store stopped carrying all the "flavored spams" about last year . We dropped Bacon spam, Turkey Spam, ect and now keep only SPAM classic and SPAM lite .
BUT , Cheezits seem to be going the oppisite way .. we now carry like a million kinds of cheeseits ...
So my observation to this question is both yes and no .

3 . "Delivery schedules. Has the recent increase in fuel prices altered delivery times, frequency of trucks, capacity of trucks or any other trucking procedures? "
My store gets a "Dry goods" truck every night , 363 days a year . And a meat/produce truck 5 days a week . "There is talk of cutting meat trucks to only 4 a week due to reduced demand ."

4 . "Sales volume per customer. Has the number of items sold changed in any way. This may indicate that people are stocking up or altering their shopping frequency with extra purchases or cutting expenses with fewer purchases."
As I have said in the past , sales of canned meat, ect have SKYROCKETED at my store . It is my opinion that coustomers are buying a lot MORE of what CHEEP .. at the expence of buying a LITTLE of whats HIGH in cost .
And yes .. several coustomers at my store will tell you that they are stockpileing food incase "something happens" .

5 . "Large volume packaging. Is there a noticable trend in the bulk items, i.e. big sacks of sugar or flour vs the 5 pound sacks, family pack meats vs individual steaks, the big pack of toilet paper vs 4 rolls at a time. "
Yes , at my store Bulk packaged items are doing really well ..
Bulk flour, corn meal , sugar , beans , cake mix , everything .. if its bulk .. it sells ..
Theres this really nice older lady thats a regular .. Shes on a fixed income .. She buys a GIANT can of Chef Boyardee brand Ravioli every month and then opens it and puts the contents into tupperware containers and freeze's them for her use during the month . She says she "doubles her money" in this way .
Thats just one example but there are sooo many .
This same lady also told me that she is stockpileing catfood for her cat becase shes afraid the government will stop sending her checks in the mail if theres a bad war or something and she dosent want her cat to go hungry . She says she can handle it shes used to hardtimes but not her cat ..

6 . "Finally, I am interested in the ability of the store to respond quickly to a sharp increase in sales volume as a result of some external event. An example would be batteries and bottled water when a hurricane approaches. What would be the criteria for a store to receive a delivery out of its regular cycle."
I feel like my stores ability to deal with something like this is very limited unfortunantly ...However, what im going to do is this .. in the next few days im going to look into this and see exactly how my management would/could respond to this kind of thing .. I will post in a few days with a more consise answer to this question .

"Any information you can provide would help paint a picture of the trends as food and fuel prices rise."
I hope that my insites have been helpfull .

"Thank you."

No sir, thank you .

Regards .

[emersonbiggins]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('JJ', 'w')e get seven trucks a day, feeding 10,000 people a day here in little Burnet, Tx.

[Fiddlerdave]

I buy Skaggs Chili at Costco. Bought a new 8-pack, cans say "25% more beef". Cool. Then noticed a canful I heat in the microwave for the regular 2 minutes comes out scalding hot instead of just-right warm . The can did seem smaller, and I see the oz's are now only 15! Don't know what it was before, 16? 18? Just smaller. Is there a point in finding exactly how bad we are screwed?

[IslandCrow]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Kingcoal', 'I')n the grocery store, everything was smaller also. Over the years, they started to compete by increasing portion size of everything because it was the cheapest thing they could do.

[Hagakure_Leofman]

Interesting post.

Re: cigarettes. My advice (though it wasn't solicited), is that if you're going to quit - actually quit. It's nicotine that you're addicted to - not smoking - what is just the means of delivery. If you realise this, you'll note that switching to gum isn't quitting anything.

I'm not just saying this. I quit myself 18 months ago, and I'm not going to start again because I got myself off nicotine. Prior to that, I had made attempts using patches and gum. In both those approaches, I only made it about 1-3 months.

Well done on your other health achievements. You're well on your way to surviving

The only useful web site I used for help was whyquit.com. I'd say "good luck to you", but that really has nothing to do with it. You need to really decide for yourself that you'll quit for real. It's a difficult process, but you're life will definitely change for the better. It's transformed mine and it keeps getting better. Indeed, my interests today, wouldn't be my interests if I'd not quit. You really become a different person. You become yourself.

Why don't you quit on the 5th August?
That's as good a date as any...

[JJ]

I quit using the patch. First day whole patch, second day half a patch, third day half of that. Then my friend (who had quit 10 years prior) was laughing at me and point in public and calling my THE PATCH THE PATCH and I asked him why and he said "I find it amusing that you are trying to quit a drug by taking the same drug." Point taken, went cold turkey. Don't give up.

The grocery I work at ordered three trailers full of bottled water, tuna fish and peanut butter. Parked in the back, put pallets in the lobby. Then sold to the customers for the refugees of Rita and Katrina. Made a killing. (they bought the stuff and then after the customer paid for it they loaded it onto another trailer out front) I thought it was a pretty swift psychological move...also a big box out front to recycle your plastic bags. The customer brings in bags stuffed with plastic bags, places them in a bin in the front, then we throw them in the compactor in the back. Makes the customer feel good about saving the earth.

I always liked stocking the can aisle (aisle three). Since I was the new guy, and everybody hated the can aisle, they always put me on that aisle.

[jlw61]

In regards to the Spam answer... when you quit stocking all those different brands, did the shelf space shrink or stay the same with just fewer brands? Did the shelf space expand for cheesits?

If the spam shrank and the cheeseits expanded, that would strike me simply as marketing. But if spam stayed the same, then that would indicate to me that regular spam is what people want and they want a lot of it.

Ick, what a horrible thought. Sorry, the worst I can do is canned corned beef or dinty moore stew. The rest would depress me too much (spam made me sick both times I ate it).

Please keep up these observations... they are priceless!

[PonyBoy78]

Every time I go to the grocery store, I walk around and wonder about how things will change as we start to go down that slope (or cliff.. eep!).

There's such a variety of colorful, exquisite, boring, particular items on the shelves. Seems so wasteful, in many ways.

What items will be the first to disappear from stores? Will we lose Vanilla Dr Pepper first, or Cherry Dr Pepper, or Cherry Chocolate Dr Pepper? Will we eventually get to a point where the soda aisle is just four or five major brands, instead of the hundred brands we have now? And how long will it take to get there?

Repeat this for every item group in the store. How many small beer brewers will go under? Will the Hungry Man dinners outlast the Smart Ones dinners, and do the Boston Market dinners stand a chance? And how many brands or flavors of yogurt do we really need?

It's going to be fascinating to see how grocery stores change as time goes by.

[TWilliam]

Interesting thread, thanks for starting it Mack.

A tip for the smoking and the weight loss: it's been known for awhile now that the human mind, particularly the subconscious, doesn't deal effectively with negations, in other words, telling someone 'don't think about a pink elephant' invariably leads to the thought of a pink elephant.

Thinking of yourself as 'a smoker who's quitting' actually reinforces the self-image that you're a smoker, making it that much more difficult to quit. Same with 'I'm losing weight'; the thought reinforces the self-image of someone who's overweight.

Instead, start telling yourself, 'I'm a non-smoker', and that 'I'm becoming trim and fit'. Use the same type of descriptive statements whenever you talk about the issues to someone else too. It may seem insignificant, but it DOES make a difference in the effectiveness of your efforts.

I tried quitting cigs several times without success, but once I finally started thinking of myself as a non-smoker, I no longer had any problem with avoiding the habit. Been cig free for better than twenty years now with absolutely no inclination to ever start again.

Good luck!

[Cashmere]

I don't agree that the only answer to quitting nicotene is cold turkey.

But I do agree that, if you're REALLY committed, it's the best way to go.

As for the gum - I know a guy who quit smoking 6 years ago and has been on the gum ever since.
So, yes, he's still an addict, but how much better health does he have?

Just get mad a quit.

Anytime you feel the urge to smoke, bang out 20 push ups.

Good for the chest, and great for the lungs.

[Mack12345]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Cashmere', 'I') don't agree that the only answer to quitting nicotene is cold turkey.
But I do agree that, if you're REALLY committed, it's the best way to go.
As for the gum - I know a guy who quit smoking 6 years ago and has been on the gum ever since. So, yes, he's still an addict, but how much better health does he have? Just get mad a quit. Anytime you feel the urge to smoke, bang out 20 push ups. Good for the chest, and great for the lungs.

[vision-master]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ')My advice (though it wasn't solicited), is that if you're going to quit - actually quit. It's nicotine that you're addicted to - not smoking - what is just the means of delivery. If you realise this, you'll note that [u]switching to gum isn't quitting anything

[Typical_Lurker]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('vision-master', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ')My advice (though it wasn't solicited), is that if you're going to quit - actually quit. It's nicotine that you're addicted to - not smoking - what is just the means of delivery. If you realise this, you'll note that [u]switching to gum isn't quitting anything