in a competitive market (which US groceries mostly are) if the store has to "eat the cost" of bruised fruit, then the price will necessarily have to be higher on the fruit they sell.

Think of it this way, you have fruit at home to be shared by all the members of your family, it was fine when you bought it, but now some of it is bruised. So now you own a mix of fruit: what do you do, throw away the bruised fruit, or trim it, or give a loved one the good looking one and eat the bruised one yourself? Those costs (tossing or trimming or eating slightly lower quality) have to be borne by somebody, in this case the whole family or a member of the family.

You buy a car and you buy insurance for it; that's because a car is expensive and you don't want to bear the burden of a bruised car yourself, you want to share that burden with all the other people who buy insurance; and yet, the insurance company is making money, so apparently you are paying a little extra for this decrease in the variance of quality.

Same with your theory of purchasing fruit: you are not saying (in your original comment) what you think you are saying, that bruised fruit is too expensive; what you are actually saying is that you prefer to overpay for expensive fruit all the time and not deal with imperfections. Because otherwise, if the supermarket could sell all their fruit and not just perfect fruit, and was competing against other supermarkets, then the fruit would be overall actually cheaper across the board; you say "you don't get any discount", but with time you actually would.

I explain all this because it allows you to live your life feeling less miffed.

Makes sense in economics 101. The reality is, the Instacart guy doesn't give a shit and will provide bruising as part of the service of schlepping your crap for you. The in-store shoppers don't really care either.

The explanation that you're providing is really a rationalization for paying more to procure an inferior product. You're always going to have wastage of perishable items. It's much cheaper and sensical to avoid moldy strawberries, close to date meat and dairy, etc by shopping yourself, or hiring your own casual labor without some intermediary subtracting value.

All of these services are hiding costs through VC largesse and exploitation. You can literally get more for less by just hiring a housekeeper and having them pick up stuff for you, but nobody does that because the costs are "above the line", and it feels less nouveau riche and more clean to have some service exploit the poor sap picking your banannas rather than talk to a human.

I think it's more that hiring a housekeeper is an option that most users of these services haven't given serious consideration. They don't know how it works or where they would start.

> The explanation that you're providing is really a rationalization for paying more to procure an inferior product

the explanation I gave is literally for paying less, so you missed the point of it, and you are then blaming econ 101 for your lack of understanding. And you are mixing in other factors that econ 101 covers, but the point of econ 101 is to learn to separate different factors.

The Instacart guy isn't a magic elf. The $0.05 you save on rotten fruit is offset by a $0.50 in labor.

As investors tire of setting money on fire, that will become more apparent, just as it did with Uber as prices went up and quality went down.

What you're missing out on is information asymmetry.

If you're insuring against a risk, and you have more information than the insurer, you may be profiting and the insurer may be running a loss.

If you're picking out your own groceries, you can select the pristine fruit and vegetables, and the grocery store takes the loss. With a disinterested picker, you take a portion of the loss.

You take a disproportionate portion of the loss, because in person shoppers are taking the pristine fruit, leaving more non-pristine fruit for the pickers.

Yes, you are correct that you are essentially paying a premium, but the issue is less about the item's cost and more about the need for time investment and physical presence--correct me if I'm wrong, but it doesn't seem like it's possible to get the same level of un-bruisedness from delivery or curbside pickup that you could from going into the store and picking fruit yourself.

When I lived in Brooklyn, the standard at most fruit/veg vendors was to have the best stuff inside and the bruised stuff outside (e.g., at 40cents/lb discount.) We usually brought from the outside and did the math on whether the recoverable portion was worth the discount.

Unfortunately the supermarkets do not work this way -- they seem to have one class of goods. I'm not sure what happens to their bruised goods, but I do wonder if they offload those items to other stores? Does it really go straight into the trash?

My parents used to run a produce market agency in Sydney. Their clients were banana farmers and their customers were national supermarket chains.

From what I remember, not much was ever wasted and trashed out of their warehouses. Any bananas that couldn't be sold in supermarkets due to quality or size issues, were sold to bakers and smaller market retailers, and anything left after that was sold as animal feed.

In Boston, there's an outdoor public market (Haymarket) that operates Friday/Saturday and basically sells dirt cheap produce (and some fish/other food).

The catch, is that it's whatever the wholesalers couldn't sell during the week to the supermarkets and now need to get rid of before next week's shipments come in. It often doesn't have much shelf life left and/or is ugly. And the vendors tend to keep cutting prices to the point of nearly giving away whatever's left towards the end of the day on Saturday. 10% of the normal price still beats throwing it in the dumpster and getting 0%.

It's a nice model that matches people wanting cheap food with the excess/castoffs in the market.

That's because there are classes of supermarket instead.

- Go to a cheap supermarket and expect bruised stuff and pick out the stuff you like.

- Go to a more expensive one and expect no bruising.

- Go to a yet more expensive one and expect nothing but organic and ripe.

It's kind of like class expectations. You don't want to be known as the person who shops at a place with bruised stuff (and the supermarket appeals to shoppers that way).

You find that in farmer's markets as well. Go to an inexpensive one and expect bruising. Go to an expensive one and be angry if there is any bruising.

I don't know if it's still the same, but when I was running the produce department at a Food Lion in the mid 90s we would just discount the damaged produce and only tossed stuff that was rotting. Bruised apples got wrapped 4 to a tray. I don't remember how much the discount was, it was programmed into the scale.

I believe supermarkets then sell it to the next group, which are restaurants or wholesale purchasers that send to factories. Highly unlikely that non-rotten food of supermarket quality is wasted.

I live in the US and 10 years ago ate almost entirely out of dumpsters. Grocery stores throw out perfectly good food every day. If you ask in front they'll say they donate it, but in back there's a dumpster full of cartons of eggs with one egg cracked, and packaged food that's a day past its sell-by date. We waste an absurd amount of food.

It's been about 12+ years since I've regularly dumpstered food, but my experience is that more food was being thrown out before (but maybe not much before) the sell-by date than after.

I think the issue is that of given the choice between something with a sell-by date a few days in the future or 10-15 days in the future at the same cost, nearly everyone is going to take the food with the better date. Which means the arrival of a new batch of inventory makes the older inventory barely salable.

Technical solutions could help here: it is taxing on humans and most POS systems to have to adjust the price of older inventory, but if that could be done automatically (or the labor pushed onto the customer to identify the condition in exchange for a discount) people looking for deals might help reduce this type of waste.

You just need to include the expiration date in the barcode and apply discounts automatically.

> Technical solutions could help here: it is taxing on humans and most POS systems to have to adjust the price of older inventory, but if that could be done automatically

That's a pretty good idea aid seems it could be solved entirely by software (+some signs for awareness).

I doubt you've got a good data stream about sell-by dates, tho - the old and new have the same UPC generally. Maybe OCR of sell by stickers? And this doesn't help things that don't have dates, like produce.

Dang, I figured that stuff would have been included in the barcode. There must be some way to track this automatically because I doubt stores are managing their inventory on tracking this manually in 2020.

Ever done store inventory? It's one of life's little joys.

I've heard of them but I figured it was a periodic thing to make sure the stores automatic accounting aligns with actual stock to adjust for stolen, damaged, or misplaced product. I didn't think it was for checking expectations.

A good grocery store will waste less. They'll have someone merge multiple cartons of eggs to refill ones that have one cracked (assuming the carton isn't soaked). They'll see they have a bunch of inventory about to go past sell-by and will toss up a sale to get rid of as much of the near-expiration items. They'll be careful about rotating stock so that the older items are up front so people who are less date-sensitive will buy them.

> They'll have someone merge multiple cartons of eggs to refill ones that have one cracked

That's technically illegal. Grocery stores are not allowed to repackage pre-packaged food. We have strict food-handling regulations in place to protect consumers, which is part of what makes food waste such an issue.

Nah, if it goes to anybody, it goes to food banks (or other 501(c)(3) organizations). The supply chain bifurcates much further up; it'd take a lot of effort for a relatively low volume of unsaleable but unspoiled food at the store level to make it to a restaurant or a wholesaler.

I worked in a supermarket about 10 years ago as a stocker, among other things. A lot of our expired products were donated to various places, but a not-insignificant amount was also thrown away or literally poured down the drains due to laws preventing it from being sold or given away (IIRC). Also this is the end of the chain, I don't know how they operate at a higher level of distribution.

I used to live 20 floors above a supermarket. I could see quite clearly when they'd bring in a large garbage container and dump hundreds of pounds of produce into it, pêle-mêle, and then it getting carted away.

Just had grocery curbside pickup last week, including two pineapples. Both looked much greener than any I would have selected myself. (I normally select a pineapple where the inner leaves come out easily.) A bit of research online, pineapples don’t ripen once picked. Cut them up, and they were both fantastic.

What I'm saying is that your perception of quality is not actually objective quality.

This car has dents but those don't matter. Full price for you. Car still gets you from a to b just fine. This jacket has some holes and few stains but it will still keep you warm.

I know this isn't the point you're making, but the right dent patterns can increase fuel efficiency and make cars more desirable to some buyers.

Ok, now I need to know about these dent connoisseurs who measure their impact on fuel efficiency.

Effectively, there is no difference between an apple and one with a bruise. I still get the same nutrition and taste, most other differences being unimportant.

A jacket with a hole has massive loss of effectiveness, and I don't receive a new jacket to wear each day.

A car with a dent has significant loss of value, not that it's something I'm terribly concerned with, I run all cars until they die.

>Effectively, there is no difference between an apple and one with a bruise. I still get the same nutrition and taste, most other differences being unimportant.

That's simply not true. The bruises become rot spots and before getting there they introduce oxidation which affects taste. The shelf life is then also diminished not only for the bruised apple, but for any that are nearby.

Relatively speaking, I think the bruise on an apple is actually a measurably greater decrease in (relative) value than the dents in a car.

You could compare it to rust instead.

I can understand that for a crooked carrot, but for example a tomato with broken skin actually gets bad pretty quickly.

Neither is yours. But if yours is satisfied with the food you can get by ordering online, you're free to order online.

It doesn't sound like they are claiming that their perceptions are objective.

In your previous post, you trip all over yourself acknowledging that their preferences are valid.

It's obvious enough that's what they are driving at; they want a shopping service that accounts for their preferences.

If the vast majority of shoppers perceive a product as lower quality it is, almost by definition, worth less in a market. Quality is a very tricky idea to pin down (read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance if you'd like to hear a lot on the idea) and claiming that your own highly biased opinion on the matter is what counts as "objective" is a pretty bold claim.

This is true in some cases, but not most.

They should price the produce according to its quality then.

They already do to a certain extent. Damaged goods often find their way into the "reduced" section.

Perhaps this was the “actual price” of the produce anyway, including the wasted and donated food. Delivery means there’s more reliable metrics about the average quality of food stocked and expected by shoppers (in a given area). This is a good thing if they make it so customers can easily post reviews and request refunds.