Now, the models that the somewhat sophisticated supermarkets use don't fit on a spreadsheet, and really try to guess which items really are people's favorites, look at profit margins, and risks of people just going to a different supermarket altogether because the competitor down the street still has your favorite, or charges 30% less for it. They check what happens when a product isn't in stock, or when a competitor has a significant discount. It's a difficult optimization problem, given all the differences among people's shopping lists.

Having a favorite product get discontinued sucks: It happens to me at least a couple of times a year, and sometimes straight from the manufacturer, so I can't even buy it online. But don't imagine that every supermarket out there is run by teams swimming in money. It's an extremely competitive business with many players, and there's not that much of a difference between the way the small chains run their operations today and having to close down because the lower prices of a larger competitor dropped sales just enough that they are losing money.

Oh, no doubt. I'm not saying the spreadsheet guys aren't needed. They clearly are because competition is so stiff. So the reason store A needs spreadsheet guys is because store B has them. All of the spreadsheet guys, collectively, lock the grocery stores into a race to the bottom.

I'm complaining about the existence of spreadsheet guys in the first place. Pulling back a little bit, maybe we need to question whether technology is always beneficial to society? Maybe some technology is inherently worse for society but we can't get rid of it because it's now locked into the market.

Anyways, it's good for the cashier too, because time for smalltalk, maybe sipping some drink, or such.

To be up to date, it's your fate...to wait!

I often think that they are the source of endless waste and inefficiency, because they are working against each other and none of them stocks everything.

Personally I'd prefer fewer larger ones which stock really everything in every variety, instead of many smaller ones which don't.

This are really so called first world problems, it's still a cornucopia, though one could argue about the nutritional/health implications also. But again, 1st world problem.

You've linked to SSC; Scott Alexander has a whole other essay on precisely this family of problems: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/.

Yes, squeeze that marginal profit, please. I was born in communism, and guess what, we did not have 20 flavors of yogurt to choose from, or supermarkets for that matter. In Eastern Europe we counted ourselves very lucky to have plain yogurt, which was rationed.

Joy and happiness aren't the point, those are just nice to have. Putting food on the table is the point.

And having a flavor of yogurt discontinued, out of dozens, due to profit margins, is a first world problem and it affects only the rich.

I was born at the tail end of communism in my region so I haven't experienced the worst parts, but the 20+ years of market optimization in the food space that I actually remember went primarily into variety. There was no point in those 20 years where quality food was scarce or even too expensive for most.

I have people in my family who worked in grocery stores some years ago, when the market managed to optimize these jobs to the point there were a step away from modern slavery. Fortunately, a few large scandals over events like a pregnant employee losing child due to workload made the regulators clean the space up. Today, a chain store employee in Poland earns a reasonable salary and has hard, but not backbreaking work conditions.

There is a point past which things get too optimized, and there is no loss in preventing or reversing that.

My corner grocery (run by a family that lives a couple blocks away) did the same thing - they dropped the soy milk brand I like. I asked about it, and they brought it back.

I think they do cost more on average than HugeCo (if you use the HugeCo surveillance/loyalty card), which also theoretically has a larger selection, etc.

But for some weird reason the store that sells me what I want gets my business.

They even have other customer-service oriented niceties, such as the fact that you don't have to put your groceries on a belt at checkout -- instead their carts are designed so that the cashier pulls directly from the cart, they go into bags that then get put into another cart for you to take out of the store. Little things like that make me wonder why these concepts haven't caught on. (Same with Aldi's letting their cashiers sit on a stool -- employee friendly, and doesn't interfere with the customer).

It is really fun to take someone there who has never been in one before, and watch as they get overwhelmed. Just the fact that there are 3 aisles of frozen pizzas... and the cheese coolers run at least half way down the width of the store.

Oh, and the employees are friendly -- I wonder if the fact that it is employee owned helps there (or how the employee ownership works).

Edit: do a video search for Woodman's, someone has posted a video of traveling the store on a scooter, you can get a good idea of the size of it.

Likewise, there's no such thing as "the best product" at a supermarket. Everyone has their own spread of products and if you cancel low-performing product lines, sometimes it has unexpected effects. (Anecdatum: We used to exclusively do grocery shopping at Woolworths until they stopped selling the cans of chilli beans that we use for nachos. Now we do maybe 1/4 of our grocery shopping at Coles instead, costing Woolworths thousands of dollars a year in lost sales, just because we needed some chilli beans and might as well get the rest of our groceries while we're there.)

I think the core observation behind the job of the spreadsheet guys is that, at scale, the choices within a family of products will approximate a normal distribution - so there will be a "best product" within each family; with a limited shelf space and a lot of different products to sell, this gives them a clear way to optimize for maximum revenue.

As a trivial example, just looking at the profitability of individual items would lead them to discontinue selling milk (I mean, there's no profit in it so why bother?) because it's generally used as a loss leader.

The loss leader in this scenario is the "milk" family, not a particular brand of milk.

- Sent from my Xperia Compact

well. I'm a nokia 5.3 owner now. It's big, but ticks all the other boxes & is cheap...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Format_war

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_obsolete_technology

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fad

and so on, I fail to see a reason for some of those failures. Seems arbitrary/random to me.

I just thought it was crappy that Motorola was actually providing phones with the features people were asking for (In the Droid days, people wanted physical keyboards, and the Droid Turbo offered insane battery life and a damn near bullet-proof screen), but they seemed to be commercial failures.

FWIW, I use a Pixel 3 now, which seems to be doing okay, but still not near the success of iPhone and Galaxy.