“Harbinger households” consistently buy products that get discontinued (2019)

Re:“Harbinger households” consistently buy products that get... by mcv on Thursday June 23, 2022 @09:18AM (#31848664)

I have never seen this as anything remotely related to me. There's a big supermarket chain (the biggest in my country) that for a long time had a tendency to cancel every product that I really liked. Or at least make it harder to buy.

Since I was young, I always loved spicy vegetable sandwich spread, but for many years I thought it had been discontinued, because this giant chain sold all the other flavours, but not my favourite. Until I discovered it at a different chain, and became aware of their betrayal. Then they introduced their home brand organic vanilla ice cream which I loved, so they quickly discontinued it. They did have same home brand organic chocolate ice cream which tasted far better than home brand ice cream has any reason to (it reminded me more of Australian), so a bit later they discontinued that too. A popular A-brand desert had a lemon-variety with a particularly addictive taste, and while they didn't discontinue it entirely, they did stop selling it online and in most of their supermarkets (only the very largest still had it).

But none of that has anything to do with me; it's just the supermarket chain that clearly has some grudge against me.

Good news: they recently started stocking my favourite sandwich spread flavour again.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:“Harbinger households” consistently buy products that get... by bombcar on Thursday June 23, 2022 @09:27AM (#31848793)

I've found that you can sometimes talk to the manager of the store and they can actually order most any product that any of their suppliers stock - or more of a certain product.

Our store would continually run out of the particular baby food we wanted and the cashier noticed me buying it all when it was in stock and asked if I wanted them to just order another box for me.

This doesn't help when the suppliers have discontinued it, and some of the larger chains are all automated, but it can be a useful trick. The computers try to notice what sells and order more (I've bought all of a certain item and noticed they stocked twice as much the next week, for example) but sometimes it can be assisted.

You can also email the company/distributor and ask for retail locations in your area, they'll usually know.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:“Harbinger households” consistently buy products that get... by threads2 on Thursday June 23, 2022 @09:34AM (#31848907)

When I worked at a grocery store my manager hated this because you'd have to order a box of like 12 spicy vegetable spread, the person would buy one, then the rest would expire on the shelf. He'd usually just lie and say he couldn't order any.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:“Harbinger households” consistently buy products that get... by bombcar on Thursday June 23, 2022 @09:48AM (#31849075)

Yeah, if you do it you need to follow through and buy the whole box (or most of it), otherwise they'll be less inclined to do it later.

[ Parent | on HN ]