> Costco is generally clean
That makes it sound like cleanliness is not the norm in grocery stores in US.
That depends, are you the health inspector? But yeah, unless you live in an area where the average home is 400k+ and the average car is a Mercedes your local grocery stores will be "grimey". Not really dirty, but staffed by people who (rightfully) aren't paid enough to care. By comparison Costco is basically sterile.
Thanks to our old friend Baumol [1], cleanliness is not the norm in any typical grocery store in the 1st world.
You're saying that people who work in grocery stores don't care about their job performance, because their level of pay is guaranteed by workers in other industries being productive? That's a cynical thought.
By the way, where I'm from (EU), cleanliness is definitely the norm for grocery stores.
Come on. I’ve been to many, many small grocery stores in Western Europe.
Some had obviously old/dirty fixtures, signage, and floors, some had newer cleaner looking equipment. The average in Europe was much, much “dirtier” than Americans on average will put up with.
“Dirty” in this context means not-new-looking.
I’d much rather not pay for someone to replace things that are perfectly functional.
But many consumers (especially Americans) prefer extremely well lit, very new looking equipment.
So I think you may have this exactly wrong. Europe has much dirtier stores, because it doesn’t value cosmetic polish as much as health and cost savings.
To be fair, different countries in Europe are culturally different. And, to be even fairer, what we mean by "dirty" is wildly personal, I think.
Re:Love Song to Costco
by harpersealtako on Monday July 11, 2022 @10:47AM
(#32056873)
US grocery stores in general seem no less clean than western European grocery stores from my limited experience. I don't know what the parent poster is talking about -- even Walmarts in the bad parts of town seldom seem conspicuously "dirty".
Re:Love Song to Costco
by the_doctah on Monday July 11, 2022 @10:23AM
(#32056559)
I'm not sure we should be proud of businesses having to force their hourly employees to act like bouncers for surly anti-maskers.
In short, they give the appearance of doing ask if the things a business should be doing in line with the intent of the law, as opposed to just doing the bare minimum to the letter of the law, and doing what you are supposed to do is so rare as to be considered exceptional.