Eli5 How do grocery stores around the world afford to be fully/half stocked in a product 24/7 simultaneously even in small towns where not everything’s bought?

Question

Eli5 How do grocery stores around the world afford to be fully/half stocked in a product 24/7 simultaneously even in small towns where not everything’s bought?

In: 47

Answer 1

The most direct answer is that food is cheap for them and there’s a lot of waste. Also, it’s pretty normal that the store doesn’t own or manage much of its own product. Like when you see a shelf of coke… That’s probably from a coke vendor basically leasing space on those shelves. And so some of those costs are pretty distributed.