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?
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Having worked in a number of grocery stores over the years, I can tell you that there are a number of factors at play in keeping a store stocked. But that would likely expand way beyond the scope of a ELI5 comment, so I will try to keep things as straightforward as possible:
At the end of the day, everything simply comes down to math. “Shrink”, which is essentially any time the store loses a product to anything other than someone paying for it, is baked into the price for everything. It’s just a fact that a lot of milk and eggs and meat are going to be thrown out without being sold. Same with vegetables. And the prices for each “unit” of product reflects that anticipated waste. Which is kind of gross when you think about it, but that’s just the current nature of the business.
Secondly, a lot of stores rely on something called “rolling stock” which is essentially keeping storable goods constantly loaded on to trucks and moving around from store to store, rather than in a warehouse somewhere. Not paying for a huge system of warehouses, and maximizing storage through tools that are already around, helps to keep costs down. This is also how shelves can stay full, or at least fuller, without each store having a huge supply of Graham crackers and peanut butter stashed in the back: “trucks coming tomorrow morning; if we’re out now, we’ll have it then.”
Third, a lot of things on the shelves will last for a pretty good chunk of time. Potato chips, breakfast cereal, soda, bottled water, popcorn, canned goods: all of that packaged product can sit for a hot minute and still be perfectly sellable. “If it’s not selling now, it can sit there until it does”. And that’s not even counting non food products that are still sold in grocery stores. I’ve never seen a Hallmark card get thrown out for being past sell by.
TL;DR- folks higher up the chain than I ever was had done the math and figured out how to keep higher shrink products like milk that often ran at a loss balanced out with products that can sit on the shelves longer and still sell.
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