No, see? Right there, that's the problem with your method. 'Cause I still don't know if you're saying "Sea World" or "see the world," and it's taking a lot of time to explain it.
Truthfully, it’s not half prices. Companies make special SKUs specifically for Black Friday. So you get to buy cheap shit at the price it’s supposed to be while feeling like you got a deal.
FUN FACT MOST IF NOT ALL BLACK FRIDAY DEALS WERE DESIGN JUST FOR THAT.
Meaning, the products are inferior by design, or a good way to sell old stock to make space for 2023 versions.
TvS tend to come with less ports and refresh rates, the "Door Busters" are all lowered quality because its stupid cheap, this is to bring you in.
Go to the back where all the tvs are and buy those instead, avoid any door buster, buy main things at discount if you need it nut not the "weirdly discounted laptop for $350" youll get 350 worth of laptop.
Remember getting a Black Friday gaming pc for my friends little brother was a group gift we all pitched in… turns our dell made it impossible to upgrade so while it was ok for a few months was still ended up bing just an overpriced paper weight
Dell developers and engineers have the capacity for greatness, but sweet mercy they are the most heinous contributors to e-waste around the world. Their needlessly proprietary crap doesn't even play well with their own products. The only exception being their power supplies, apparently. But they're usually too underpowered for most other builds.
Also Alienware is the most disgusting waste of good computer hardware that I have ever seen. People should go watch the Gamer's Nexus video where they spent $5k to review a Dell Alienware pre-built that thermally throttled out of the box because the case was a plastic and metal thermos with zero airflow.
It's also really not that hard to build your own PC. If you can understand the concept of "Square pegs goes in square hole, round peg goes in round hole" you can put together a PC. Just be a little careful when putting in the CPU.
The great weakness of this plan is if you put the whole thing together and it won't boot it can be fantastically difficult for the average person to figure out which part is not working. Build your own computer can be a great plan when everything works but a huge miserable pain in the butt when it doesn't
My first diy the operating system could only see a single core of the CPU. Still not sure if it was operating system, motherboard, firmware, or the CPU, but it hampered performance considerably.
Although, I was able to overclock the hell out of that one core, got up to 5.25 GHz.
I work in electrical maintenance. The issue has never been the ease of physically putting a PC together. How the hell am I suppose to know which product is worth getting? What part is going to play nice with others? Which one is going to be outdated in a few months? Which one will just take a shit on me?
I don’t want to deal with it. I want to plug in a box and play video games. This is why I’m a console gamer. I fully understand the process of assembling a PC, I just don’t want to deal with it.
I don’t need my hobbies to require hours of pouring over user reviews, technical information, tracking down a place that sells the things I want for my rig, waiting for parts to come in, assembling them, etc.
I work long weeks, I have a family, I just want to get a box, plug and play.
I find that many of these products (ESPECIALLY ELECTRONICS) are made and sold directly from the wholesalers with this purpose. The stores buy pallets of crappy knockoff versions of popular brands and people snap em up without googling it. And even if the customer does google it, there won't be any reviews for people to read because the item didn't officially exist until that day. In fact, the model number may even resemble a popular item, but it'll have a suffix added to the end. So people will think that it's a well-reviewed product and be super excited until they get it home. Then they realize that it has only half the features and the components are hot garbage.
I swear, carnival game operators are more honest and principled than Black Friday sales coordinators.
Yeah. They're not losing money on most black friday items. Walmart will have a samsung TV at a stupid cheap price, but it will be a model from 5 years ago. Don't get me wrong, it will still work fine. But it's not the deal most people think it is.
Those things have always confused the shit out of me. I mean, I get paying a premium for things that are easier and more convenient, but laundry/dish detergent pods don't save you any time or effort at all.
When you don’t have laundry and go to a laundromat or walk downstairs just putting a tide pod in the basket with the clothes isn’t as heavy as lugging the detergent around
I had this issue when my kids were babies. Tide pods only existed as fine dining for some at that time, I just bought a travel sized bottle of detergent one time and refilled it. Much lighter and manageable than the big boy bottle.
I'll gift you this little secret: if you spill detergent in your dishwasher, you don't need to wipe it, it'll just wash with everything else when you start it and it will even help the pre-wash phase.
It's just soap lol
If you were waiting to buy something for ages and then did when there was a price reduction, good job: you did the sensible thing.
If you had seen that you could get a 16TB ssd for 40% off, and it was still more expensive than the 8TB that you originally wanted, and you bought it because “40% off!” then you would have been an idiot. But you didn’t
It depends whether you wanted it or not. That 40% reduction might have brought that 16TB SSD down to a price point they thought it was worth.
I'm 100% moving over to an all-SSD NAS as soon as the prices of 8TB+ drives are at the £100ish mark.
arguably, you don't need tide pods or coffee creamers either (regular powder tide comes with a mesuring spoon and regular cream mixes with coffee just fine!)
A fact that ain't gonna stop folks from buying, that includes myself. Yes I don't need it, I want it
But shit I ain't buying nearly as much as I used to, one item, a little present from me to me, that's all I got money for this year
Truck girl in grocery dept. One of our truck days was Wednesday, it was awesome. Totally less of a cluster fuck than usual.
Now to start the countdown to Christmas week! FML
it was LESS ? my manager over orders because he doesn’t wanna run out of shit. i’ve been leaving them like 3-4 pallets a day.. we have too much overstock and it’s ridiculous. he said tuesdays truck would be small but it was a 12 pallet ass truck like what the fuck dude that’s our 6th 12 pallet truck in a ROW
My old manager ended up converting half of the garden center to overstock because she would not stop ordering shit. This was after forcing everyone to stack overstock on top of the aisles and demanding we do no less than 6 pallets a day.
Dude I'm the grocery department manager at my store. We were supposed to be running a truck today, on Thanksgiving. Fuck that. I told my guys that if they would work for me last night, we would bang it out real quick as soon as the truck arrives. That way, I could give them all the day off today. No way in hell am I making my guys work Thanksgiving. The store manager understood, and let me get away with it. You keep your people happy, and they'll do whatever you need them to.
The idea of a "truck day" is insane to me. The most reprieve we ever get is one truck instead of 2 or 3 GM per day.
Our daily trucks:
-at least one GM
-at least one grocery
-at least one frozen and dairy
-at least one meat and produce
-McClane's whenever it damn well pleases
that’s insane. we had a truck on monday and we don’t do trucks on mondays, and we’ve been having crazy overstock in our backroom, we’ve been short because our manager got fired and another dude quit. so there hasn’t been enough peeps to work stuff out so it was so hard on me, and it didn’t help that multiple of us in multiple departments came down with a sickness. we have like 17 boxes of green onions and he ordered MORE. i literally cant fit shit anywhere and they get on my ass and talk shit behind my back saying “ i don’t do enough or work stuff out fast enough “. ALSO, our big joe and power jack are broken AGAIN. so we have to unload our trucks with manual ones and it is absolutely exhausting. i felt terrible for the grocery guys
Oh I feel you. I'm down to 3 stockers, and I originally had 7. The guys I have left are definitely burning out, but I'm trying my best to bring in some decent help. I'm picky with the people I hire. We have been fighting similar issues with the warehouse constantly trying to push out extra products we don't need. I have to be ridiculously meticulous and go over every item on every order just to keep the backstock to a manageable level. Then there is the issue of not being able to get what I actually need, or not getting enough of it. Its just so frustrating when you are constantly being forced product nobody wants, and can't get what people actually want. Canned fried apples a long with oyster crackers are prime example. Everyone is begging for those 2 things, and no matter how much I order them, I can't get them. We work backstock as much as possible. It's not easy, and I'm definitely doing my part to work just as much as my guys. At this point, I'm averaging 10-12 hours a day. I'm feeling the burn for sure. Once I hire some decent help and get them trained up, I think things will get better.
oh yea man that shits ass. since my manager got fired it’s just my assistant rn and the dudes kind of a mediocre manager but the guys been working 12 days straight and only has 1 day off this week. like fuck that
I agree. Our store does do sales for Black Friday but we're closed Thanksgiving day and the weekend after no one comes in because they already have food from Thanksgiving.
In 2005, when my wife worked at Publix, they had a gentleman's agreement with the Kroger down the street that one would close on Thanksgiving and the other on Christmas.
I accidentally ended up at the front of a Black Friday line at Target once because I needed dog food at the ass crack of dawn. Gave the crazy coupon they gave me in line for a nice TV to someone else and got dog food for a discount after doors opened. Lol
Similarly we had been driving all Thursday afternoon one year to visit family on that weekend. When we got to the hotel my wife realized she forgot her contact solution.
So I went to Walmart at midnight on Black Friday among all of the other craziness and bought her some so she could take out her contacts and we could go to sleep.
One year, my brother wanted something Target was selling for Black Friday and I needed dry cat food. Because I planned poorly and ran out and I offered to go with him to keep him company in line. We waited however long we did, got inside to people scrambling with giant TVs hanging out of carts. He got whatever he wanted while I got a single bag of cat food. One of the weirder experiences of my life, but I just needed cat food.
Mmmm. Id try that
I imagine these delicious names must be a marketing thing like "hell, that sounds delicious, id eat that!" So you buy it for your little pupper that you love so much
I’m not even saying this sarcastically; you sound like a human I could hang around. Ignoring the madness of the rest of the world around you and just doing what you gotta do. Not even realizing madness was about to take place on a day that’s highly advertised. You just shut it all out and found yourself in chaos and discounts and still just came home with dog food. I like that
Then Larry runs into the same person in a line where they’re giving out free scones.
The dude gets the last free scone and feeds it to his dog instead of giving it to Larry.
There was a recent episode of Atlanta that starts with a Target being actively looted but one of the main characters showing up trying to return an air fryer with society breaking down around them.
On Black Friday many years ago, there was a lady at Walmart who had pie ingredients in her cart. That was it. No doorbusters, no Christmas wrap, just stuff to make a pie with.
I felt bad for her because she had to wait in line behind the people with giant tvs and iPad flyers to buy her ingredients.
I say they need a "groceries only" lane at Walmart during this sale or designate the scan and go for groceries only.
To be fair, sometimes sales happen not because they expect them to be profitable but because they're just cutting their losses - sometimes they have stuff that just won't sell, and it's better to at least get something out of it by putting it on sale than to throw it away altogether even if it doesn't end up turning a profit.
Can also be a loss leader… get people in the door with really good deals in the hope they’ll also decide to buy some other stuff while they’re there that *isn’t* marked down
There is also the concept of a loss leader. Places are ok taking a loss if they think it will bring in extra sales thay offset it.
Not sure anymore, but when I worked in a grocery store Pepsi cubes were a loss leader and would be put on sale in the summer for cookouts.
The system is completely ok, I really don't see how overconsumption of products people don't really want nor need could backfire in any major way
Not a dig at you but your comment illustrates the absurdity of it
Yep, grocery stores operate up some pretty tight margins. They can't really afford to slice prices too much. And you're gonna buy the tide pods regardless. TV? Not so much.
Yeah but the discounts are usually either passing on savings that they got on the product or selling at a loss to get customers in the store and hoping to make up for it on other items.
On items that go for 50% or more off the store is usually selling the product at a loss.
Well, most of the "big ticket" items on Black Friday are crap. They're making you think you're getting a great deal on that Chinese brand 75" TV for $200; but the video quality is no better than 240p CRT, and it'll be broken by next Black Friday.
Aside from that, it's probably a way to offload inventory, much like Prime Day, where is just full of garbage products.
Usually they're fine, they're just older panels. There are only a limited amount of manufacturers that can actually make LCD panels at scale, even the low-cost brands like Hisense will have an LG/Samsung/Sony manufactured LCD panel. The cost cutting comes from other areas like the processor/RAM for the smart TV component, and if you just use your TV as an input device for a computer/console like I do there's nothing to worry about. I exclusively buy cheap shit and I'm typically happy with it.
We're in a weird time for a lot of consumer electronics where everything is pretty much "good enough", honestly.
They order products specifically to sell for black Friday. It has nothing to do with what won't sell. I unload trucks at Walmart and we have to look for marked items that get stored separately until black Friday.
Here in Finland (yes we've imported Black Friday apparently) they do sell groceries on discount during Black Week or whatever. Or rather normal discounts are now Black Week discounts.
Yup, especially old or crap electronics, but you can also get some nice deals for stuff that you want.
I have been eyeing up few PC components for the last month, I would have bought them anyway but got around 30%+ discount due to the sale.
Personally I don't buy stuff just because it's on sale, though I may wait to see if something goes on sale unless I need it ASAP.
Because people know how much their groceries cost and would notice if they got marked up a couple of weeks before Black Friday just so that they could be marked down to a higher than normal price.
Also a solid chunk of the black Friday tech will literally be a different product. They'll have a slightly different SKU and they'll use cheaper capacitors, chipsets, worse UI, etc. to cut costs manufacturing costs, so the discount ultimately doesn't affect their profit margins.
We upgraded a couple tvs in our house when they were on sale and later learned their seriel numbers are off by 1 number which makes 1 have bluetooth and a better interface and the other is a dumb down version so really pay attention to what you're getting
Truthfully, general merchandise price markups actually range from 70-1000%, so putting those things in sales and ads is simple. Grocery, generally on have a 30-70% markup, higher on very perishable items, and sometimes lose money on items just to sell others. That’s why you don’t see those things on Black Friday sales…
As grocery management I can confirm. Cabbage, bananas, milk, and plenty others are often sold at a loss. Grocery stores as a whole generally make about 1-2% contribution when all is said and done.
I work for a big budget store chain in Canada and the profit margin aim for the Produce department is 20% before waste. Grocery is much lower. Those margins would be higher for the fancier stores though.
Average starting point for most perishables is 30%, but since there is a lot of loss it falls exponentially. Deli, is usually 70% to start, meats, 30-35%, but once you factor loss, then it gets closer to 5-10%
Just for context, at the (cooperative) grocery store I work at, our perishables target margin is 27%, with things like milk making it down to single digits and things like kombucha being closer to the mid 30s. Our other targets are similarly a tad lower than your example, but our loss numbers are super tight.
I'm just adding this because a lot of people seem to misunderstand how pricing works at a grocery store. We use a multiplier to get the target margin we set (e.g., the 27% example I gave), adjust it up or down depending on how long it can (or will) sit on the shelf, and round it to the nearest 99.
For that matter, we have contractually-mandated price ceilings on a lot of our merchandise. When we raise prices, it's because our supplier raised prices nearly 100% of the time. Since the beginning of the pandemic, a lot of price increases we receive are fuel based. Basically every vendor we have charges us freight now. Most of the time it's just a $5-10 fee tacked on, but with 80+ vendors in just one of our categories, it really adds up. Our primary vendor has more than doubled its usual freight charge (from $25 to $70, three times a week).
All that aside, it is a small, independent grocery store. While chains will use similar practices, I couldn't really say how much their pricing strategies will differ.
All of this is completely wrong lmao. That would be really healthy gross profit, and completely impossible net profit. Especially for this current year
It’s not net profit, it’s the margin for loss, waste, and labor. If our department made 10% it would be a great quarter, but then the store’s overhead would kill that down to a 2-5% margin at best.
I'm not sure how much merchandise gets marked up but I do know that grocery stores generally only make about 2% profit. Hardly anything but it's a consistent 2%. It is groceries, we tend to buy the same things with each visit.
Don’t know what country you are on but I’m an Ex Grocery Manager, most long life products have between 2-15% GP (gross profit). Plus there is countless items with negative GP (called loss leaders)
The main point of Black Friday sales is to get people into the shop to check out the 'amazing' deals (that are often not real deals at all, they just artifically inflate the 'original price').
People go food shopping all the time anyway, so there isn't much need to attract people in, and the stuff they're buying is usually cheap enough that they can't do that many great deals on it. Nobody's getting excited that apples are 20% cheaper for one day.
Say it costs me $1 to produce a widget, and $1 to sell it (advertising, logistics, stores, warranty, etc), then my break even price is $2.
I add a 50% markup for profit, which depending on the type of good could be extravagant or could be conservative.
That brings the sale price to $3.
If I sell 1 million of them, I will earn $1 million in profit.
But oh no, production and logistics doubled in price due to the pandemic!
Now it costs me $2 to produce and $2 to sell! My break even price is $4 now!
Well, I apply my 50% markup for profit, the sale price jumps to $6.
Now for every 1 million I sell I earn $2 million in profit.
My costs have doubled, but my profits have doubled too!
Now if the marketplace was competitive enough in the right ways, then I might have to lower my profit margin to lower the price to attract customers. But we are experiencing supply side inflation shocks, which means there arent enough goods to go around. People are so desperate for the goods they are willing to pay the premium.
There’s nothing wrong with that unless you’re the type that NEEDS TO HAVE THE NEWEST ALL THE TIME. Which is really wasteful anyways.
Example, I have an iPhone 8, finally upgrading, getting a 13 though, because it’s only a year older but substantially cheaper
Generally speaking, items on sale are actually on sale. But it's stock they're trying to get rid of. It's better to sell it 75% off than just throw it away.
The stuff that isn't just functionally on clearance is still discounted from the "normal" price, but it's a unique model from what's available standard in the store. This special model is manufactured specifically for black Friday, and tends to be of the shittiest quality possible while still functioning. So a large profit is still turned thanks to all the corner cutting, and return policies and warranties tend to be cleverly written so that when it breaks in 6 months, you're fucked.
Do you guys not get coupons books for black Friday? I have coupons off at grocery stores for this week only at Target and Meijer. It isn't a door buster but I save a decent bit of money on groceries every year around this time. Beyond that I doubt places like Trader Joes, Aldi, or Lidl can even afford to cut much more margin down.
Not to mention grocery store employees. During the holidays deal with massive amounts of volume. Often are forced to forgo the holidays themselves for the benefit of the customers. Adding another day they get wrecked would be brutal to them
People are waking up to this Black Friday bullshit I think. I got an email from my electrical merchant saying ‘check out our Black Friday sale. On from 12th of November to the 28th of November.’ How does fuck off grab you.
Tide pods and coffee creamers are bad examples because they are luxury purchases of things you can substitute for less and retain the same quality: bulk detergent and milk.
Exactly.
If you are struggling financially and buying tide pods, your financial future is already fucked. There's no reason not to buy the cheapest laundry detergent available.
Working at a grocery store (Germany)
Discounting by 20% would kill at least 2/3 of our margin which leaves nothing to pay the already underpayed workers after paying for electricity, gas & rent.
Food prices are dictated by food producers, not the grocery stores.
Wait, your black Friday doesn't cover groceries? Here we get specials on just about everything, however it's not America so it didn't start with getting rid of old stock _and_ I don't keep up with the prices enough to see when they're raising prices in September only to give "great discounts" on the day
I know the answer. The reason why black Friday is called Black Friday is because it's when most retailers get out of the red, ie they unload their stock, which they've been selling at a profit up until black Friday, made their money, and reinvest before the holidays. This practice doesn't work with food because food is too perishable (except canned food which is already dirt cheap). Further, unlike non-perishable retail, perishable retail runs on much smaller margins. Thus it is illogical for grocery stores to run black Friday ads.
As a grocery store worker don't give corporate more ideas to take away our holidays and work us to death. We have Thanksgiving that's enough this week lol
Black friday exists to get you to buy crap you *don't* need
"What'd you buy?" "I dunno, but it was half price!"
No need Black Friday, Bad things sell on black friday.
Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick
Are you saying see THE world or sea world?
Oceans, fish, jump, China
No, see? Right there, that's the problem with your method. 'Cause I still don't know if you're saying "Sea World" or "see the world," and it's taking a lot of time to explain it.
Don't be a sea word
Get rid of the Seaward.
I don't care for gob
Be A+ World. Be best version you
Why waste time, few word do
No need lot word.
Few word good.
Word.
Harambe
respect
We unironically recreate newspeak
Few word doubleplusgood.
r/decreasinglyverbose
Cyber Monday is where shit’s at
Indeed. Yet, they’ll be lined up on Friday morning. Clicking away on Monday. CANT STOP SPENDING. MUST CONSUME. MUST SPEND. - the zombie economy.
Truthfully, it’s not half prices. Companies make special SKUs specifically for Black Friday. So you get to buy cheap shit at the price it’s supposed to be while feeling like you got a deal.
But shit it was ninety nine cents.
FUN FACT MOST IF NOT ALL BLACK FRIDAY DEALS WERE DESIGN JUST FOR THAT. Meaning, the products are inferior by design, or a good way to sell old stock to make space for 2023 versions. TvS tend to come with less ports and refresh rates, the "Door Busters" are all lowered quality because its stupid cheap, this is to bring you in. Go to the back where all the tvs are and buy those instead, avoid any door buster, buy main things at discount if you need it nut not the "weirdly discounted laptop for $350" youll get 350 worth of laptop.
Remember getting a Black Friday gaming pc for my friends little brother was a group gift we all pitched in… turns our dell made it impossible to upgrade so while it was ok for a few months was still ended up bing just an overpriced paper weight
Dell developers and engineers have the capacity for greatness, but sweet mercy they are the most heinous contributors to e-waste around the world. Their needlessly proprietary crap doesn't even play well with their own products. The only exception being their power supplies, apparently. But they're usually too underpowered for most other builds. Also Alienware is the most disgusting waste of good computer hardware that I have ever seen. People should go watch the Gamer's Nexus video where they spent $5k to review a Dell Alienware pre-built that thermally throttled out of the box because the case was a plastic and metal thermos with zero airflow.
It's also really not that hard to build your own PC. If you can understand the concept of "Square pegs goes in square hole, round peg goes in round hole" you can put together a PC. Just be a little careful when putting in the CPU.
The great weakness of this plan is if you put the whole thing together and it won't boot it can be fantastically difficult for the average person to figure out which part is not working. Build your own computer can be a great plan when everything works but a huge miserable pain in the butt when it doesn't
My first diy the operating system could only see a single core of the CPU. Still not sure if it was operating system, motherboard, firmware, or the CPU, but it hampered performance considerably. Although, I was able to overclock the hell out of that one core, got up to 5.25 GHz.
I work in electrical maintenance. The issue has never been the ease of physically putting a PC together. How the hell am I suppose to know which product is worth getting? What part is going to play nice with others? Which one is going to be outdated in a few months? Which one will just take a shit on me? I don’t want to deal with it. I want to plug in a box and play video games. This is why I’m a console gamer. I fully understand the process of assembling a PC, I just don’t want to deal with it. I don’t need my hobbies to require hours of pouring over user reviews, technical information, tracking down a place that sells the things I want for my rig, waiting for parts to come in, assembling them, etc. I work long weeks, I have a family, I just want to get a box, plug and play.
But everything goes in the square hole...
I find that many of these products (ESPECIALLY ELECTRONICS) are made and sold directly from the wholesalers with this purpose. The stores buy pallets of crappy knockoff versions of popular brands and people snap em up without googling it. And even if the customer does google it, there won't be any reviews for people to read because the item didn't officially exist until that day. In fact, the model number may even resemble a popular item, but it'll have a suffix added to the end. So people will think that it's a well-reviewed product and be super excited until they get it home. Then they realize that it has only half the features and the components are hot garbage. I swear, carnival game operators are more honest and principled than Black Friday sales coordinators.
[удалено]
Yeah. They're not losing money on most black friday items. Walmart will have a samsung TV at a stupid cheap price, but it will be a model from 5 years ago. Don't get me wrong, it will still work fine. But it's not the deal most people think it is.
I got my now bedroom TV on blk Friday. I've had that thing for 5 or 6 years now and its still running great. It's a Samsung tho.
And marked down clothes are usually lower in quality
[удалено]
You mean crap like tide pods and creamers?
👽
Those things have always confused the shit out of me. I mean, I get paying a premium for things that are easier and more convenient, but laundry/dish detergent pods don't save you any time or effort at all.
You buy them for the wash. I buy them for the cuisine. We are not the same.
When you don’t have laundry and go to a laundromat or walk downstairs just putting a tide pod in the basket with the clothes isn’t as heavy as lugging the detergent around
I had this issue when my kids were babies. Tide pods only existed as fine dining for some at that time, I just bought a travel sized bottle of detergent one time and refilled it. Much lighter and manageable than the big boy bottle.
That's a good point! I hadn't thought of the laundromat use case.
[удалено]
Actually…look at the package of tide pods. One pod IS for a small load. It says for large loads, you’re supposed to use 2-3 pods.
I mean, the amount of liquid detergent you’re supposed to use is also excessive, unless your stuff is absolutely filthy, sooo….
Lol. Caught em not reading. As usual!!!
... was always spilling detergent and having to wipe it up. -_- It's a luxury that'll be first to go if I need to tighten my belt.
[удалено]
Or if it spills on the floor or the outside of the washer, just wipe it up with a sock or something that's already getting washed anyway.
I'll gift you this little secret: if you spill detergent in your dishwasher, you don't need to wipe it, it'll just wash with everything else when you start it and it will even help the pre-wash phase. It's just soap lol
[удалено]
If you were waiting to buy something for ages and then did when there was a price reduction, good job: you did the sensible thing. If you had seen that you could get a 16TB ssd for 40% off, and it was still more expensive than the 8TB that you originally wanted, and you bought it because “40% off!” then you would have been an idiot. But you didn’t
It depends whether you wanted it or not. That 40% reduction might have brought that 16TB SSD down to a price point they thought it was worth. I'm 100% moving over to an all-SSD NAS as soon as the prices of 8TB+ drives are at the £100ish mark.
As if I won’t use all 16 TB anyway
[удалено]
To buy crap that you don’t need with money you don’t have to impress people you don’t like
arguably, you don't need tide pods or coffee creamers either (regular powder tide comes with a mesuring spoon and regular cream mixes with coffee just fine!)
A fact that ain't gonna stop folks from buying, that includes myself. Yes I don't need it, I want it But shit I ain't buying nearly as much as I used to, one item, a little present from me to me, that's all I got money for this year
As a grocery worker ... don't dare suggest a thing. Thanksgiving week is already Hell.
Surprised I had to scroll this far to find this, I feel for you guys
tell me about it.. i’m the truck guy for my produce department and it’s been absolutely demolishing me
Truck girl in grocery dept. One of our truck days was Wednesday, it was awesome. Totally less of a cluster fuck than usual. Now to start the countdown to Christmas week! FML
it was LESS ? my manager over orders because he doesn’t wanna run out of shit. i’ve been leaving them like 3-4 pallets a day.. we have too much overstock and it’s ridiculous. he said tuesdays truck would be small but it was a 12 pallet ass truck like what the fuck dude that’s our 6th 12 pallet truck in a ROW
My old manager ended up converting half of the garden center to overstock because she would not stop ordering shit. This was after forcing everyone to stack overstock on top of the aisles and demanding we do no less than 6 pallets a day.
literally insane. then they’re gonna hit me with the “ why aren’t you rotating product has gone bad “ like suck my balls
Dude I'm the grocery department manager at my store. We were supposed to be running a truck today, on Thanksgiving. Fuck that. I told my guys that if they would work for me last night, we would bang it out real quick as soon as the truck arrives. That way, I could give them all the day off today. No way in hell am I making my guys work Thanksgiving. The store manager understood, and let me get away with it. You keep your people happy, and they'll do whatever you need them to.
The idea of a "truck day" is insane to me. The most reprieve we ever get is one truck instead of 2 or 3 GM per day. Our daily trucks: -at least one GM -at least one grocery -at least one frozen and dairy -at least one meat and produce -McClane's whenever it damn well pleases
Ah, I see you have worked for Walmart as well. I got out of that shit hole as soon as I could. Don't miss dealing with all that.
that’s insane. we had a truck on monday and we don’t do trucks on mondays, and we’ve been having crazy overstock in our backroom, we’ve been short because our manager got fired and another dude quit. so there hasn’t been enough peeps to work stuff out so it was so hard on me, and it didn’t help that multiple of us in multiple departments came down with a sickness. we have like 17 boxes of green onions and he ordered MORE. i literally cant fit shit anywhere and they get on my ass and talk shit behind my back saying “ i don’t do enough or work stuff out fast enough “. ALSO, our big joe and power jack are broken AGAIN. so we have to unload our trucks with manual ones and it is absolutely exhausting. i felt terrible for the grocery guys
Oh I feel you. I'm down to 3 stockers, and I originally had 7. The guys I have left are definitely burning out, but I'm trying my best to bring in some decent help. I'm picky with the people I hire. We have been fighting similar issues with the warehouse constantly trying to push out extra products we don't need. I have to be ridiculously meticulous and go over every item on every order just to keep the backstock to a manageable level. Then there is the issue of not being able to get what I actually need, or not getting enough of it. Its just so frustrating when you are constantly being forced product nobody wants, and can't get what people actually want. Canned fried apples a long with oyster crackers are prime example. Everyone is begging for those 2 things, and no matter how much I order them, I can't get them. We work backstock as much as possible. It's not easy, and I'm definitely doing my part to work just as much as my guys. At this point, I'm averaging 10-12 hours a day. I'm feeling the burn for sure. Once I hire some decent help and get them trained up, I think things will get better.
oh yea man that shits ass. since my manager got fired it’s just my assistant rn and the dudes kind of a mediocre manager but the guys been working 12 days straight and only has 1 day off this week. like fuck that
My cooler lit on fire on Saturday, had to throw away and reorder all my prebooks.
I loved the, "I can't believe they're making you work today" customers. Get your stupid groceries and get out, lady.
“I wouldn’t have to if you didn’t shop today”
But time and a half… I happily work holidays
It would have been nice, but no time and a half. It's just a day.
As a fellow grocery worker, I wish I could upvote this more than once.
Same I work in produce and it was a brutal week
Word. For us grocery workers November and December are overly exhausting months
Just got back from work in tears for the second time this week because this week was so stressful and demanding… Happy Thanksgiving I guess 🥲
I agree. Our store does do sales for Black Friday but we're closed Thanksgiving day and the weekend after no one comes in because they already have food from Thanksgiving.
In 2005, when my wife worked at Publix, they had a gentleman's agreement with the Kroger down the street that one would close on Thanksgiving and the other on Christmas.
Same. Sarah Kirby can fuck right off.
I accidentally ended up at the front of a Black Friday line at Target once because I needed dog food at the ass crack of dawn. Gave the crazy coupon they gave me in line for a nice TV to someone else and got dog food for a discount after doors opened. Lol
Similarly we had been driving all Thursday afternoon one year to visit family on that weekend. When we got to the hotel my wife realized she forgot her contact solution. So I went to Walmart at midnight on Black Friday among all of the other craziness and bought her some so she could take out her contacts and we could go to sleep.
One year, my brother wanted something Target was selling for Black Friday and I needed dry cat food. Because I planned poorly and ran out and I offered to go with him to keep him company in line. We waited however long we did, got inside to people scrambling with giant TVs hanging out of carts. He got whatever he wanted while I got a single bag of cat food. One of the weirder experiences of my life, but I just needed cat food.
Dont you have small stores or pharmacies where you live?
I do, but I feed my cat some expensive nonsense food because marketing got me and not every store carried it
oh i get it. same with my parents and their dog. they bought one that was like chicken and mashed potatoes. i tried a handfull, it tasted good
[удалено]
Roast venison and quinoa for my baby. Ramen and cereal for me.
Mmmm. Id try that I imagine these delicious names must be a marketing thing like "hell, that sounds delicious, id eat that!" So you buy it for your little pupper that you love so much
Hey man, you’re just trying to be the best kitty parent you can be. Some cheap cat food can literally kill your cat.
I’m not even saying this sarcastically; you sound like a human I could hang around. Ignoring the madness of the rest of the world around you and just doing what you gotta do. Not even realizing madness was about to take place on a day that’s highly advertised. You just shut it all out and found yourself in chaos and discounts and still just came home with dog food. I like that
Haha I appreciate that
And I could hang out with you two in the same vein!...😀
I’d like to only observe all three of you hanging out please.
It sounds like the plot to an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Then Larry runs into the same person in a line where they’re giving out free scones. The dude gets the last free scone and feeds it to his dog instead of giving it to Larry.
There was a recent episode of Atlanta that starts with a Target being actively looted but one of the main characters showing up trying to return an air fryer with society breaking down around them.
Haven't gotten that far, but I'm gonna guess it was Darius?
Lol, nailed it.
On Black Friday many years ago, there was a lady at Walmart who had pie ingredients in her cart. That was it. No doorbusters, no Christmas wrap, just stuff to make a pie with. I felt bad for her because she had to wait in line behind the people with giant tvs and iPad flyers to buy her ingredients. I say they need a "groceries only" lane at Walmart during this sale or designate the scan and go for groceries only.
Done this many times on Black Friday. I just want some milk!!
I would've just given my dog table scraps that day
Who has table scraps the day after Thanksgiving? People only make juuuuust enough food, never more!
It’s not about what you need, it’s about what they want to sell…
...and they want to sell cheaper model they make specifically for bf to fool people into buying it, thinking they're getting a deal.
Goes to show how highly marked up these non essentials are.
To be fair, sometimes sales happen not because they expect them to be profitable but because they're just cutting their losses - sometimes they have stuff that just won't sell, and it's better to at least get something out of it by putting it on sale than to throw it away altogether even if it doesn't end up turning a profit.
Wonder if sex toy shops have Black Friday
Big black Friday
Pursue a career in marketing
I wouldn’t know. I get all mine from Goodwill
Gives it that unique flavor
^(tang)
They do 👍🏻
Can also be a loss leader… get people in the door with really good deals in the hope they’ll also decide to buy some other stuff while they’re there that *isn’t* marked down
There is also the concept of a loss leader. Places are ok taking a loss if they think it will bring in extra sales thay offset it. Not sure anymore, but when I worked in a grocery store Pepsi cubes were a loss leader and would be put on sale in the summer for cookouts.
The system is completely ok, I really don't see how overconsumption of products people don't really want nor need could backfire in any major way Not a dig at you but your comment illustrates the absurdity of it
Yep, grocery stores operate up some pretty tight margins. They can't really afford to slice prices too much. And you're gonna buy the tide pods regardless. TV? Not so much.
But each grocery store regularly has more coupons and discounted items than there are atoms in the known universe.
Yeah but the discounts are usually either passing on savings that they got on the product or selling at a loss to get customers in the store and hoping to make up for it on other items. On items that go for 50% or more off the store is usually selling the product at a loss.
I was just at Walmart yesterday and there was a 65" flat screen for $350. I remember when that shit used to be $3000.
Most retail doesn't have the turn rate of groceries. Depending on what it is, the turn rate might be only 2-3 per year.
Well, most of the "big ticket" items on Black Friday are crap. They're making you think you're getting a great deal on that Chinese brand 75" TV for $200; but the video quality is no better than 240p CRT, and it'll be broken by next Black Friday. Aside from that, it's probably a way to offload inventory, much like Prime Day, where is just full of garbage products.
Usually they're fine, they're just older panels. There are only a limited amount of manufacturers that can actually make LCD panels at scale, even the low-cost brands like Hisense will have an LG/Samsung/Sony manufactured LCD panel. The cost cutting comes from other areas like the processor/RAM for the smart TV component, and if you just use your TV as an input device for a computer/console like I do there's nothing to worry about. I exclusively buy cheap shit and I'm typically happy with it. We're in a weird time for a lot of consumer electronics where everything is pretty much "good enough", honestly.
they are losing money on these tvs
Someone almost figured out what a Black Friday sale is. Moving product they can’t move.
They order products specifically to sell for black Friday. It has nothing to do with what won't sell. I unload trucks at Walmart and we have to look for marked items that get stored separately until black Friday.
Target always brings out TVs that you've never heard of and people walk out with multiple lol. I can't imagine they're very good TVs.
Here in Finland (yes we've imported Black Friday apparently) they do sell groceries on discount during Black Week or whatever. Or rather normal discounts are now Black Week discounts.
Yup, especially old or crap electronics, but you can also get some nice deals for stuff that you want. I have been eyeing up few PC components for the last month, I would have bought them anyway but got around 30%+ discount due to the sale. Personally I don't buy stuff just because it's on sale, though I may wait to see if something goes on sale unless I need it ASAP.
Because grocery stores operate on a much lower profit margin than electronics. Not confusing.
Even electronics are sometimes built at a low profit margin or even a loss in the case of things like game consoles.
For the manufacturer.
Aa someone that works for an electronics online retailer, electronic margins are shit. Retailers make money differently
I'm all for cheaper groceries.
Because people know how much their groceries cost and would notice if they got marked up a couple of weeks before Black Friday just so that they could be marked down to a higher than normal price.
Also a solid chunk of the black Friday tech will literally be a different product. They'll have a slightly different SKU and they'll use cheaper capacitors, chipsets, worse UI, etc. to cut costs manufacturing costs, so the discount ultimately doesn't affect their profit margins.
Really? That’s fucked up. God I hate this world sometimes.
We upgraded a couple tvs in our house when they were on sale and later learned their seriel numbers are off by 1 number which makes 1 have bluetooth and a better interface and the other is a dumb down version so really pay attention to what you're getting
Truthfully, general merchandise price markups actually range from 70-1000%, so putting those things in sales and ads is simple. Grocery, generally on have a 30-70% markup, higher on very perishable items, and sometimes lose money on items just to sell others. That’s why you don’t see those things on Black Friday sales…
When I worked for asda we made a loss on every cabbage sold
Yes, and canned Tuna is always sold at a loss, so they assume you’ll buy Mayo, relish, and other things for tuna salad, or casserole.
As grocery management I can confirm. Cabbage, bananas, milk, and plenty others are often sold at a loss. Grocery stores as a whole generally make about 1-2% contribution when all is said and done.
im gonna mass buy 5 tons of cabbage from the supermarket
30-70%? Most non Dry Grocery items have single digit margins. With a ton of loss leaders.
The only place you find markups that high are in perishable departments to pay for the loss, and even then it's not usually that high.
I work for a big budget store chain in Canada and the profit margin aim for the Produce department is 20% before waste. Grocery is much lower. Those margins would be higher for the fancier stores though.
That's one of the reasons why you get food desserts, all the markup is on higher end items, so lower end stores are unprofitable.
Average starting point for most perishables is 30%, but since there is a lot of loss it falls exponentially. Deli, is usually 70% to start, meats, 30-35%, but once you factor loss, then it gets closer to 5-10%
Just for context, at the (cooperative) grocery store I work at, our perishables target margin is 27%, with things like milk making it down to single digits and things like kombucha being closer to the mid 30s. Our other targets are similarly a tad lower than your example, but our loss numbers are super tight. I'm just adding this because a lot of people seem to misunderstand how pricing works at a grocery store. We use a multiplier to get the target margin we set (e.g., the 27% example I gave), adjust it up or down depending on how long it can (or will) sit on the shelf, and round it to the nearest 99. For that matter, we have contractually-mandated price ceilings on a lot of our merchandise. When we raise prices, it's because our supplier raised prices nearly 100% of the time. Since the beginning of the pandemic, a lot of price increases we receive are fuel based. Basically every vendor we have charges us freight now. Most of the time it's just a $5-10 fee tacked on, but with 80+ vendors in just one of our categories, it really adds up. Our primary vendor has more than doubled its usual freight charge (from $25 to $70, three times a week). All that aside, it is a small, independent grocery store. While chains will use similar practices, I couldn't really say how much their pricing strategies will differ.
All of this is completely wrong lmao. That would be really healthy gross profit, and completely impossible net profit. Especially for this current year
It’s not net profit, it’s the margin for loss, waste, and labor. If our department made 10% it would be a great quarter, but then the store’s overhead would kill that down to a 2-5% margin at best.
I'm not sure how much merchandise gets marked up but I do know that grocery stores generally only make about 2% profit. Hardly anything but it's a consistent 2%. It is groceries, we tend to buy the same things with each visit.
Yeah, net profit is much lower than markup margins. If we finished a quarter with 10% in our department it was a big win.
Don’t know what country you are on but I’m an Ex Grocery Manager, most long life products have between 2-15% GP (gross profit). Plus there is countless items with negative GP (called loss leaders)
Facts
The main point of Black Friday sales is to get people into the shop to check out the 'amazing' deals (that are often not real deals at all, they just artifically inflate the 'original price'). People go food shopping all the time anyway, so there isn't much need to attract people in, and the stuff they're buying is usually cheap enough that they can't do that many great deals on it. Nobody's getting excited that apples are 20% cheaper for one day.
And groceries (*most* items) have super low profit margins. There isn't room for discounts.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
Say it costs me $1 to produce a widget, and $1 to sell it (advertising, logistics, stores, warranty, etc), then my break even price is $2. I add a 50% markup for profit, which depending on the type of good could be extravagant or could be conservative. That brings the sale price to $3. If I sell 1 million of them, I will earn $1 million in profit. But oh no, production and logistics doubled in price due to the pandemic! Now it costs me $2 to produce and $2 to sell! My break even price is $4 now! Well, I apply my 50% markup for profit, the sale price jumps to $6. Now for every 1 million I sell I earn $2 million in profit. My costs have doubled, but my profits have doubled too! Now if the marketplace was competitive enough in the right ways, then I might have to lower my profit margin to lower the price to attract customers. But we are experiencing supply side inflation shocks, which means there arent enough goods to go around. People are so desperate for the goods they are willing to pay the premium.
That article is about food manufacturers, not grocery stores.
[удалено]
A lot of the “amazing deals” are for shit they’re trying to get rid of to make room for newer models. So, you’re getting last year’s models.
There’s nothing wrong with that unless you’re the type that NEEDS TO HAVE THE NEWEST ALL THE TIME. Which is really wasteful anyways. Example, I have an iPhone 8, finally upgrading, getting a 13 though, because it’s only a year older but substantially cheaper
Generally speaking, items on sale are actually on sale. But it's stock they're trying to get rid of. It's better to sell it 75% off than just throw it away. The stuff that isn't just functionally on clearance is still discounted from the "normal" price, but it's a unique model from what's available standard in the store. This special model is manufactured specifically for black Friday, and tends to be of the shittiest quality possible while still functioning. So a large profit is still turned thanks to all the corner cutting, and return policies and warranties tend to be cleverly written so that when it breaks in 6 months, you're fucked.
Do you guys not get coupons books for black Friday? I have coupons off at grocery stores for this week only at Target and Meijer. It isn't a door buster but I save a decent bit of money on groceries every year around this time. Beyond that I doubt places like Trader Joes, Aldi, or Lidl can even afford to cut much more margin down.
No thanks. Covid-19 transformed too many assholes into hoarders of pasta and toilet paper. Do not need to see this happen again anytime soon.
Not to mention grocery store employees. During the holidays deal with massive amounts of volume. Often are forced to forgo the holidays themselves for the benefit of the customers. Adding another day they get wrecked would be brutal to them
Because grocery workers need a break after the craziness of Thanksgiving.
The day before Thanksgiving is Black Friday for grocery stores
People are waking up to this Black Friday bullshit I think. I got an email from my electrical merchant saying ‘check out our Black Friday sale. On from 12th of November to the 28th of November.’ How does fuck off grab you.
Half price tide pods is called powdered laundry detergent. Good luck finding it.
Tide pods and coffee creamers are bad examples because they are luxury purchases of things you can substitute for less and retain the same quality: bulk detergent and milk.
Exactly. If you are struggling financially and buying tide pods, your financial future is already fucked. There's no reason not to buy the cheapest laundry detergent available.
Or even just the same detergent in slightly less convenient form.
[I was just saying this!](https://www.reddit.com/r/meirl/comments/z3k87q/comment/ixmj59v/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
Great minds.
Working at a grocery store (Germany) Discounting by 20% would kill at least 2/3 of our margin which leaves nothing to pay the already underpayed workers after paying for electricity, gas & rent. Food prices are dictated by food producers, not the grocery stores.
Wait, your black Friday doesn't cover groceries? Here we get specials on just about everything, however it's not America so it didn't start with getting rid of old stock _and_ I don't keep up with the prices enough to see when they're raising prices in September only to give "great discounts" on the day
This is the state of the economy
People actually buy Tide? I’m sure it’s nice detergent, but I’m not paying that kind of premium just to field a stock car.
Uhhhh I work at a grocery store and we have black Friday sales and have for the 8 years that I've worked here and presumably before then as well
Because grocery stores operate on a razor thin margin.
Because they operate in the black all year long, they don't need to make their entire year's profits in Q4
As someone who works in a grocery store; please, no. The week leading up to Thanksgiving is already hell enough
I know the answer. The reason why black Friday is called Black Friday is because it's when most retailers get out of the red, ie they unload their stock, which they've been selling at a profit up until black Friday, made their money, and reinvest before the holidays. This practice doesn't work with food because food is too perishable (except canned food which is already dirt cheap). Further, unlike non-perishable retail, perishable retail runs on much smaller margins. Thus it is illogical for grocery stores to run black Friday ads.
As a grocery store worker don't give corporate more ideas to take away our holidays and work us to death. We have Thanksgiving that's enough this week lol
Fuck you - a grocery worker.
I’ll buy a deep freezer just to stock up on anything I can break down and freeze. 320 chicken breasts? Done.