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Comment by socializer | Hacker News Reader

And yet, supermarkets existed in the year 2000, selling products at comparable or lower inflation-adjusted prices, without any of this connectivity.

Yes, a lot of it exists to squeeze a bit more of a margin out of the business, but come on. The alternative isn't going back to the Middle Ages, it's shaving 0.1% off the profit margin. It's OK to wonder if the risk is worth it.

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Grocery stores infamously have some of the lowest margins in all of retail and typically hover in the 1-3% range. As a sector they have about zero room for inefficiency and have to be this aggressive about chasing operating cost reductions.

The increased profits that have occurred in recent decades have landed with the big food companies, not with the retail chains selling their products at very little margin.

Wonder the margins on those $9 boxes of Cheerios at major California grocers.

They did promise to increase the cost of breakfast a couple years ago.

Well, for whatever it's worth, I think the closest manufacturing facility for those would be in Iowa. They had a plant in California but it closed in 2015.

AKA, the decade where everyone bought way too much into the 'Just do JIT supply chain for the manufacturing location to warehouse tail and pretend we are Amazon' bullshit.

I put it that way because it is short-sighted to not consider that transportation costs will always increase over time (i.e. fuel prices, wages of drivers) and shipping a final product over that long of a distance (i.e. at least half of the country, and instead of shipping grain to process it is finished boxes which is less efficient for volume) and yet they made that choice.

Where it got nasty is that when the average consumer base decided it was fine to pay dealer markups on cars because of the parts issues that industry saw from their JIT shortsights, everyone saw dollar signs instead of a problem to fix.

Wonder the max price a company would be charged to ship a trailer of the largest boxes of Cheerios from say Maine to San Diego. Maybe fifty cents a box? You got me curious about the breakdown of the $9.

I'll admit I'm curious about the cost breakdown myself.

I did go ahead and do a query against gemini, and the estimate is 25 cents a box after considering long tail expenses (i.e. fuel, CARB premiums, etc.)

So, Less than you thought and way less than even I initially expected.

Mea culpa on my end, I wonder where the other parts of the price are coming from.

I do have other thoughts, but don't know California labor laws and the like enough to guess.

e.x. I know one big factor in the 'slowing' of inflation of grocery prices in my state over the last 20 years, has been the erosion of pay/benefits for workers. If California is still guaranteeing that for the workers (decent health care, at least a couple weeks of vacation time, etc.) and it's built into the cost... makes sense and TBH I wouldn't hate paying extra for that. Grocers here have with only a few exceptions gotten terrible.

A lot of supermarkets here own their own "budget" food brands and for many items they are not that far off from the competition in price.

Yeah, I worked at one during that time. The amount of food we threw away on a regular basis was incredible.

Seems like these days stores just keep it on the shelves instead of throwing it away. The produce quality in even the more expensive stores here is abysmal.

I think it's an interesting question.

I would be interested to know what the damage caused by this attack is compared to savings over a system where thermostats need to be adjusted on-site.

Except that in this case, the possibility of something like this probably is worth it, because system vulnerabilities are solvable problems, while ignoring the ability to improve system efficiency is a static stance. A lot of things have driven up the price of groceries since that time. You mention "comparable or lower inflation adjusted prices", but this hides the fact that the inflation adjusted basket of groceries in the US is near inflation (105% vs a baseline of 94%), while the input costs to that supply chain (like labor, and diesel) have gone up faster. The efficiency isn't doing nothing, grocery prices would almost definitely be higher without it.

> the inflation adjusted basket of groceries in the US is near inflation

You must not mean what you have said here. If so, you are double-dipping.

> system vulnerabilities are solvable problems

Which apparently why after >2000yrs of effort from both sides we now, finally!, have locks that no lockpicker can compromise.

That's not what "vulnerabilities are solvable problems" means, except maybe for cybersecurity maximalists who believe that, "bro, add passkeys, and just one more thing, attestation, and W^X, and ..., and there will never be vulnerabilities".

Vulnerabilities will always exist. Systems will always be hackable. You solve the problem by patching what you can, and cleaning up after what gets exploited, if and when it gets exploited.

> because system vulnerabilities are solvable problems

If only…

That's why I spoke of them in the plural. Obviously the possibility of a system hack (presumably) won't ever completely go away, but individual vulnerabilities as they appear in specific systems are usually tractable problems, especially if you narrow it to things that one wants solved rather than all possible vulnerabilities regardless of severity or accessibility.

That's the work that goes into hiding the "other half" of the inflation (i.e. the 2x diff between reported inflation and what you can actually see in your life).

How would you stay in business if your competitor was offering 20% off your prices because they had better logistics and tracking? Ask consumers to eat the cost due to their latent demand for, uh, inefficient delivery and food spoilage?

There are numbers between 0.1% and 20%

This is already the case in the grocery market. There are various leaner and more efficient operators offering the same goods for lower prices, sometimes a lot lower than just 20%. However most people don't think to shop at the various Grocery Outlet's or Food4Less's. Working class is wise to it but not really further up the class ladder. They don't think much at all and reflexively go to their ralphs, which plays the opposite game where they have higher prices such that they might occasionally mark them lower and make you think you are getting a deal. Some people are even going to erewhon.

Are you saying that stores in the 2000s were throwing away 20% more of their total revenue than they are today? That sounds crazy, especially given that the prices - again - seem pretty much the same or higher if you correct for inflation.

But more to the point, there's plenty of grocery stores that ask 20% more than their competitors and are doing just fine; in fact, constant price changes and promotions make it impossible for consumers to really compare if Safeway is cheaper than Whole Foods, so people usually go to the place that's physically closer, has better selection, or better vibes. I can't even know if a 12-pack of Coca-Cola is going to be $6.99 or $9.99 today.

Choose your own number, but it has to be large enough that supermarkets decided the CapEx was worth it, and also large enough that once one did it, the rest followed suit.

It's not even significant cost. The main cost is still the hardware, not electronics driving it, and especially not a tiny module that talks with electronics to send/receive commands/metrics

Coca cola is a bad example as it does not require refrigeration during transport and does not spoil fast (at all?).

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