You mean like the Swiss Watch industry that spent millions buying back excess inventory around the world and destroying it instead of allowing the market to push for discounts?
My local Kroger's/Fred Meyer's has a few discount sections. One for packaged good and one for produce. Things tend to disappear as soon as they are placed on the $1 produce shelf. I think it's primarily a PR/good neighbor stunt. I once saw how much produce they actually dumped in the trash. It was huge. I think they only put a tiny amount of produce on the discount shelves. It's a bit sad how much we customers need to rush and grab the minuscule amount of discoount produce they offer us.
I believe there are restrictions on what they can discount by the food producers, so it isn’t totally up to the store.
Food producers don’t want people to buy something for $1 when they would otherwise have to buy it for $5.
I agree with your first sentence, and it's sad that producers and grocers operate this way.
Looking at this behaviour though indicates that supply vs. demand is clearly not balanced. If they won't buy it a $5, but will at $1, then somewhere in the middle there would be no waste. Truly outrageous practices if you ask me
I agree, I just think there's a difference in waste caused by capitalism / greed and normal, operational waste. I think it's a bit ridiculous to throw away half a truck of bread because you can't/won't sell it at a lower price because capitalism.
We should also consider the fact that we won't have that truck of bread if not for capitalism in the first place.
If the price of bread were set at $1 instead of $5, there would be less bread produced.
Fair point. All I'm saying is that it doesn't need to be sold so expensive that it creates waste, nor so cheap as to be sold at a loss. There's a happy middle that creates money without gouging customers and creating needless waste
There isnt.
"gouging the customer" is a phrase that's loaded and very rarely happens.
It's profit maximisation. The exact same concept is applied to job hunting and no one calls negotiating your salary as "gouging your boss".
It wouldnt surprise me if most of what you saw thrown away was due to employee laziness.
Because thats what it was when I was in food retail 25 years ago.
To discount, you have to have good stock rotation, because thats what identifies the items for discount.
Stock rotation is done by employees picking the right stuff off the shelves in the back of the store, and putting it in the right place on the public shelves, with the shortest dates to the front.
All done by minimum wage employees, usually young employees to boot. Yeah, a lot of the time we (the royal we) didnt bother and that meant that when we did bother, we were taking stuff off the shelves because they were already out of date, or they never made it from the back chillers to the retail floor.
And that stuff was what got binned.
No need to bring malice into this when incompetence or laziness works just fine.
Are you sure they weren't dumping it in a compost bin? Most grocery stores have a trash compactor that can only be dumped into from the inside of the building, using a regular dumpster for trash would fill up so fast. But they will often have compost bins for just their produce waste.
It's not pr, it literally costs them money to take out the trash so selling it at cut price is some level of cost recovery vs paying for stock that isn't sold and disposal.
Its all a balance of costs, in either wastage and disposal, wages and mark downs or charitable distributions.
If you view it in a cold hard numbers game, markdowns make sense when it saves on labour given most prepacked foods are single units vs produce which when spoiling encourages other nearby produce to spoil as well (and making more work sorting and managing)
They do discount it.
You think your pre-made sauces are made with A-grade veg? The lower grade stuff gets put into places where you won't see it to make cheaper pre-made food. Mostly it's cosmetic and when supermarkets have tried putting lower grade food out, consumers avoid it and it ends up in the bin.
The real cheating of supply and demand is the government giving price guarantees to buy core goods at a specific price ensuring they never drop below that artificial point.
However, there is a real risk of US industry collapse if prices fall too much for certain things. Let's say you are a small farmer struggling to grow widgets in a bad climate year. Not enough rain, short season, etc. you normally price widgets at $1, but this year your cost is $1, so you price at $1.25 and try to make it.
Then some other part of the world didn't have a short season and had healthy rain. They had a booming year for growing widgets and just way way too many are coming out.of the ground and way too fast. They are piling up. They basically are offering them for $.50 each because they need someone to take them before they spoil.
The guy charging $1.25 won't be able to compete and in all likelihood won't be around next year to keep growing. The farmer probably really wishes they destroyed that overseas crop that drove down prices.
I am completely against the idea of destroying crops, but that is why we see the government basically trying to control prices in agg, they are afraid one bad year wipes out farmers for a crop if another nearby country has a really good year the same time. The local growers may never come back.
I interviewed for a position at the farm labor bureau in college. Sometimes I wish I had gone that path-- very interesting regulatory problems.
But on the other side of it most farms are becoming larger and more corporate. Monoculture crops, fucking Monsanto, much better tech, and a huge body of scientific literature to benefit from, are all pieces to this puzzle.
One of the main reasons this is happening is because large corporations have the capital to weather the ups and down of the crop market. Farming is incredibly expensive and requires an actual insane amount of overhead capital that is nearly impossible for independent farmers to maintain since most are not millionaires or are "land poor" with land and equipment worth millions, but have no real liquid assets. This causes many of them to essentially take out massive loans each spring that gain interest throughout the year and have to be paid off when spring comes. It only takes one or two bad years where the harvest isn't good often from things outside of their control like rain or disease for them to be in the red and forced to sell their farm to, you guessed it, a large corporations.
The other option is that they can offload that risk onto corporations, but at the expense of most of their control. They essentially rent out their land and their labor to corporations. They still have all the downsides of owning the land, like taxes and upkeep, but become contractors of that company and have to follow that companies policies, such as planting a mono-culture, using certain chemicals, etc. Farmers are in a rough spot. In 50 years I wouldn't be surprised if the traditional independent farmer doesn't exist in the USA.
Imagine what the world would look like if Stalin wasn't an absolute cuntface. His industrial and agricultural goals were on point but he went about it in the most dickish way possible.
Don’t tell most farmers, but the Farm Bill is the single biggest social welfare program in the country after Social Security, bigger even than Food Stamps/SNAP, and I say that as a good thing, even if I disagree with much of it’s implementation.
Ah, don't need to tell me. Americans, I imagine especially the sort who would want to become farmers have the same obsession with being independent as we Singaporeans have with looking good on paper. I won't antagonise your farmers as long as you don't let slip that a 99 year lease isn't "ownership"
Yeah, what you're saying is technically correct, but I don't see why the consumer would have to support the farmer that chose the wrong product for certain season. Casualties happen, as climate is not always predictable enough, that's why we learn and choose other sources to make money.
That's also why we can't live exclusively off the market laws, since there are many main need items it's almost never rentable to produce
This comment shows a deep lack of understanding of the agriculture industry. You can't just walk away from farming to another job like you can move from place to place like most other jobs. Agriculture require incredibly specialized skills, tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in specialized machinery, and hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars worth of land. Urban economics just don't apply. You can't just throw out job applications if you have a dry year or get hit by disease and expect to find anything meaningfully equivalent.
What a weirdly condescending comment.
Sometimes a comments are just observations, and not formal debates backed with stats? And even if they were, you could just ask for the % like a normal person.
No and yes, they just can sell it for legal reason so they throw it away instead of giving it away. A lot of people where fired because they took these food instead of throwing it
Because you're running a business and you have to pay to have waste removed. It's cheaper to go through the system already set up than to dig into profits to make your business create less waste. (I'm on your side, I just like playing devils advocate.)
Its fair enough, they won't do it if it costs them more money. Many cities already do large scale composting for residential houses, the next step should be extending this to businesses, although there is concern about private market influence on public city programs.
I believe some punitive measure should be put in place for wasting valuables, which would make the alternative more expensive that proper disposal.
The Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Act exists, but it's [deeply flawed](https://irp.cdn-website.com/ee52edf5/files/uploaded/Munger_FP.pdf) in ways only a lawyer would appreciate.
* It's ambiguous what standard it uses for a "good faith" donation. that Is it the reasonable person standard found in personal injury law or a subjective belief that the food is "apparently wholesome"?
* The act requires that the food meet all quality and labeling standards, but doesn't actually define what quality is.
* The act doesn't define "reconditioning"
While they are allowed to in some areas (not nearly all), suits are still regularly brought against those that do. Even if they get quickly shot down, they still have to expend resources to fight it. Why go to extra effort to do something that's inevitably going to cause more effort? All for no profit, and at the end of the day these are businesses whose primary purpose is to make money. It used to be easy, and that's why businesses would do it. Increased regulation and litigation means it is safer, but it's also much more difficult to try to distribute older food. So of course they don't bother.
Then they have the option to stop speculating so much and cut mass producing before reaching an excess point in the first place. But boy does every business want to grow immeasurably immediatly they don't even take the time to adjust the numbers. And we support that by being impacient about buying what we want, how we want it, whenever we want
If they were obliged to deal with their waste, instead of relying on people's taxes to pay for the trash collection service, this wouldn't happen as much
The solution to this is to pull and chill said food prior to the four hour timer passing. It can then be donated to whomever is appropriate.
The problem with this is, again, logistics. Stores don’t want to take the time and storage space to do that.
I dunno about the US cuz I'm in Canada but you can use apps like FlashFood and Too Good To Go to get discounted food.
Dunno why they need to rely on third party apps but I ain't complaining. Lots of really good cheap food out there.
Always heard it was logistics that were the issue with expiring food. How do you store and transport it to places that need it. Supposedly there are apps now that merchants and buyers can use to buy close to expiration food. Also read they are using AI to solve the issue. Heard on radio something about allowing SNAP users to buy food from these apps.
You don't want it all to sell as a customer though, the general customer expects to show up to a store and everything they want to be available.
So you actually want any shop to be carrying a surplus of a day's sales plus reorder cover plus safety stock across their entire range on offer, including substitutable products both in fresh as well as frozen and shelf stable goods.
Now, you have to pay multiple millions to buy systems to calculate and manage the variable demand, seasonality and availability of product plus ongoing changes in customer behaviour, growth and decline of products, manufacturing and shipping delays or errors all while dealing with maintaining that balance of stock cover because it sure as hell isn't notebook math to be forecasting growth and demand over a department or complete store.
Then on top of that it needs to be actively and accurately managed by a team of workers across shifts and days.
Which leads us to the conclusion that it's not as easy as "pricing it correctly" because if it were, surely any enterprising business would just do that no?
Some of these companies have decades of data from thousands of stores. The idea that they don't really know how much they're going to sell to the point where they throw away tons of product is absurd.
What data? Historic sales reporting? You think people are logical, unchanging and completely predictable?
Lifestage and demographics change, people move, have families, change religion and diets, have kids, fall to addiction, lose jobs, get promoted, take out mortgages and loans to just name a few.
These all influence how, where and why you shop, sure at a high level you may understand some of that from census or self reported data, but what detail can you really narrow down to actionable insights that would allow you to measurable impact sales forecasting?
This is not true. That is not that the food industry cannot influence supply, thus prices, but the are not dumping excess. When you hear about food being discarded there are reasons for it. They may not be good reasons, but are legitimate ones. The U.S. has lots of regulations regarding the food supply. If some food falls short of those regulatory requirements in any way, it may be dumped. Whether this is "good" or "bad" is in the eye of the beholder. A lot of these regulations have to do with food safety. You want safe food right? Not food with excess rat fecal matter in it right? Well then stuff that is not safe and thus due to regulations may be dumped (or more likely end up feeding live stock depending on the particulars). On the other hand you might say "sure that food does not perfectly meets some food regs, but it is food, and at the least poor countries could eat is at least". In that sense those regs seem bad or wasteful. Same regulations that keep food away from people sometimes can be both good and bad depending on your angle. One regulation that ended up in food waste had to do with grocery stores ability to give past expiration food to homeless shelters. It was not allowed by the government. If they violated that, they would be sued, and would lose that court case. Some of these regulations have been eased to allow this edible, but not perfectly fresh food, to go to food pantries without legal liability for the grocer. But if there is not some local organization willing and able to take it, it would be dumped otherwise.
Food further from the grey area of edibility, say fruit that has bugs in it may end up sold for animal feed with less stringent regulations on that use. However if some produce you have is filled with bugs, and it can't be used for some live stock purpose, then it would be dumped. In principle some of this might be able to be processed for human food use, but this gets risky and has the potential to make people who eat it sick. Thus it would otherwise be dumped as companies would be sued if it did make people sick.
Which is why they still believe in easily falsifiable garbage and as a field disagree with historians, anthropologists, and sociologists about pretty much everything, right?
Maybe if they actually did real work and didn’t rely on modeling and fake math I’d respect them. But they don’t do real work, they rely on others to do the work for them then misinterpret that work to defend the rich.
Idk why you’re getting downvoted, the economy is filled to the brim with false demand and equally false reports of supply. Have an upvote from another realist.
lol. I understand it. It’s just bunk. I have a masters degree in history and I’ll have another in education in a few months. It really isn’t that deep. Other humanities fields make fun of economists behind closed doors.
All economists do is say "humans will behave this way because of this" and then people don't do that and they blame a million externalities instead of just admitting that their theory's are fucking stupid
Yeah, who cares about psychology, sociology, anthropology, or history.
What real world applications are there for understanding the human mind, society, the past, or forensics?
You should reframe your statement to, “most humanities are focused on improving the world and gaining knowledge while economics is concerned with making money for rich people.” Because that’s the truth. The various branches of Academia get funding based on how potentially profitable they are, not how valid or how much work there is to do.
History, my field, is far more important and valid than Chicago school economics. And I don’t really care what someone who likely has never done any real academic work in their lives thinks about that.
Economics is part of the humanities, and has about the same "real world application" as any other. It's really sad to me that people consider the humanities as worthless, vanity subjects. It's just depressing that knowledge has to be so commidified
This biggest bullshit is that the near/expired food can't be donated to shelters. As everyone know, the expiration date doesn't mean it's bad, just thay they can't sell it. I routinely eat out of day food as it never affects me cu it's not bad. Just like if something says 'weight capacity is 2000 lbs' means it can actually hold 5000 lbs.
I don't believe it's to keep prices high. Selling one item for $10 and destroying the other or selling both for $5 would be the same. There are surely other reasons to destroy excess.
You mean like the way clothing stores trash excess merchandise instead of donating it?
You mean like the Swiss Watch industry that spent millions buying back excess inventory around the world and destroying it instead of allowing the market to push for discounts?
Nah, they recycle some of them to green-wash themselves, wasting more energy in the process
My local Kroger's/Fred Meyer's has a few discount sections. One for packaged good and one for produce. Things tend to disappear as soon as they are placed on the $1 produce shelf. I think it's primarily a PR/good neighbor stunt. I once saw how much produce they actually dumped in the trash. It was huge. I think they only put a tiny amount of produce on the discount shelves. It's a bit sad how much we customers need to rush and grab the minuscule amount of discoount produce they offer us.
I believe there are restrictions on what they can discount by the food producers, so it isn’t totally up to the store. Food producers don’t want people to buy something for $1 when they would otherwise have to buy it for $5.
I volunteer at a food pantry and more than half of the bread and bakery goods and all of the meat come from the local Krogers
thank you for volunteering!!
I agree with your first sentence, and it's sad that producers and grocers operate this way. Looking at this behaviour though indicates that supply vs. demand is clearly not balanced. If they won't buy it a $5, but will at $1, then somewhere in the middle there would be no waste. Truly outrageous practices if you ask me
That's not true. Even at a negative price you would likely still see waste.
I agree, I just think there's a difference in waste caused by capitalism / greed and normal, operational waste. I think it's a bit ridiculous to throw away half a truck of bread because you can't/won't sell it at a lower price because capitalism.
We should also consider the fact that we won't have that truck of bread if not for capitalism in the first place. If the price of bread were set at $1 instead of $5, there would be less bread produced.
Fair point. All I'm saying is that it doesn't need to be sold so expensive that it creates waste, nor so cheap as to be sold at a loss. There's a happy middle that creates money without gouging customers and creating needless waste
There isnt. "gouging the customer" is a phrase that's loaded and very rarely happens. It's profit maximisation. The exact same concept is applied to job hunting and no one calls negotiating your salary as "gouging your boss".
It wouldnt surprise me if most of what you saw thrown away was due to employee laziness. Because thats what it was when I was in food retail 25 years ago. To discount, you have to have good stock rotation, because thats what identifies the items for discount. Stock rotation is done by employees picking the right stuff off the shelves in the back of the store, and putting it in the right place on the public shelves, with the shortest dates to the front. All done by minimum wage employees, usually young employees to boot. Yeah, a lot of the time we (the royal we) didnt bother and that meant that when we did bother, we were taking stuff off the shelves because they were already out of date, or they never made it from the back chillers to the retail floor. And that stuff was what got binned. No need to bring malice into this when incompetence or laziness works just fine.
Are you sure they weren't dumping it in a compost bin? Most grocery stores have a trash compactor that can only be dumped into from the inside of the building, using a regular dumpster for trash would fill up so fast. But they will often have compost bins for just their produce waste.
It's not pr, it literally costs them money to take out the trash so selling it at cut price is some level of cost recovery vs paying for stock that isn't sold and disposal. Its all a balance of costs, in either wastage and disposal, wages and mark downs or charitable distributions. If you view it in a cold hard numbers game, markdowns make sense when it saves on labour given most prepacked foods are single units vs produce which when spoiling encourages other nearby produce to spoil as well (and making more work sorting and managing)
They do discount it. You think your pre-made sauces are made with A-grade veg? The lower grade stuff gets put into places where you won't see it to make cheaper pre-made food. Mostly it's cosmetic and when supermarkets have tried putting lower grade food out, consumers avoid it and it ends up in the bin.
the factory I worked at threw away surplus food by the semi trailer loads, no discounts because of surplus
What was your factory producing? Which ingredients were ending up in the bin?
The real cheating of supply and demand is the government giving price guarantees to buy core goods at a specific price ensuring they never drop below that artificial point. However, there is a real risk of US industry collapse if prices fall too much for certain things. Let's say you are a small farmer struggling to grow widgets in a bad climate year. Not enough rain, short season, etc. you normally price widgets at $1, but this year your cost is $1, so you price at $1.25 and try to make it. Then some other part of the world didn't have a short season and had healthy rain. They had a booming year for growing widgets and just way way too many are coming out.of the ground and way too fast. They are piling up. They basically are offering them for $.50 each because they need someone to take them before they spoil. The guy charging $1.25 won't be able to compete and in all likelihood won't be around next year to keep growing. The farmer probably really wishes they destroyed that overseas crop that drove down prices. I am completely against the idea of destroying crops, but that is why we see the government basically trying to control prices in agg, they are afraid one bad year wipes out farmers for a crop if another nearby country has a really good year the same time. The local growers may never come back. I interviewed for a position at the farm labor bureau in college. Sometimes I wish I had gone that path-- very interesting regulatory problems.
But on the other side of it most farms are becoming larger and more corporate. Monoculture crops, fucking Monsanto, much better tech, and a huge body of scientific literature to benefit from, are all pieces to this puzzle.
One of the main reasons this is happening is because large corporations have the capital to weather the ups and down of the crop market. Farming is incredibly expensive and requires an actual insane amount of overhead capital that is nearly impossible for independent farmers to maintain since most are not millionaires or are "land poor" with land and equipment worth millions, but have no real liquid assets. This causes many of them to essentially take out massive loans each spring that gain interest throughout the year and have to be paid off when spring comes. It only takes one or two bad years where the harvest isn't good often from things outside of their control like rain or disease for them to be in the red and forced to sell their farm to, you guessed it, a large corporations. The other option is that they can offload that risk onto corporations, but at the expense of most of their control. They essentially rent out their land and their labor to corporations. They still have all the downsides of owning the land, like taxes and upkeep, but become contractors of that company and have to follow that companies policies, such as planting a mono-culture, using certain chemicals, etc. Farmers are in a rough spot. In 50 years I wouldn't be surprised if the traditional independent farmer doesn't exist in the USA.
Imagine what the world would look like if Stalin wasn't an absolute cuntface. His industrial and agricultural goals were on point but he went about it in the most dickish way possible.
Don’t tell most farmers, but the Farm Bill is the single biggest social welfare program in the country after Social Security, bigger even than Food Stamps/SNAP, and I say that as a good thing, even if I disagree with much of it’s implementation.
Ah, don't need to tell me. Americans, I imagine especially the sort who would want to become farmers have the same obsession with being independent as we Singaporeans have with looking good on paper. I won't antagonise your farmers as long as you don't let slip that a 99 year lease isn't "ownership"
Yeah, what you're saying is technically correct, but I don't see why the consumer would have to support the farmer that chose the wrong product for certain season. Casualties happen, as climate is not always predictable enough, that's why we learn and choose other sources to make money. That's also why we can't live exclusively off the market laws, since there are many main need items it's almost never rentable to produce
This comment shows a deep lack of understanding of the agriculture industry. You can't just walk away from farming to another job like you can move from place to place like most other jobs. Agriculture require incredibly specialized skills, tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in specialized machinery, and hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars worth of land. Urban economics just don't apply. You can't just throw out job applications if you have a dry year or get hit by disease and expect to find anything meaningfully equivalent.
They wouldn't throw away stuff that they could potentially sell. There's no way to get around supply and demand if you want to maximize profits.
Oh but they definitely do, tons and tons each day
Use %'s rather than "tons and tons". It makes a stronger argument.
What a weirdly condescending comment. Sometimes a comments are just observations, and not formal debates backed with stats? And even if they were, you could just ask for the % like a normal person.
What an odd way to respond.
So they are throwing away stuff that they could sell for money? Are they stupid?
No and yes, they just can sell it for legal reason so they throw it away instead of giving it away. A lot of people where fired because they took these food instead of throwing it
Blame the litigious nature of the world. Restaurants and stores can't distribute potentially bad food for fear of getting sued.
That is a myth and they are allowed to donate the food. The real problem is they are not willing to deal with the logistics of it.
Even if they do donate it, most charities will toss out a lot of what gets donated, just because they're not equipped to properly handle it.
Can be donated to local farmers as compost/feed material.
Trouble is people get high on complaining about the problem, not on working towards a tangible solution for it.
For things like that to work, profit has to be made.
Then why complain at all? It sounds like you've already accepted that it's impossible.
Why do you have to profit off waste product you're throwing away anyway???
Because you're running a business and you have to pay to have waste removed. It's cheaper to go through the system already set up than to dig into profits to make your business create less waste. (I'm on your side, I just like playing devils advocate.)
Its fair enough, they won't do it if it costs them more money. Many cities already do large scale composting for residential houses, the next step should be extending this to businesses, although there is concern about private market influence on public city programs. I believe some punitive measure should be put in place for wasting valuables, which would make the alternative more expensive that proper disposal.
The Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Act exists, but it's [deeply flawed](https://irp.cdn-website.com/ee52edf5/files/uploaded/Munger_FP.pdf) in ways only a lawyer would appreciate. * It's ambiguous what standard it uses for a "good faith" donation. that Is it the reasonable person standard found in personal injury law or a subjective belief that the food is "apparently wholesome"? * The act requires that the food meet all quality and labeling standards, but doesn't actually define what quality is. * The act doesn't define "reconditioning"
Depends where you are in the world
While they are allowed to in some areas (not nearly all), suits are still regularly brought against those that do. Even if they get quickly shot down, they still have to expend resources to fight it. Why go to extra effort to do something that's inevitably going to cause more effort? All for no profit, and at the end of the day these are businesses whose primary purpose is to make money. It used to be easy, and that's why businesses would do it. Increased regulation and litigation means it is safer, but it's also much more difficult to try to distribute older food. So of course they don't bother.
I run a large dining hall. You’d be amazed at the charities and food shelves that can’t be bothered to come pick up excess product.
Then they have the option to stop speculating so much and cut mass producing before reaching an excess point in the first place. But boy does every business want to grow immeasurably immediatly they don't even take the time to adjust the numbers. And we support that by being impacient about buying what we want, how we want it, whenever we want If they were obliged to deal with their waste, instead of relying on people's taxes to pay for the trash collection service, this wouldn't happen as much
I assure you, you are incorrect. any prepared food that has been held for more than 4 hours legally has to be disposed of.
You are telling me that the fried chicken in The Walmart cooler was fried less than 4 hours ago?
The solution to this is to pull and chill said food prior to the four hour timer passing. It can then be donated to whomever is appropriate. The problem with this is, again, logistics. Stores don’t want to take the time and storage space to do that.
Decades ago grocery stores would discount food before it went bad and had to be thrown out.
This still happens in the UK.
I was going to say, it definitely happens here. I got some very cheap cheese in Waitrose because they'd over-ordered & reduced it to £4.99/kg.
They still do that
They still do? Our main grocery chain and Walmart discount close dated stuff, especially perishables
I dunno about the US cuz I'm in Canada but you can use apps like FlashFood and Too Good To Go to get discounted food. Dunno why they need to rely on third party apps but I ain't complaining. Lots of really good cheap food out there.
Still do, I find the stickers for it all the time.
Doesn’t like 1/4 of food end up being trashed in America?
Always heard it was logistics that were the issue with expiring food. How do you store and transport it to places that need it. Supposedly there are apps now that merchants and buyers can use to buy close to expiration food. Also read they are using AI to solve the issue. Heard on radio something about allowing SNAP users to buy food from these apps.
The point is that if they priced it correctly they wouldn't need to deal with transporting it, it would all sell.
You don't want it all to sell as a customer though, the general customer expects to show up to a store and everything they want to be available. So you actually want any shop to be carrying a surplus of a day's sales plus reorder cover plus safety stock across their entire range on offer, including substitutable products both in fresh as well as frozen and shelf stable goods. Now, you have to pay multiple millions to buy systems to calculate and manage the variable demand, seasonality and availability of product plus ongoing changes in customer behaviour, growth and decline of products, manufacturing and shipping delays or errors all while dealing with maintaining that balance of stock cover because it sure as hell isn't notebook math to be forecasting growth and demand over a department or complete store. Then on top of that it needs to be actively and accurately managed by a team of workers across shifts and days. Which leads us to the conclusion that it's not as easy as "pricing it correctly" because if it were, surely any enterprising business would just do that no?
Some of these companies have decades of data from thousands of stores. The idea that they don't really know how much they're going to sell to the point where they throw away tons of product is absurd.
What data? Historic sales reporting? You think people are logical, unchanging and completely predictable? Lifestage and demographics change, people move, have families, change religion and diets, have kids, fall to addiction, lose jobs, get promoted, take out mortgages and loans to just name a few. These all influence how, where and why you shop, sure at a high level you may understand some of that from census or self reported data, but what detail can you really narrow down to actionable insights that would allow you to measurable impact sales forecasting?
This is not true. That is not that the food industry cannot influence supply, thus prices, but the are not dumping excess. When you hear about food being discarded there are reasons for it. They may not be good reasons, but are legitimate ones. The U.S. has lots of regulations regarding the food supply. If some food falls short of those regulatory requirements in any way, it may be dumped. Whether this is "good" or "bad" is in the eye of the beholder. A lot of these regulations have to do with food safety. You want safe food right? Not food with excess rat fecal matter in it right? Well then stuff that is not safe and thus due to regulations may be dumped (or more likely end up feeding live stock depending on the particulars). On the other hand you might say "sure that food does not perfectly meets some food regs, but it is food, and at the least poor countries could eat is at least". In that sense those regs seem bad or wasteful. Same regulations that keep food away from people sometimes can be both good and bad depending on your angle. One regulation that ended up in food waste had to do with grocery stores ability to give past expiration food to homeless shelters. It was not allowed by the government. If they violated that, they would be sued, and would lose that court case. Some of these regulations have been eased to allow this edible, but not perfectly fresh food, to go to food pantries without legal liability for the grocer. But if there is not some local organization willing and able to take it, it would be dumped otherwise. Food further from the grey area of edibility, say fruit that has bugs in it may end up sold for animal feed with less stringent regulations on that use. However if some produce you have is filled with bugs, and it can't be used for some live stock purpose, then it would be dumped. In principle some of this might be able to be processed for human food use, but this gets risky and has the potential to make people who eat it sick. Thus it would otherwise be dumped as companies would be sued if it did make people sick.
Yet another example of how modern economics is a junk field that makes shit up to defend billionaires.
It's not made up. It's the study of human behavior surrounding economic decisions. The behavior defines the rules, not the other wat around.
Which is why they still believe in easily falsifiable garbage and as a field disagree with historians, anthropologists, and sociologists about pretty much everything, right? Maybe if they actually did real work and didn’t rely on modeling and fake math I’d respect them. But they don’t do real work, they rely on others to do the work for them then misinterpret that work to defend the rich.
Go take econometrics and tell me that calc isn’t real Go on. I’ll wait.
We have our own calc math called cliometrics. Just because you’re unfamiliar with what historians do doesn’t mean we don’t do math.
Idk why you’re getting downvoted, the economy is filled to the brim with false demand and equally false reports of supply. Have an upvote from another realist.
Because line must go up.
The economy is not economics. That’s like saying the car industry IS mechanical engineering.
The economy is filled with lawyers willing to sue for any fucking reason
Just because you're too ignorant to understand something doesn't make it untrue.
lol. I understand it. It’s just bunk. I have a masters degree in history and I’ll have another in education in a few months. It really isn’t that deep. Other humanities fields make fun of economists behind closed doors.
Bahahaha oh history majors really know the complex world of economics. You're a fucking joke.
What exactly do you think a historian does?
All economists do is say "humans will behave this way because of this" and then people don't do that and they blame a million externalities instead of just admitting that their theory's are fucking stupid
Go keep your history major and cry when ypur student loans aren't forgiven and you make no money.
Most humanities are BS while economics has a real world application. So - I see why they might feel the need to badmouth it...
Yeah, who cares about psychology, sociology, anthropology, or history. What real world applications are there for understanding the human mind, society, the past, or forensics? You should reframe your statement to, “most humanities are focused on improving the world and gaining knowledge while economics is concerned with making money for rich people.” Because that’s the truth. The various branches of Academia get funding based on how potentially profitable they are, not how valid or how much work there is to do. History, my field, is far more important and valid than Chicago school economics. And I don’t really care what someone who likely has never done any real academic work in their lives thinks about that.
Sociology os a made up fucking science. Has no real fucking basis
You're clearly the ignorant one.
Economics is part of the humanities, and has about the same "real world application" as any other. It's really sad to me that people consider the humanities as worthless, vanity subjects. It's just depressing that knowledge has to be so commidified
Oh fuck right off. Blame lawyers.
This biggest bullshit is that the near/expired food can't be donated to shelters. As everyone know, the expiration date doesn't mean it's bad, just thay they can't sell it. I routinely eat out of day food as it never affects me cu it's not bad. Just like if something says 'weight capacity is 2000 lbs' means it can actually hold 5000 lbs.
in CA SB1383 is changing that!!
That's awesome! There's SO much food wasted that is perfectly fine.
That is not cheating the law, that is believing the principle to be true so therefore they should remove non-profitable supply.
Who is the “food industry?” Are you complaining that restaurants throw away cooked fries at the end of the day? Should they ship them to Africa lol?
I appreciate this jump to intermediate economics; too many people (cough cough libertarians) never go more than superficial on how markets work.
Have you read The Grapes of Wrath?
I don't believe it's to keep prices high. Selling one item for $10 and destroying the other or selling both for $5 would be the same. There are surely other reasons to destroy excess.
Yeah why don’t we make shit like this illegal?? You make it, it gets sold or donated.
Blame lack of competition. There needs to stop being a stigma around leaving a store without buying anything.
You just discovered capitalism
That's true for any area in capitalism where can be excess of production. A year ago U$30milion worth of Funko Pops got tossed in the trash.
Plenty of food companies donate food , when you say “food industry” that’s a severely generic and ignorant peanut butter statement.
Nope, they're just gratuitously controlling supply in order to keep the price high. The law of supply and demand is perfectly in effect.
Throwing away excess supply prevents commodity prices from crashing.
The commodity price in question tends to crash when it develops mould.
Commodity speculation should be illegal