How To Influence What Your Grocery Store Sells
Visit any grocery store often enough, and eventually it will frustrates you with one or all of many things having to do with the food chain, or even if it’s a small grocery store on the corner. If you frequent any store, it’s probably unnecessary to point out what may frustrates you. Still, I’ll attempt to pinpoint why you may walk out of the store, either telling yourself you should find somewhere else to shop, or deciding you need an alternate store.
Grocery stores are all about profit. Everything they do, whether it’s the type of food they sell, or how they display the food in the store. It’s all done to take advantage of their customers and upsell them as often as possible from the time they walk into the store, and even as they wait on line to pay for their groceries.
Even though upselling is important to grocery stores, they also want to keep the customer they have and gain more. It’s all about profit.
So how would this frustrate you? Ask yourself how many times you walk into your grocery store and they’ve changed everything.
They don’t move groceries around because they sell out of certain things, or because they decide the display wasn’t good. They move items around because they want you to buy more. Not just the things on your list, but besides what’s on your list. So, every so often, in fact, often, they arrange and rearrange. They know this frustrates their customers, but they bet that the profits they make will outweigh a few frustrated customers.
Upselling is just one way they frustrate you. There is the customer service issue, the bathroom that’s never clean, and lately the shopping bag issue. The shopping bag issue is worthy, however, because using your own non-paper or no plastic bags affects our environment positively.
Even though I started this post with how supermarkets frustrates their customers, the point of this post isn’t about that. It’s about the value of their customers. If you get nothing else from this post, I hope you realize how important you are to any supermarket you frequent and how you can get them to carry the type of foods you want as a consumer.
Why Influence What A Grocery Store Carries?
If you’ve chosen to become conscious of the environment and the type of food you eat, then it’s likely you know that as much as organic foods have become a mainstay in most grocery stores, genetically changed food still account for a large portion of most grocery store. To make buying organic a mainstay and more common, we must use our power as consumers to convince large chain grocery stores to carry less genetically changed foods and more organically grown foods.
Where do you start?
Here are three things you can ask of your grocery store today that will affect the environment and influence what they carry.
1. Choose to buy organic
Organically grown foods are becoming more and more reasonable. Paying a few cents more for apples that’s not genetically changed or sprayed with chemical, is not as drastic a cost difference as it’s been in the past. That’s because more and more customers are choosing to buy organic and are asking their local market to carry it. Because of the demand, we force grocery stores to respond to their customers. Remember profit!
2. Ask your grocery store to carry fair-trade products
Not familiar with fair-trade? The best way to define it to think of fair-trade as cheaper access to organically made products. Fair-trade ensures it makes the products without chemicals, pesticides, or hormones. Also, they make sure products they create are ethical in standards that are inline with the environment. This includes monitoring the companies that make them, by ensuring their standards, and their process didn’t affect the environment in any adverse way.
3. Ask for more non-GMO products
Non-GMO products are becoming more popular these days, and rightfully so. Like fair-trade, it’s an excellent alternative to organic products. The reason to choose non-GMO is simple. It’s safer for you because non-GMO products are free of genetically changed ingredients which are linked to health issues most of us would want to avoid.
Make it happen at your store
You too can go to the customer service area of your store and ask to speak to a manager. Tell them what you are looking for, or could not find. Ask them to carry items you need. All the better if it’s something organic.
Also, you can go online and contact the corporate offices for your store. Share your opinion as to the items you want to see in the store. You may not get them to stop trying to upsell its customers, but you can get them to carry the fruit, vegetables, or any products you need.
If more and more customers voice their need and make their voice heard, soon genetically changed foods that affect our health adversely will take up a small portion of their shelves. Wouldn’t that be a beautiful thing?
