Hacker News Reader

Comment by 1_2__3 | Hacker News Reader

Combine this with an increasing trend in grocery and drug stores to only stock 1 "name brand" and everything else is house-branded and we're in for a rough time. For now you can still use brand loyalty, but what happens when the whole world is Wal-martified (we're on our way) and Safeway only sells Safeway brand, Costco only sells Kirkland, CVS only sells CVS products, etc.? You can say "go somewhere else" but selecting a different store isn't even a realistic option for many people in the US - there are no alternatives.

We rely on retail establishments to provide choice as part of their value add. Now that that's disappearing in favor of the retailer controlling everything, what happens next? I honestly don't know.

View on HN

I can say this as someone who knows for certain, most of the products on the shelves are the same, regardless of the label. They came off the same line from the same factory. Want to know how they are different? The line operator stopped for 10 minutes to change out the packaging. The amount of variety you see is an illusion. The generics are exactly the same as the expensive name brands. Walk into any store and compare the manufacturing codes on similar products. And before you get too pedantic, I'm not saying they are _all_ exactly the same. I'm saying a choice of 10 "brands" likely all come from 3 or less factories of origin.

20 years ago I worked for a major gasoline refiner in Canada, who supplied the gasoline for all of the gas stations in Toronto. Esso, Shell, BP, Petro-Canada, Sunoco - all bought their gas from the same refinery. The whole WORLD is branding.

I think this finally hit me when I saw on display a tiny bottle of high-end "high performance surfer sunscreen" for $35, complete with beautiful packaging and a poster with attractive models.

You can still find this in small communities. I get my gas from a small community because it's cheaper on that side of the border. There's like 5-6 gas stations and one supply truck company. The locals all know to buy from the cheapest one and yet the Shell, Chevron, and others are still in business.

Price discrimination at its finest!

> You can say "go somewhere else" but selecting a different store isn't even a realistic option for many people in the US - there are no alternatives.

You can order online and it will kill off the brick-and-mortar stores even more if they don't vet their products. Amazon's been trying to convince people to do more home grocery shopping with them for a couple years already. If people lose confidence in Wal-Mart and their local grocery stores' products, Amazon will kick their butts.

Unfortunately, Amazon is not immune to fake products. For me, after being burned too many times, the honeymoon is over with Prime. If you read the reviews, you'll see this is a big problem on Amazon.

> read the reviews

That's another problem though. I don't want to spend an hour researching reviews for every product I want to buy on Amazon. It's ridiculous how infected they are now. The last thing I wanted to buy was a regular bottle of American Crew shampoo. Half the reviews say it's fake. Half say 5 stars. There is no other seller. What do you do?

Not to mention comments for similar brand products but not the product you are ordering.

Thus the death of local stores and rise of Amazon and other online stores.

Id never buy computer parts locally. Only online. Perhaps this is beginning of I only buy x (E. G. Aloe) from online as well. Where we have more choice. Reviews. Vetting..

You are making more of a drama then this is. If it would be a huge problem there are a hole host of possible solutions. From small many small stores to delivery network.

A company could buy on mass with different stores and sell standard packages to small stores and home owners directly.

Also other product producers who are getting pushed out are probably searching for solutions to reach costumer right now.

These doom and gloom prediction almost always turn out to be wrong. I have actual read your exact argument before, that was before the korean immigration when the opened stores everywhere.

> Safeway only sells Safeway brand, Costco only sells Kirkland, CVS only sells CVS products

This seems to work pretty well for Trader Joe's. I trust their stuff.

>" You can say "go somewhere else" but selecting a different store isn't even a realistic option for many people in the US - there are no alternatives."

In New York City there is basically Duane Reade(on every other block) and CVS. As the diversity in stores and brand selection decrease the unit prices seem to increase. I think this largely explains $5.00 for a single roll of dental floss.

Yep, that's why for a lot of things like that, I try to buy it in bulk from Costco or someplace online.

I am curious do you have any recommendations for replacing the brick and mortars for grocery/drugstores online other than Amazon or?

Not specifically, just shopping.google.com. I try to check there if I don't think the prices at my normal outlets are good enough. For instance, I needed some bags for my vacuum cleaner a while ago, and they were too high at both the manufacturer's site (Bissell) and at Amazon. There were off-brand bags at Amazon for less, but the reviews were terrible. So I think I looked on Google shopping, and ended up finding a great price for the OEM bags at target.com. While I was there, I got some dental floss that works well for me, because it was also really cheap there.

In another example, my now-ex wife wanted some specific sea salt from Italy that she likes a lot for some reason. Amazon's price was very high, so again I used Google (I think, this was probably a year ago) and found a site that specialized in Italian food imports. They had dirt-cheap prices for the stuff if you bought it by the case, so that's what we did, plus a bunch of other pasta stuff that was really cheap.

There's tons of specialty stores out there like that that you just have to look for, depending on what you're looking for. shopping.google.com frequently points me to good places, but also just a regular Google search, or a search on DDG will frequently be productive. Even other big-name retailers will frequently have good deals, better than Amazon: walmart.com, target.com, etc. But it all fluctuates and varies a lot, so it is a bit of work to find good deals. But generally, once I've found a good supplier for something I repurchase at some interval, it usually works out best to keep buying from them, so it's frequently worth the time investment to find a good supplier. Then I just keep all my email receipts tagged "Purchases", and then do a search through those when I need to re-order something.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com