Hacker News Reader

Comment by iamleppert | Hacker News Reader

People here are smart enough to realize what this is: a publicity stunt.

Even if you have money, shopping at Whole Foods is foolish. Amazon reduced a fraction of the items prices, they are still heavily over-priced, and the food quality for the price is low. Whole Foods is a grocery store that prices it's food high to attract a certain type of consumer. That's all.

If you want high quality food, I encourage you to visit a local farmer's market. There is probably one close to you every week, or every other week. There are even larger ones or speciality ones less frequently (monthly).

At a farmer's market you'll get high quality produce, fresh that is directly from the farm. All or most of your money will be going to people actually growing or making the food, not a large corporation, food distributor, or Amazon.

I really wish we would just ban grocery stores for good and try to go back to this form of food consumerism.

View on HN

I am not sure farmer's markets are prepared, and perhaps could never be prepared, for the type of volume they would have to do to entirely replace grocery stores.

As someone who lives in a big city, grocery stores here are packed at all hours. There will be dozens of checkout lines open going through customers as fast as they can. There are a ton of grocery stores, too, with each one as busy.

Farmer's markets are clearly not as effecient at serving customers as a supermarket, which means they would be even more crowded. We would have to have a LOT more of them to replace all of the supermarkets, and they would take up a lot more space than the current supermarkets to serve the same number of people.

As a busy parent of a toddler, grocery shopping already takes up a lot more time than I want it to. I can't imagine trying to fit the extra time it would take to shop at a farmers market for everything into my schedule.

When we think about making some sort of massive change to the way we live our lives (like everyone doing all shopping at farmer's markets), we have to really think about what it would mean to operate at that scale. What might work great for you as an individual may not work for everyone in the world, if everyone were to change their behavior.

You can't fit in an hour every weekend to go get food, that's cheaper and better quality than a grocery store to feed you and your family?

I think you are missing my point - if everyone switched to Farmer's markets only, it would overwhelm the system. Farmer's markets are simply not effecient enough to serve the millions of people who live in our large cities.

An hour of a software engineer's time is worth ~$30-50. At least, many of them happily pay that much for someone to do an hour's worth of chores for them.

Unless you're buying industrial quantities of food, I doubt a trip to the farmer's market will save you $40. The quality difference is also difficult to quantify. Onions and potatoes from the farmer's market aren't any healthier then onions from the supermarket.

And here's the elephant in the room - at any particular time of year, most of the food that you eat is not in season where you live. If it's not in season, you're not going to get it from your farmer's market (Unless said farmer is reselling it from a wholesaler - which a lot of stalls do.)

Do you spend an hour a week churning butter by hand, or do you pay someone else to do it for you?

Oh there we go with the "my time is worth $50/hr" thing.

By that kind of reasoning, how much money can you save by reducing how much time you sleep by an hour each night?

Or maybe if I add 10 people to your project you'll get it done 10x faster?

Additionally, just think how much money software developers could save if they paid $25 an hour for someone to sleep with their wife!

Esitmating 1 hour a week, and an average salary of $50, that's an extra $25 per week, or $1300 a year!

... and if you pay via Credit Card, you can probably have a 2% cashback, too.

I get paid a lot more then $30-50/hr. I discounted my rate for time I'm not at work.

After a point, I will absolutely pay $30 to not lose another hour of sleep.

Either way, you're missing the point. Time is money. People spend money to save time, and people spend time to save money. Different people have a different rate at which they'll strongly consider doing one over the other.

For most of us, the amount of money we have is very limited. For all of us, the amount of time we have is very limited. Eventually, we'll all be dead.

I'm pretty confused by this post. I shop at whole foods regularly and while their prices are high, their product is usually much better than the other stores I visit (kroger, meijer).

I also do not get the "shop at a farmers market exclusively" line of reasoning. We don't have access to farmer's markets in the winter. That's not really a highly available thing where I live (Michigan). Even when it's summer we still do not have access to all the same foods that are available in a grocery store.

I never said farmers markets are the one solution. I do think locally produced food and direct to consumer food could be a solution. It's better to deal locally whenever possible. And contrary to popular belief, local food is very possible to scale and do so efficiently.

Because everyone here seems to only understand the world through software engineer terms, I'll break it down for you: a distributed system is often very efficient and scalable solution to a supply and demand problem.

Ah, farmers' markets! We have a nice one in our town, and it's fun to visit. But it didn't take long to notice . . .

1. It's a hard life for farmers. To be open for business by 8:30 a.m. for our local gentry, it's necessary to rise at 4 a.m., load up the truck and drive for a couple hours to our town. Some of the smaller-stand operators are on the verge of quitting because the commitment doesn't pay off.

2. Part of shoppers money goes for the farmers' gasoline, travel burden, etc. That's much more intense when food is brought to market inefficiently in many smaller vehicles rather than a single, Interstate-grade truck.

3. Most farmers are trying to move produce at multiple stages of goodness. Yes, there are beautiful peaches at $3.99/pound. There also are squished ones in the mix at times, too, as well as over-ripe ones at $1/pound that the farmers need to sell, too. It's all part of running a store. But someone still has to pick out the good from the not-so-good, and often that's the customer.

Overall, I'm glad farmers' markets exist, and sometimes the goods can be spectacular. But the inefficiencies are too severe for them to take on a dominant role in feeding the USA.

Whole Foods customers did expect to receive "premium" food at a premium price, but even the richest of them were starting to notice that it was so significantly higher that they would shop elsewhere for at least some of it. Lowering the prices to the point where they are still higher than everyone else but not godlike is a return to the premium feel.

Tech analogy: Apple's stuff truly is much more expensive than most other stuff, but not so expensive that it's completely out of reach for upper to middle class incomes.

> I really wish we would just ban grocery stores for good and try to go back to this form of food consumerism.

I'm sure that'll work out great for people who live in poor communities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert

It would help them the most -- getting rid of grocery stores that sell low quality, sugary mass produced foods and going back to local micro farmers markets is in what form of reality a bad thing?

Many places don't have local micro farmers markets, and even if they did, groceries sell a LOT of food. Are you sure your local farm and meet demand at an affordable cost?

You seem to be reductive.

either those people can't afford locally produced food, or the farmers can't afford to do it at the prices they'd demand.

people need affordable supermarkets. this isn't complicated, it's unfortunately just not very profitable to serve these people.

Every local farmers market I've been to has been less expensive than a grocery store. I literally come away with enough food for the week at half the cost of the grocery store produce (Safeway for me). Whole Foods? Probably 1/4th the cost.

Really, truly what I'm saying is true. For people who don't even have a grocery store, I think things like community gardens (a garden that is shared between a block of neighbors) is a perfectly scalable, healthy and affordable solution.

you are seriously out of touch with what life is like in a place so impoverished it can't even sustain a good grocery store.

The people referenced in the article don't even HAVE grocery stores, they just have things like 7/11 or other quicky marts.

> The people referenced in the article don't even HAVE grocery stores

That's largely bunk - the definition of a 'food desert' is far from what the media would have you believe:

"In the U.S., a food desert consists of a low income census tract residing at least 0.5 miles in urban areas ... from the large grocery store."

Living 0.6 miles from a grocery store != not having a grocery store....

"The USDA defines what's considered a food desert and which areas will be helped by this initiative: To qualify as a “low-access community,” at least 500 people and/or at least 33 percent of the census tract's population must reside more than one mile from a supermarket or large grocery store (for rural census tracts, the distance is more than 10 miles)." [1]

Traveling over a mile to a grocery store is a big deal for somebody without a car -- especially if they're elderly, disabled, or have children.

1. http://americannutritionassociation.org/newsletter/usda-defi...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com