Even if they did give you a price break for lower quality food. They'd still do things like give you a pineapple that will never ripen before it rots like we received last week.
Think of it this way, you have fruit at home to be shared by all the members of your family, it was fine when you bought it, but now some of it is bruised. So now you own a mix of fruit: what do you do, throw away the bruised fruit, or trim it, or give a loved one the good looking one and eat the bruised one yourself? Those costs (tossing or trimming or eating slightly lower quality) have to be borne by somebody, in this case the whole family or a member of the family.
You buy a car and you buy insurance for it; that's because a car is expensive and you don't want to bear the burden of a bruised car yourself, you want to share that burden with all the other people who buy insurance; and yet, the insurance company is making money, so apparently you are paying a little extra for this decrease in the variance of quality.
Same with your theory of purchasing fruit: you are not saying (in your original comment) what you think you are saying, that bruised fruit is too expensive; what you are actually saying is that you prefer to overpay for expensive fruit all the time and not deal with imperfections. Because otherwise, if the supermarket could sell all their fruit and not just perfect fruit, and was competing against other supermarkets, then the fruit would be overall actually cheaper across the board; you say "you don't get any discount", but with time you actually would.
I explain all this because it allows you to live your life feeling less miffed.
The explanation that you're providing is really a rationalization for paying more to procure an inferior product. You're always going to have wastage of perishable items. It's much cheaper and sensical to avoid moldy strawberries, close to date meat and dairy, etc by shopping yourself, or hiring your own casual labor without some intermediary subtracting value.
All of these services are hiding costs through VC largesse and exploitation. You can literally get more for less by just hiring a housekeeper and having them pick up stuff for you, but nobody does that because the costs are "above the line", and it feels less nouveau riche and more clean to have some service exploit the poor sap picking your banannas rather than talk to a human.
the explanation I gave is literally for paying less, so you missed the point of it, and you are then blaming econ 101 for your lack of understanding. And you are mixing in other factors that econ 101 covers, but the point of econ 101 is to learn to separate different factors.
As investors tire of setting money on fire, that will become more apparent, just as it did with Uber as prices went up and quality went down.
If you're insuring against a risk, and you have more information than the insurer, you may be profiting and the insurer may be running a loss.
If you're picking out your own groceries, you can select the pristine fruit and vegetables, and the grocery store takes the loss. With a disinterested picker, you take a portion of the loss.
Unfortunately the supermarkets do not work this way -- they seem to have one class of goods. I'm not sure what happens to their bruised goods, but I do wonder if they offload those items to other stores? Does it really go straight into the trash?
From what I remember, not much was ever wasted and trashed out of their warehouses. Any bananas that couldn't be sold in supermarkets due to quality or size issues, were sold to bakers and smaller market retailers, and anything left after that was sold as animal feed.
The catch, is that it's whatever the wholesalers couldn't sell during the week to the supermarkets and now need to get rid of before next week's shipments come in. It often doesn't have much shelf life left and/or is ugly. And the vendors tend to keep cutting prices to the point of nearly giving away whatever's left towards the end of the day on Saturday. 10% of the normal price still beats throwing it in the dumpster and getting 0%.
It's a nice model that matches people wanting cheap food with the excess/castoffs in the market.
- Go to a cheap supermarket and expect bruised stuff and pick out the stuff you like.
- Go to a more expensive one and expect no bruising.
- Go to a yet more expensive one and expect nothing but organic and ripe.
It's kind of like class expectations. You don't want to be known as the person who shops at a place with bruised stuff (and the supermarket appeals to shoppers that way).
You find that in farmer's markets as well. Go to an inexpensive one and expect bruising. Go to an expensive one and be angry if there is any bruising.
I think the issue is that of given the choice between something with a sell-by date a few days in the future or 10-15 days in the future at the same cost, nearly everyone is going to take the food with the better date. Which means the arrival of a new batch of inventory makes the older inventory barely salable.
Technical solutions could help here: it is taxing on humans and most POS systems to have to adjust the price of older inventory, but if that could be done automatically (or the labor pushed onto the customer to identify the condition in exchange for a discount) people looking for deals might help reduce this type of waste.
That's a pretty good idea aid seems it could be solved entirely by software (+some signs for awareness).
That's technically illegal. Grocery stores are not allowed to repackage pre-packaged food. We have strict food-handling regulations in place to protect consumers, which is part of what makes food waste such an issue.
A jacket with a hole has massive loss of effectiveness, and I don't receive a new jacket to wear each day.
A car with a dent has significant loss of value, not that it's something I'm terribly concerned with, I run all cars until they die.
That's simply not true. The bruises become rot spots and before getting there they introduce oxidation which affects taste. The shelf life is then also diminished not only for the bruised apple, but for any that are nearby.
Relatively speaking, I think the bruise on an apple is actually a measurably greater decrease in (relative) value than the dents in a car.
In your previous post, you trip all over yourself acknowledging that their preferences are valid.
It's obvious enough that's what they are driving at; they want a shopping service that accounts for their preferences.