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Comment by donarb | Hacker News Reader

And the common response to self checkout is that you are putting a checker out of work. Never mind the fact that most of the shelves are not stocked by store employees, but by distributors. A grocery store is basically a place where the store rents out shelf space to the highest bidder.

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My response to self-checkout is that it only works properly 50% of the time, and the other half I have to stand around looking befuddled before an employee waddles over to clear the error. Cashiers are evidently better at checkout than I am, and their labor is free-to-me, so self-checkout just seems like a raw deal with no upsides.

I don't see why it has to be one way or the other. aside from whole foods JWO (which is great!), I have yet to see a single grocery store that lacks checkout lanes. if you like that service, you're in luck! it's available pretty much everywhere. but let's have self-checkout as an option too. nine times out of ten, I'll be walking out the door with my groceries while you're still waiting in line.

I think you might just have a shitty grocery store... 50% is an absurd failure rate. I think the failure rate I've seen is closer to 1%, and I'm a pretty heavy self checkout user across pharmacies and grocery stores, in both sf and ny

> Never mind the fact that most of the shelves are not stocked by store employees, but by distributors.

This is new to me. Do you just mean that the placement is decided by distributors? I'm pretty sure I have seen store employees putting stuff on the shelves from time to time at my local supermarket.

I believe this only applies to a few sections—soda, chips, and magazines(?). Your produce and canned food aisles are stocked by the store employees, though the planograms for the shelving layout comes from corporate, sized for the store’s footprint. There may be some distributor input into those, such as cereal, but I’ve never seen those processes, only the resulting stock plan.

This is correct. In many areas, alcohol is also stocked by distributors. But the rest of the grocery store is stocked by store employees.

This also only applies to some stores - not all. You can often tell by the uniform the sticker is wearing.

Smaller stores and chains are often stocked by the store itself, even if Coke delivered the pallet.

Distributors for the big food companies (Coca-Cola, Pepsi/Frito-Lay, etc) essentially rent and maintain a section of shelving and then keep it full and decide themselves on the distribution of products that appear. Smaller manufacturers sell their product wholesale to the stores who then stock them in the normal fashion.

The end caps of isles are sold to the highest bidder, typically by the week; if that bidder is coca-cola they manage that display as well, subject to the constraints of the store.

One of the innovations of Frys Electronics was to try to run their shops that way, as they started by selling serial cables and other computer supplies in their family's grocery chain. It only partially worked as the vendors weren't really equipped to do this, the way the food companies are.

No, vendors have a few shelves, it's not at all like you say. Source: have seen employees stocking the vast majority of shelves.

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