Picking Cherries

Picking Cherries was Originally Posted on October 26, 2011 by

Decades ago I used to shop at Giant Supermarket in the DC area. They were probably not the first, but I remember them putting in computers to manage pricing of products. Scanners and barcodes were in “in” thing because it made checkouts faster. It also made something else faster.

By keeping prices in a computer, it very easy to change them. Then the store prints a new shelf tag and the price of the product has changed. No longer does a human have to pull every product off the shelf, reprice them with a new sticker and put them back. Customers used to get really upset when they would buy a product, pell off the price only to find a cheaper price underneath. Since the product was offered at a cheaper price, what caused the cost to increase? The only reason could be thatr it was mis-priced or the store wants more profit.

The scanners also allow the store to stop people placing a different price on a product to get it cheaper. Hiowever, there can also be problems when the one number in the computer is wrong, then all items are priced incorrectly.

One store here found that a product without barcodes was very popular. Once the product was barcoded, it stopped selling. Turns out the employees were taking the product because there was no record in the register and thus no realtime inventory.

Barcodes are sold by a non-profit organization and until about 2000 were inexpensive enough. Then the group made them very costly and most small companies cannot afford to barcode products. I was able to get a few through a roundabout process, however buying them through the regular channels would have cost me thousands of dollars. Compare this to a similar product, a domain name, which costs $10.

So after all of this, what do these barcodes have to do with cherries? Fruit usually has a PLU sticker on them and not barcodes.

With the holiday season coming soon, you may find various items placed on sale. Stores will also remove sale prices on other items, hoping that when you buy the cheap item, you will also buy expensive other items. This is similar to our store which offers turkeys for $8 yet all other Thanksgiving items were very expensive.

When I shop, I try to buy items at the lowest per/item price. For frozen dinners I try to stay under 22 cents per ounce and I use similar pricing strategy for soda and other items. Sometimes the shelf tag with cost per ounce is wrong, so carry a calculator if you want to double check. many cell phones have a built in calc. I also make a cheat sheet on soda so I can compare the price of a 12, 20, 24 and 36 box of soda and the cost I think is reasonable to pay.

So as you shop, try to cherry pick and buy the items that are on sale and skip those which are not.

I always tried to get my Mom to buy large COSTCO-sized items like paper towels and so on, but she had no room to store those things. I tried to talk her into going in halvsies with a neighbor. You might consider these things when shopping.