The New Bait & Switch

Every Thursday the postman delivers a small advertising packet.  Our local grocers entice us with discounts on items we would ordinarily purchase for our families.  Kosher consumers in my area flock to one supermarket over the others for about the past twenty years.  The Orthodox Rabbi and the President of that store had a friendship which led to an agreement to offer Kosher meat, delicatessen, and baked goods.  As the corporate artists who design the weekly ads, working with each chain's purchasing agents and marketing staff, well know, if people patronize preferentially for the things they want most, they will fill their carts with everything else on the grocery list.  So Kosher in my town seeks out Shop-Rite.

When the packet of ads arrives, I separate Shop-Rite's circular from the rest, then take it to one of my two desks. Putting writing pad, one of the ones you get for free from a charity or a hotel, and with pen and highlighter to my right, closing the lid of my laptop while putting the circular upon it, I begin seeing what Shop-Rite might have for me at the anticipated coming week's shopping outing.  Serious price reductions, those mass lures, go on the first page.  They've even added a flap to make that front page larger.  Produce along with floral department occupies the back page.  Usually, though not always, starting from the front, I read their items half page at a time.  If it's too enticing to pass up, needed or not, that item gets a streak of colored highlighter and it gets recorded on the front of the pad, the side with the agency's logo.  If it looks like perhaps it should go into my cart it gets a maybe with the pen next to the item in the ad, and listed on the reverse of the pad's page.  The maybes far exceed the have to's.  On Sunday's I download the coupons onto my shopper card which will then deduct the savings when I scan its bar code at the register.

Shopping day arrives, list in hand, I traverse aisle by aisle.  Take a cart, plop six reusable bags on its bottom, enter the main door, then right-face.  Shelves and a display with some of the items from the front page of the circular that require no refrigeration.  Rotate left and the produce begins, sometimes with the advertised farm products in the nearest bin, more often in their usual bins.  And as I have been recently learning, sometimes not at all.  Genuine Jersey Corn, 4 ears/$2 not there at all, not even in the specially assembled section at the far end of produce where the other advertised vegetables from regional farms could be taken.  Like most modern day mega-marts, the perishables run the perimeter of the store. Stable products fill most of the store in parallel aisles.  After personal care products and baby needs, Shop-Rite set up a wide aisle dominated by soda or similar beverages that really have no place in anyone's cart, but reserved space, both shelving and central stands for more sale items as well as seasonal items.  Back to School this month.  Great deal on stick pens.  I buy a package of black and a package of blue each summer.  Ad takes effect Sunday, display empty on Monday.  Wireless Mouse, $10.  Like to try one of these.  Fine print in Ad:  where available, while supplies last.  None on shelves.  Doubt if consumers scooped up the entire stock in one day.  Maybe the bait, an attractive item, good price, not really something you will be able to buy, but see what else might be in School Supplies.

And so it went.  Hamburger rolls $1.25 for eight.  Could get as many packages of hot dog rolls for same price, shelf of hamburger rolls of that brand empty.  Unable to find lemonade on sale.  And a few more other things from my reverse page of maybe I'll get it, maybe not.

I went to customer service where people are pleasant but really have no influence.  The lady called the department manager for everything I couldn't find.  Didn't come in from supplier.

In a previous era, retailers would intentionally fail to have sufficient advertised items to meet a realistic projection of demand.  Since purchasers schlepped to the store to get that soap, analgesic, underwear, or grapes, they would encounter an unhappy spouse or kids if they came home empty-handed.  Depending on how much they really needed that electric coffee maker or those muffins, they could and often would opt for a competing brand with a higher profit margin.  And since getting to the strip mall took some effort, then roam the store to see whatever else might deserve placement at the cash register.  Bait and Switch, a common ploy to boost retail bottom lines in an industry that runs on notoriously thin profit margins offset by volume.

My present inability to find what I had placed on my advertising generated shopping list probably does not have a sinister motive.  There is no intent for hot dog rolls to overflow the assigned shelf while hamburger rolls of the same house brand at the same price do not appear on the adjacent shelf.  Rather the consumer has become the unwitting pawn of modern, sophisticated commerce's unsolved challenges.  Products in the supermarket come from all over the world, manufactured in massive amounts by producers who must obtain ingredients from every farm imaginable.  They have to produce the amount that they think they can sell at an acceptable price to a distributor.  The retailer then has to make an educated guess, though one supported by very fallible Big Data, as to what the consumer demand will be.  Then purchasers have to negotiate best prices, close deals, and pass that good fortune to headquarters who can decide what to discount.  The art or media division creates the ad, somebody else nudges the suppliers to deliver the products in the anticipated amounts, while somebody else at the retailer's central office figures out how many of each product need to arrive at each of their hundreds of stores in time for the first day of the advertised sales.

Our computers are good, but not that good.  The sequence of farm, factory, first delivery, importation, purchasing estimates, bank loans to be repaid after sales, and overland transportation to hundreds of locations has any number of glitch points.  As a consumer, I only saw one, the product they told me I could have for a bargain not available for purchase, not at that price or any other price.  There are other hamburger rolls or pens I could buy, no other computer mice, and all costing more than what I intended to spend.

So the best option for end user like myself, pick up the things that were on my list, which is the vast majority, assess purchases for things that Shop-Rite or any other retailed chose not to put in the week's circular, and decide if I needed a missing item badly enough to pay the increment for a higher priced brand on display.  While no ill intent or manipulation on the part of my preferred store, they still benefit indirectly from not being able to offer me what I thought they were offering me.  I have a reason to go there at all, a credit card that will not bounce, a mind that signals to me that something on the shelves not on my list still ought to go into the cart, and maybe come back on Thursday to see if the supplier was able to make good on the advertised item before the next week's circular makes the process literally circular.

Each Thursday when the mail comes I get baited.  An analysis of my register receipt over several visits would likely confirm switched as well, though in the era of supply chain fallibility, not by intent. Whether our legislators or regulators need to act, I'd vote not yet.  The solution will more likely come from upgrades in technology.  And the fortunes that come to the companies that make consumer supply more reliable can expect a fortune far in excess of the couple of bucks I currently overspend at the supermarket most visits.