Supermarkets

By: Nicole Shalit

Supermarkets are stores that offer a variety of food and household merchandise. Although it is much like a grocery store, it is quite a bit bigger. They are typically comprised of meat, produce, dairy, and baked goods departments along with shelf space reserved for canned and packaged goods as well as for various nonfood items such as household cleaners, pharmacy products, and pet supplies. Some supermarkets also carry alcohol, clothes, electronics, etc. Super Wal-Mart’s are such stores.

Usually supermarkets occupy a lot of space, are on a single floor, and are near a residential area which makes it more convenient for consumers.

People shop at supermarkets for a number of reasons. First is the convenience of having a large selection of different items available under one roof. Imagine how much more of your time you would waste if you had to go to different places to do your grocery shopping, pick up your photos, and get that new DVD that came out. Without supermarkets you would have to go to three different stores for that.

In North America, supermarket chains are often supplied from the distribution centers of a larger business, such as Loblaw Companies in Canada, which owns thousands of supermarkets across the nation.

They usually offer products at low prices, and even take losses on items such as bread and milk. To keep profits up, they rely on high volume sales. Many stores are trying to cut back on the labor costs by installing self checkout lanes, which allows the customer to scan and select payment themselves. Usually these lanes have one employee for every four lanes. The employee is there to help with any problems or questions that may come up.

Other services supermarkets may have are banks, cafes, pharmacies, video rentals, and some even have a gas station.

Normally, supermarkets have baby food and products, food, books and papers, movies, cosmetics, electronics, clothes, flowers, pet supplies, and toys. When retail stores first opened, all the products were behind the counter, and had to be picked out by an employee. Today we have self service stores, where we can pick out what we want. It’s really hard to pick out fruit and certain items without being about to pick them up and look at them. The Piggly Wiggly was the first ever self service grocery store. Even though there are still Piggly Wiggly’s out there, today grocery stores are much bigger than in those days.