Shopping at the chain stores has become so uneventful and tedious; its all the same, same ice cream, chocolate, sauces, chips, meat choices, etc etc.
Independents have different variety however that comes with an increase in price.
Just curious as to what others think?
What Would You Like to See More of in Supermarkets?
The fact that people need bin liners anyway, and so they are now forced to buy their plastic shopping bags, is of little to no benefit to environment whatsoever.
All benefits are to the supermarket who sells the plastic bags.
There is already another thread for this…
Yes need.
Yes need.
I kind of see a benefit in that i now buy biodegradable bin liners. and use the green woolies/coles mesh bags. so really the stores make a small one off sale of the bag and then no profit after that.
so there is some benefit to the environment. I don't see people buying plastic bags everytime i shop either, its more like an emergency option.
I think it has an overall positive effect for the effort involved.
They should have make an effort to make biodegradable/paper bags complimentary or almost free.
In the end of the day, the strategy that is implemented by these big companies (supermarkets or banks) to reduce paper statements/plastic bags, are driven by money and greed, not the love of environment.
I bet you that there are analysts employed to estimate how much $ they saved.
@[Deactivated]: https://www.woolworths.com.au/shop/discover/reusable-bags
We’ve launched a new reusable bag in our stores called the Bag for good™. It’s yours to use again and again, and if it ever gets damaged, we’ll replace it for free no matter when you bought it from us. Simply bring your damaged bag to the Customer Service desk in any of our stores and we’ll swap it for a new one. We’ll even recycle your old one so it can keep doing good.
And the good this bag can do doesn’t stop there. Any money we make from the sale of the Bag for good™ in the next 12 months, will fund the Woolworths Junior Landcare Grants Program, encouraging young Australians to play an active role in ensuring the sustainable future of their environment.
https://landcareaustralia.org.au/junior-landcare/
https://www.coles.com.au/corporate-responsibility/sustainabi…
We have also introduced a new range of Community Bags, available in stores since 5 June 2018. These durable, multi-use bags have been designed by school children from across Australia. A portion of sales of these bags will be donated to four community organisations – Clean Up Australia, Little Athletics Australia, SecondBite and Guide Dogs Australia. The range includes a shoulder bag, a chiller bag, a tote and a jute bag.
They already do.
It's not that hard to bring your own bag. Not sure about coles but woolworth green bag is guarantee for life. You buy it once and you can reuse it. If it break replace it for free. The profit is only because idiot forget their bag each time every time.
Any money save by not giving out plastic bag is from not having people taking a couple million bags buying only one item so they can have some for their bin liner.
@[Deactivated]: because they have to put a time limit on it, so put a small time then they can extend and get more publicity out of it.
@[Deactivated]: I agree. Give it to a little reef charity with hardly any funding, or a firm that is based on Kangaroo Island with little working capital.
All benefits are to the supermarket who sells the plastic bags.
Actually the supermarkets are taking a substantial hit, because now many peeps only buy what they can comfortably (or awkwardly) carry to their car, whereas they used to buy more cause they could easily carry it to their car in complimentary bags.
That definitely don't apply to me. I use trolley.
@[Deactivated]: yeah they wont let my use a basket to take stuff to the car boot like i've been doing for 20 years. so now i use the trolley for my few items.
Paper bags sure. Otherwise make me use a cart that has the best green footprint. I've tried just using the trolley but it's slows you down.
Paper bags require deforestation. Much worse for the environment
sustainable forests. much better than plastic killing all marine life or reusable going into landfill.
@abuch47: Just make sure you despose or your bags correctly and they just go to land full. Less land need to be cleared for that.
Cost of paper bags (wholesale) is outrageously expensive at the moment. Thank China for that one.
As someone who works in at a supermarket, we legit probably still give out the same amount of bags. They either need to either go back to the old ones or bump up the price to sub $1 to make it a real inconvenience and coles takes 0 profit from the bags, all goes to charity
The profit is also in the sale of bin liners / other plastic bags, I know i have had to start buying them now.
coles takes 0 profit from the bags, all goes to charity
Which charity in particular killer? Where can I find this information?
we legit probably still give out the same amount of bags
Got some data to back that up?
I know that I personally use WAY less now. Used to use 1 every day when I grab lunch. Now I just use my hands to carry it to the car. I see most people either carrying or re-using bags when I shop…
I buy 3-4 every time I shop and they go straight to landfill.
Maybe in your store.
I rarely see anyone buying bags at the supermarket.
Recyclable plastics bags would been ideal really. Cost is probably to high however for.tjem to offer free unfortunately
Christ the amount of whining that happens over these bags is unreal
You've been downvoted by the infamous OzBargaim bag Bois
Don't question their love of free bags again!
It sounds like you are whining about whining.
they were NEVER complimentary, the price of the ones we used to get for "free", were already bumped into the price of the goods… so all that has happened is that now we pay for them twice..
Sure, go old school and have paper bags again
pharmaceuticals
Hot chick(en)s
He meant chick***, hot chick**s
Gotta catch 'em all!
Poke 'em all.
I mean Pokemon. Autocorrect fail
Fights.
Snatch some formula from a daigou's trolley/arms. Easy peasy.
… from a daigou's trolley
OK, I've learned a new word today… I was initially baffled as to how you had managed to slip a blatantly racist slur past the 'OzBer elite' simply by applying erroneous spelling of it… then it occurred to me that it's not Europeans filching all the milk… so I 'Googled it'. 'Daigou' … bizarro!
Thats some fancy way of saying you were wrong all along! :)
Was listening to a podcast about the history of 'black friday' sales in the US … the conversation talked about some of the tragic events that had taken place, link below to one in-particular;
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/deadly-shootout-at-calif-toys-r…
To be fair though, that article says the shootout probably had nothing to do with the shopping event.
Free fruit for man-children.
LOL
They sure do look smug being escorted around the supermarket in their lavish carts while feasting on ripened $4.90 per kg bananas.
And then there's me, wandering around on my own two legs, removing their half eaten banana off the floor, loudly declaring it a slip hazard and removing it off-premises for proper disposal. In mah belly.
Just bring your mum to the shops with you?
you know it goes both ways. These guys get harassed and abused by customers everyday.
I wasn't only talking about staff. No idea why you would presume that.
Checkouts
I'm torn. I like the empowerment, but that's not why they're doing it.
I've leaped onto self checkout since it started. No wait, perfectly packed, and Fly through. I look across to lazy cavemen dumping their shopping on a conveyer belt, for another person to do their simple beep & bag. Ergh.
But other days… it's our family, with a loaded trolley, 2 adults, a 5yo, & a baby in the trolley. Supermarket puts MINIMAL staff on registers, forcing a long wait resulting in multiple meltdowns.
Checkouts include self-checkouts
I don't see that issue.
Over the last 12months,i must've visited 30-40 different Coles/Woolies. The longest I've waited at self checkout was about 1min, xmas time at a rural holiday spot.
It's Aldi I'm curious about. Their queues can be criminal, and they're frugal as. But no self checkout??
Meltdowns of the ice cream variety?
We just returned from the USA/ Mexico, and really loved how many of the supermarkets over there had features like sushi trains, wine bars, freshly made deli sandwiches/ poke bowls/ salads and coffee bars. All for a decent price, too!
The population is also a lot bigger and can sustain things like that. Do you think a wine bar and sushi train at the local Melton/Blacktown Woolies would get a lot of customers?
The population is also a lot bigger
I see what you did there.
Not necessarily, I've been to small towns which still have an inbuilt starbucks and are 3x the size of a typical woolworths. I think they're just built bigger for economies of scale.
How do you support scale though? With population.
There are a lot of factors that are different in the states as well, land is generally cheaper to put a box big place up, with construction and employment costs lower. Incentives from local and state governments, all the while you have some of your stores bringing in massive profit because they live in heavily populated areas.
I've lived in small towns in Australia where the Woolies is twice or three times the floor plan of a city one, they also support local business within its boundaries (remember Starbucks is local to America). But these were often built ~40 years ago. Today the cost of doing big box rollouts is Australia is just way too expensive (or places like Costco would be everywhere).
@serpserpserp: Plus - if your entire chain of stores already has arrangements, suppliers, logistics, staffing, etc in place for extras like sushi trains and wine bars, that cuts down on a lot of fixed costs for these additions even in stores which might not enjoy economies of scale to justify it on their own.
American small towns tend to be surrounded by other even smaller towns with little to no shops in them though.
@callum9999: This right here is the critical factor. Their "towns' are often what we'd just call a suburb. They divide up towns and cities very strictly so although a "town" might only have 10,000 people, it might be within 30 minutes drive of two or three other towns with similar population and only one of those towns might have that particular type of business.
@che_97: This, more like a town will have 30,000 or so people, with other smaller towns maybe 5 to 10k only 15 minutes away.
@serpserpserp: Whilst i do agree with you mostly, the Usa's population density is nothing like Australia. The USA only about 15 cities with a population over a million and loads of medium sized towns/Cities.
Australia has 5 Major cities and then basically nothing ( in terms of where its economically viable to open stuff)
Yeah Australia could use more population and build more cities. Bring back baby bonus!
But it isn't because of low population we can't have sushi train or wine bars at local supermarkets.
No, but it is a fundamental point if you want to have sustainable ones.
Huh?
More people per supermarket…? Nope.
I've spent a ton of time in the USA. Not sure if you would have noticed, but probably all of the local independent sushi trains and wine bars in the town surrounding that supermarket were probably put out of business by that supermarket. This is an epic problem in the USA, especially in smaller towns and especially with the behemoths like Walmart.
we have those at the bigger stores - come to Woolies town hall for example.
The woolies metro on pitt street mall has a PokeBowl bar.
Cadbury Caramilk.
Too soon, man. I only got one block of it (not recalled) and loved the stuff!
Hopefully they bring it back again one day..
Have you tried Whittaker’s West Coast Caramalized White chocolate? Has a very similar taste IMO.
Is that sold at Woolies/Big W?
I’ve seen it at both. Not all Woolies stock it, but it will be in with the international foods.
Kitkat gold does the trick
Staff at the empty freaking checkouts. I don't want to do your job, as well as pay for bags.
Poeple got used to filling their own petrol at so-called "service stations", they'll get used to bagging their own groceries. What they should do is let us do self-serve at the conveyor belt checkouts, that would be fun.
I imagined someone with a full trolley going to an empty checkout, loading all the items onto the belt then running around to the other side to start scanning all the item like the staff would.. and I cant figure out why thats so hillarious to me
Imagine a morbidly obese doing this. Security cameras record their shop each time and over a course of the year we the general public track their weightloss via a free to air tv program.
Could call it The Biggest Shopper.
Lol they basically have that in the UK, just not going round to the other side to scan. Only works well with 2 ppl, quite awkward otherwise.
Can agree supervisors tend to go with the bare minimum when giving out shifts, but what happens is when the crowd eventually dies down you'll have 1-2 people standing there doing nothing
Nice manchild attitude. Bagging your own shopping, heaven forbid! Someone has to wipe your bum, too??
Manchild? They are making millions in profit every year, they can put some staff on at the checkout so I don't have to hold a screaming child while trying to scan groceries with a register that doesn't work, with a tiny little place to put anything, and having to ask the attendant for bags. If I want to pack my own stuff I'll go to aldi and pay less.
Why don't they just remove all the checkouts if they won't pay some poor teenager $10 an hour to work on them.
Seafood variety.
yes more Morton Bay Bugs for us plebs
Give me my bloody Starbursts back.
Reject shop $1.50 everyday
Go-go girls* in cages
sif supermarkets aren't crowded enough as it is
How about go-go gadgets?
Less unnecessary packaging!
My drinking coconut had a sticker saying it was ethically and environmentally sourced and then had webbed foam protection and plastic wrap plus the 2+ centimetres of coconut pith protecting it anyway and the coconut itself that is stronger than Sparta. There was about 200mls of actual coconut water.
Complimentary bags.