Private label products being sold at other chains

[mbz321]

How the heck did they get all these things? They weren't expired or damaged as far as I could tell, although admittedly I needed to get on a subway so I couldn't stay and investigate for too long. And I've seen bodegas or small stores that have exclusively one storebrand (like the owner makes a trip to BJ's or Walmart to stock up once a month rather than having a real distributor), but this one was new to me.

Perhaps some small food wholesaler 'Cash and Carry'-type store that gets a lot of overstock/closeout merchandise from random sources? I know there are a couple smaller stores like this in Philly that I imagine a lot of corner bodegas and the like get their merchandise from.

[HCal]

Maybe a week or two ago I stopped by a bodega in NYC (Queens) to get a drink and was shocked to find how many random storebrand things they had. On one section of shelves alone, they had:

Hannaford grape jelly
Krasdale canned fruit (big NYC-area food wholesaler/cooperative, so that's not so unusual, but it is the storebrand for CTown and Bravo supermarkets here)
Kroger canned peaches
Great Valu and Market Basket strawberry ice cream sauce
Market Basket chocolate sauce
Tops barbecue sauce

How the heck did they get all these things? They weren't expired or damaged as far as I could tell, although admittedly I needed to get on a subway so I couldn't stay and investigate for too long. And I've seen bodegas or small stores that have exclusively one storebrand (like the owner makes a trip to BJ's or Walmart to stock up once a month rather than having a real distributor), but this one was new to me.

I wouldn't be surprised if the owner just went to random stores and bought things at retail prices (presumably timing it to pick up items on sale). If they can make a trip once a month to one store, then going to several stores will save money and may be worth the extra time, similar to shopping for a household.

But the peaches are odd, as there are no Kroger stores anywhere near NYC.

[storewanderer]

Maybe a week or two ago I stopped by a bodega in NYC (Queens) to get a drink and was shocked to find how many random storebrand things they had. On one section of shelves alone, they had:

Hannaford grape jelly
Krasdale canned fruit (big NYC-area food wholesaler/cooperative, so that's not so unusual, but it is the storebrand for CTown and Bravo supermarkets here)
Kroger canned peaches
Great Valu and Market Basket strawberry ice cream sauce
Market Basket chocolate sauce
Tops barbecue sauce

How the heck did they get all these things? They weren't expired or damaged as far as I could tell, although admittedly I needed to get on a subway so I couldn't stay and investigate for too long. And I've seen bodegas or small stores that have exclusively one storebrand (like the owner makes a trip to BJ's or Walmart to stock up once a month rather than having a real distributor), but this one was new to me.

I wouldn't be surprised if the owner just went to random stores and bought things at retail prices (presumably timing it to pick up items on sale). If they can make a trip once a month to one store, then going to several stores will save money and may be worth the extra time, similar to shopping for a household.

But the peaches are odd, as there are no Kroger stores anywhere near NYC.

Market Basket is rather far from NYC too by east coast standards. Out west it wouldn't be that far.

I wonder if one of the local wholesalers gets mis-shipped pallets or something and routes them off to some distributor who supports the bodegas. Sort of a quasi Grocery Outlet type of model.

[marketreportblog]

I wouldn't be surprised if the owner just went to random stores and bought things at retail prices (presumably timing it to pick up items on sale). If they can make a trip once a month to one store, then going to several stores will save money and may be worth the extra time, similar to shopping for a household.

But the peaches are odd, as there are no Kroger stores anywhere near NYC.

Yeah, there's no way anyone is driving four or five hours from New York City to go to a Market Basket. Their prices are good but not THAT good. Even Hannaford, nobody from NYC is shopping at a Hannaford. I know of people who go from Manhattan to the Bronx or Brooklyn to shop, or over to NJ, and people from Staten Island frequently shop in the Woodbridge, NJ area, but there's no way they're going more than a couple miles outside of the city. The mis-ship theory makes sense, though.

[Brian Lutz]

In a rather odd example, today I was doing some shopping at Walmart today, and in the milk aisle I found that somehow a single 1/2 gallon bottle of Good & Gather (Target store brand) 2% milk had snuck in with the Great Value branded products. It had the same plant code (37-83 which correlates to Dairy Fresh LLC in Winston-Salem), same expiration date and was basically identical except for the label, so my assumption is that it's all coming off the same line and one of the G&G branded bottles just ended up in the wrong batch. Didn't try to buy it, but I suspect it wouldn't have scanned at the register if I did.

[storewanderer]

In a rather odd example, today I was doing some shopping at Walmart today, and in the milk aisle I found that somehow a single 1/2 gallon bottle of Good & Gather (Target store brand) 2% milk had snuck in with the Great Value branded products. It had the same plant code (37-83 which correlates to Dairy Fresh LLC in Winston-Salem), same expiration date and was basically identical except for the label, so my assumption is that it's all coming off the same line and one of the G&G branded bottles just ended up in the wrong batch. Didn't try to buy it, but I suspect it wouldn't have scanned at the register if I did.

Wal Mart still has the ability for an employee to manually enter an item into the register if it doesn't scan. They can just make up a price and description. No manager required. Even the new self checkout software continues to have this function. I thought they'd finally remove it. But they kept it.

My favorite experience with it was one time when they had a bunch of clothing at $1 but none scanned that way. It all had to have a manual override. The employee on self checkout was a good spirited 20+ year employee who is always great. He came over and said he is going crazy with all these clothes, having to void, etc. He said let's do something funny. He typed CRAZY into the item description then the price of 8.00 or however many units of clothing I had. So the receipt showed I bought CRAZY for 8.00.

[Brian Lutz]

And for another example of this, today I saw several gallons of Great Value branded organic skim milk being sold in a Lidl store. Once again I'm pretty sure it's a simple matter of all the products coming from the same dairy and just ending up in the wrong store, or possibly that they just didn't have labels on hand for the Lidl brand product and just used what they had. The stuff is rather expensive at almost $7 a gallon, but my wife will get it occasionally because the organic milk tends to be ultra pasteurized and has a much longer shelf life than the regular milk.

[marketreportblog]

Spotted at the Elizabeth, NJ Food Bazaar today -- large display of red grapes, all neatly packaged in 3-lb clamshell boxes with Kroger branding. The grapes were really nice and fresh-looking, and $4 for three pounds of grapes is pretty darn good (Kroger sells this box for double this price). Food Bazaar does tend to get these random items and sell them for super-cheap -- next to this was a giant pile of two-pound strawberry boxes, two for $4. This isn't too surprising, I would say, given that the same growers probably grow fruit for multiple supermarket chains, but it's definitely the first time I've seen Kroger stuff in a Food Bazaar.