The supermarkets are dumbing us down

By and large in Australia we have little choice other than to buy our groceries from Coles or Woolworths. The concentration is pretty significant - each has close to 800 supermarkets so there are around 1,600 in total across the country.

There often times I discover something new in my local supermarket and get quite attached to regularly buying it only to find that some months down the track it just disappears from the shelves.

I suspect it is because it just hasn't produced the sales volume required by the supermarket. Both chains generally set USW (units per store per week) hurdle rates for new line products. This is the rate of sale expected from the new product on a weekly basis.

In the case of something like a nudie the USW might for example be 11. This means 11 units per store per week of each flavour ranged. That doesn't sound like a great deal until you multiply it by the number of stores. If you had a product in both chains and all stores nationally that would mean 17,600 units sold a week.

Selling 11 bottles of nudie a week in an up-market location like Sydney's Double Bay is a shoe-in, but it becomes more difficult in a lower socio-economic store location like Mount Druitt. The more stores you are ranged in the harder it becomes to achieve the same average sales level across the chain.

In the UK they have solved this problem in supermarkets like Tesco by stocking different things in different stores based on the shopper base for that store. It is less likely in this case hat the law of averages works against you.

Back here in OZ, I suspect there are some great products which are cut because they haven't managed a respectable average USW across the wide variety of stores they are listed in.

This must inevitably mean that our supermarkets will stock more and more 'mass market' lines and less and less niche lines.

The system works to dumb down our choices and that can't be good for anyone.