The Goldfish Chronicles

Six and a half years it be now. A little more - eighty months is mayhap closer to the truth. Eighty months since I last was able to enjoy the selection at Sainsburys. On a recent trip back, I realized just how much I’d forgotten the difference between Sainsburys and my choice in the US - Krogers (aka Fred Meyers in the NorthWest). Choice. There’s so much more when you’re shopping at Sainsburys - or at least at the Home Counties ones I’ve visited in my former life. Grumble, grumble, whine, whine, move on.

We all know of the Long Tail. A physical superstore can only stock 10,000 items (let’s say). Therefore it has to choose the top 10,000 sellers. An online superstore can choose 100,000 items and it finds that it can make more money from the other 90,000 than it does from the 10,000. These are random numbers - I’m not sure what the real ones are.

Thus the UK/US difference seems rather familiar, though at first glance it’s all weirded out. The US grocery has much cheaper storage and warehousing, so you would think that they would be under less pressure because they can store 10,000 items to the UK store’s 5,000. What’s odd is that they tend to contain 5 competing brands of a particular product while the UK store will choose less (if memory serves). Thus the UK store is able to have more choice by giving less space to the same product. I also think that the UK stores are the same size as the US ones (ignoring the more common habit here to tack a clothing store on the side) and must be recouping their cash in other ways.

I suspect it comes down to customer stereotypes. The US stores are able to stereotype their typical customer into far fewer sets than the UK ones do. Maybe because US immigration started a lot earlier than UK immigration and the large number of US immigrants form the same general culture, while in the UK it is far more a mixture (in the chemical, not merging into one liquid sense).

Or maybe it’s just because I grok the nuances of UK culture and happily pick those up (while not noticing the complete lack of support for others) while in the US superstore I miss out on the subtlety and walk past large sections of tripe. Hopefully not literally; some things deserve to be kept well hidden up North.

Anyway - all this had me pondering on the long tail. One of the things my employer is working on at the moment is a Long Tail for groceries; we have Amazon Fresh in Seattle (well, Kirkland) and I’m looking forward to using it when it extends out to my part of town. Plus there’s Amazon Grocery which we’ve already tested out and enjoyed a large shipment of Bunny Grahams from. Seems very nice for bulk orders, but increasingly we need to grok what the cost of items are at each location. I wonder if anyone has a website for that. Weetabix is a good example - Fred Meyer charge the insane price of nearly $6 a box, while Trader Joes come in at $2.50 or something like that. Needless to say Carrie gets to regularly goto Trader Joes under the guise of a Weetabix trip for me.

By the way - that’s my only non-assimilation item. I still eat Weetabix every morning for breakfast. We recently found Digestives again, so have introduced those to Nathan successfully, but we can take them or lose them. I import OXO cubes, stuffing mixture and custard powder, but use none of them regularly. So it’s import in terms of putting them in my suitcase once every few years.

Back to the Long Tail. It seems that we’ve lost something due to said successful Long Tail strategy. Sales seem to be a thing of the past. With the Fat Head, sales are important to move stock out even if the stock has value. You have to shift items so you can have room for the next season of product. With the Long Tail that drive doesn’t seem to be as needy. I wonder if I were living in the UK if I would still only really buy music each year in the January Sales when prices are slashed. As opposed to never buying it now because I expect to be getting January Sales prices

Sales still seem to happen to get rid of old versions of product, but those were always the ones to avoid. That and Mail-In Rebates, a curse on whomever still falls for those.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 2nd, 2007 at 11:47 pm and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.