Word: supermarketing
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Like pickle barrels and nickel candy, the ring of grocery-store cash registers may soon belong to nostalgia. In its place will come the soft whir and occasional beeping of electronic equipment. Seven large supermarket chains in the U.S. are quietly testing an automated pricing and check-out system that can "read" coded prices on each item, tot up the bill and do nearly everything but pack the groceries in a bag. Advocates of the system, who describe it as the biggest advance in retailing since the tin can, say that it promises big savings in both shopping time...
...litterbags in their vehicles must pay a $10 fine. Such fines help pay for Washington's program. But the bulk of the funds-$650,000 this year-comes from a .015% tax levied against the gross sales of industries that contribute to litter: bottlers, newspaper publishers, paper manufacturers, supermarket chains. The industries do not object. F.N. ("Mac") McCowan, executive secretary of Washington's Food Dealers Association, explains their docility with a nervous reference to Oregon: "Our law is the best alternative to the mandatory bottle return...
...elderly, going to the supermarket not only is discouraging, what with soaring prices, but can be dangerous because of rising crime. Denver is experimenting with a promising technique to ease both problems. Financed by a regional-council grant of $45,115, a nonprofit organization called Senior Services Inc. has remodeled a 45-passenger bus as a mobile grocery store and stocked it with items priced just above wholesale levels. The bus makes ten stops a week in low-income neighborhoods and housing projects, and the police department sends along an escort for security. So promising is the innovation that there...
...months of dizzying, nonstop rises (TIME, Dec. 9), wholesale sugar prices dipped slightly. Major refiners, including Amstar Corp., the nation's biggest producer, and SuCrest Corp., pared the cost of a 5-lb. bag of sugar by 25?, to $3.48. The sour news is that despite these reductions, supermarket prices are likely to continue rising for weeks before they decline or even stabilize, because the recent rapid series of wholesale boosts-seven in the five weeks prior to last week-have not yet come close to working their way through to the retail level...
Refiners could well have had additional reasons for seizing the first opportunity to cut wholesale prices. Fed up with high sugar costs, the Consumer Federation of America is staging a ten-day nationwide consumer boycott scheduled to end Dec. 10. Some supermarket chains, like Tradewell Stores Inc., which operates in California, Oregon and Washington, are urging customers not to buy sugar at all; in one week the chain's sugar sales dropped 75%, according to Tradewell President Al Thompson. Moreover, the fourfold increase in retail sugar prices so far this year has fattened company profits remarkably, but those profits...