[HN Gopher] Increasing purchases at farmers markets using point-...
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Increasing purchases at farmers markets using point-of-sale scanner
data
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 43 points
Date : 2023-12-29 18:40 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (onlinelibrary.wiley.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (onlinelibrary.wiley.com)
| zachwdc wrote:
| > We find noncash payment types, earlier sale hours, product
| differentiation, and lower customer densities are associated with
| higher customer transaction size, as is the number of product
| groups (species) and item variety offered by vendors.
| serf wrote:
| the noncash payments/hours/product differentiation make a lot
| of sense to me, you're creating a wider customer list
| essentially.
|
| the 'lower customer densities' twist is interesting. I wonder
| what creates that situation. Maybe people want to rush their
| purchases when in a crowd?
| pmx wrote:
| > the 'lower customer densities' twist is interesting. I
| wonder what creates that situation. Maybe people want to rush
| their purchases when in a crowd?
|
| I know when I'm in a crowded environment I spend much less
| time browsing and just grab the stuff I need and get out the
| way. This sort of feels intuitive to me.
| mattkrause wrote:
| And, if you _know_ you will be buying (say) 200 lbs of
| product, you probably will pick times when it 'll be easy
| to move and load.
| iamflimflam1 wrote:
| Much more time for interaction with the stallholders. We
| definitely buy more when we have a good chat as there's more
| time for up selling and cross selling.
|
| + after having a chat you feel guilty not actually buying
| anything...
| DistractionRect wrote:
| > Maybe people want to rush their purchases when in a crowd?
|
| Anecdotally, that does align with my experience. I tend to
| try to shop off hours, but now stores try to cram soo much
| into their brick 'n mortar footprint that even light foot
| traffic is a claustrophobic experience.
|
| For me, the inability to freely navigate a crowded store and
| the short mean time between interruption (where you have to
| move because someone else wants to get by or look at the same
| thing), curb my desire to linger and peruse. I make my plan,
| I get in, I get out. And that's only when I can't order for
| pickup/delivery to avoid navigating the store entirely.
| everforward wrote:
| Yup, this is me. I have poor impulse control, so if
| shopping is easy my impulses take over and I buy stuff I
| want but don't need.
|
| If the place is crowded then shopping is annoying and hard,
| and my impulse says to get the things I need and leave. I'm
| more likely to leave without things I need (eh, do I really
| want to trudge back across the store for milk or can I just
| deal with black coffee?)
| morkalork wrote:
| Exactly. When a market is too busy, it just feels like
| your being pushed on out by the crowd.
| ellisv wrote:
| I was at a store yesterday to spend some gift cards and had
| to wait several minutes to checkout because there was only a
| single employee working a register.
|
| I could imagine vendors at a farmer's market could easily run
| into a bottleneck of not being able to service customers fast
| enough.
| wolpoli wrote:
| > the 'lower customer densities' twist is interesting. I
| wonder what creates that situation. Maybe people want to rush
| their purchases when in a crowd?
|
| Another interesting question: Are people buying more food
| with this vendor now, thus displacing future purchases, or is
| the extra food ending up going to waste?
| toast0 wrote:
| Lower customer density probably also correlates with harder
| to get to.
|
| If your local farmers market is convenient to get to, maybe
| you go there for small orders, and if it's convenient for
| you, it's likely convenient for many. If your local market is
| hard to get to, you probably don't go as often, but when you
| do, you get more stuff.
|
| If the market is near dense residential, it probably gets
| more customer density and more small orders; if it's out in
| the sticks, it probably gets less customer density and larger
| orders. You're not driving 30 minutes round trip to get one
| pepper that you need right now, but you might walk a 5 minute
| round trip for that.
| mattkrause wrote:
| I wonder if some of this reflects wholesale/restaurant
| purchases vs. stuff meant for a single household.
|
| I'd expect a business to have a PO or at least a company
| card/checkbook, want very specific things (vs. whatever you
| can get from Sysco), and to purchase early/late because their
| business hours overlap.
| riversflow wrote:
| > We find noncash payment types, earlier sale hours
|
| Man are researchers really this naive? These are small
| businesses, large cash transactions aren't gonna be recorded on
| Square. duh
|
| Knowing a thing or two about the business side of farmers
| markets(having seen it from the farmer's side), I would expect
| that the correlation with earlier sale hours is related to
| those merchants having agreements with local
| restaurants/grocers or even other vendors at the farmers market
| to buy bulk quantities. You sell a good portion of your crops
| directly to a bulk reseller/food maker who pays you in credit.
| You record that in Square because it's your only CC transaction
| vendor.
| lsy wrote:
| I never really thought of farmers markets as a location for
| efficiency in the economy. Normally you are shutting down a
| street, hauling product in small trucks directly from an upstate
| farm, and having 1-2 staffers per product type make direct
| customer sales in a non-refrigerated tent. It's pretty
| objectively a waste of energy, money, and time if all you are
| looking for is sustenance. But I think people with the means go
| to farmers markets to make the utterly joyless but necessary trip
| to the grocery into a kind of fun and interesting simulacrum of
| an old-time open-air market, even at increased cost or less
| selection. While of course the vendors are trying to make money
| and probably want to make more of it, I can't help but
| intuitively recoil at the attempt to calculate this out. In some
| way it seems tasteless or missing the point, and if every vendor
| were to standardize on some product mix or strategy for sales, I
| think it would reduce the eclectic appeal of the market to most
| of its regular customers.
| myself248 wrote:
| That sounds like a lot of transport and staffing, but how does
| it compare to the numerous hands and steps that products pass
| through in the normal grocery supermarket supply chain?
|
| Obviously they're handling more product at each step, but there
| are so many more steps and so many more miles, I could see it
| swinging either way.
|
| My favorite thing about a farmer's market is that I'm talking
| to people with direct knowledge of the product and its
| production conditions. I can ask if the recent weather affected
| it, or what the outlook is like for the rest of the season, and
| usually get an intelligent answer. If something's advertised as
| organic or pesticide-free or whatever, I can get specifics
| about exactly what that means as it applies to this precise
| crop, not just a set of certification criteria that cover a
| whole industry.
|
| And if there are ways to preserve that directness while making
| the market more efficient to get more products to more
| consumers without compromising the things that make it special,
| I think that's absolutely worth looking into.
| secabeen wrote:
| Yeah, the freshness and the shorter supply chain are the
| important elements for me. For things to show up in my
| supermarket, they have a very long path through distribution,
| warehousing, and retail. Farmers' market products often go
| direct from farm, to truck, to market. This allows them to
| carry products that don't keep as well, are already ripe, or
| that are subject to damage in the traditional model.
| riversflow wrote:
| I mean at least on the West Coast of the US, my direct
| experience is that local farmers _are_ selling at local
| grocers, that 's where they sell most of their goods(that
| and to restaurants). Maybe not in Downtown SF or LA, but
| even in Davis or Sacramento for example, groceries are
| typically going to be locally sourced when they are in
| season.
|
| This is because at the end of the day it benefits farmers
| and grocers to deal direct. Better produce, no middle man.
| Produce is very straight forward to sell by the pound too.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I think this might be because most US produce comes from
| California.
|
| It is noticeable how much better vegetables and fruit are
| in California because it has to travel such a short
| distance.
| riversflow wrote:
| yeah, it's exactly why I specified the West coast. Still
| applies to a lot of people on here though.
| throwup238 wrote:
| It depends on the grocery store but it's usually a wash
| unless it's an ethnic grocery store that doesn't try to
| maintain constant inventory. The major stores like Vons,
| Safeway, Fredy Meyers, Publix, etc try to maintain the same
| fruit and vegetables in stock year round which is really
| expensive and requires a lot of infrastructure to move
| harvests from all over the world.
|
| Farmers markets and other stores try to focus more on
| seasonal produce that's produced more locally so it can be
| cheaper and less energy intensive.
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| > even at increased cost or less selection
|
| This is fascinating though, because our local farmers' market
| (Alemany in San Francisco) has like, 3 time more choices than
| any single grocery store. There's clearly different stalls
| marketed at different social-economical groups too, from the
| crunchy super-organic store to the asian grandma favorite stall
| and everything in between.
| spacecadet wrote:
| Miss the Alemany Market, one of the best in the country.
| ggpsv wrote:
| Farmers markets vary from country to country, but I'll provide
| context from my home country.
|
| I went to the farmers market on a weekly basis. I prefer the
| farmers market because unlike the supermarkets, the produce is
| fresher, it is more local, it is much cheaper, and I get to
| know who produces the food that I eat. I care about organic
| food, and unless I went to the farmer's market that was
| explicitly for organic food (though less cheap), talking to the
| farmers would help me understand how they farm and all the
| nuance around it.
|
| Anyhow, this is obviously not more efficient than a trip to the
| supermarket: it takes more time and I had to go at a specific
| time and location. However, I don't go to the farmers market in
| pursuit of efficiency. I do so because I want to support small
| farmers in my area, I want to eat fresher, and I cherish a
| tighter relationship with the food that I eat and the people
| who produce it.
|
| I do understand your point of view on efficiency is meant as a
| broader observation, but I find that it misses the points of
| farmers markets that are at odds with the pursuit of
| efficiency: localism, conviviality, and, give or take,
| qualities about the food itself.
| londons_explore wrote:
| > . It's pretty objectively a waste of energy, money, and time
|
| Some would see it as saving energy, money and time because the
| product comes direct from the farm to the town, and you are
| cutting out all the middlemen (who's time you pay for and who
| want a profit margin), warehouses (who suck energy), long
| supply routes (using energy), etc.
|
| Oddly in poorer countries, farmers markets are the _cheap_
| place to get produce, and you will pay a premium to buy from a
| supermarket, whereas in rich countries that trend is reversed.
| JimBlackwood wrote:
| I feel like this is too hard to just assume without actual
| calculations.
|
| If it went to a grocery store, it would go from the farm to a
| central location (which is who knows how many hundreds of km
| away), to some distribution center (again, who knows how far
| away), to then go to a local supermarket. I wouldn't be
| surprised if that's less efficient than shipping it to a local
| market!
|
| Aside from that, where do the products in a local supermarkt
| come from? Depending on your country, I'd be surprised if those
| bananas didn't arrive on some freight ship. Talk about
| inefficiency! In my case, even tomatoes are often from a
| different country and then we export our own tomatoes to other
| countries too. It's crazy.
|
| Next to that, I'm not sure about the other points. At least in
| my country it's cheaper (everything is in season), fresher and
| simply way better.
|
| Regarding choice, it depends. I won't find any locally grown
| bananas. But I will have more choice in vegetables and fruits
| that actually grow in my area. Personally I like that, since I
| care more about efficient and sustainable produce than shipping
| something halfway across the world for my pleasure.
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