June 28, 2008
Your
Money
Food-Shopping Tips Direct From the Store Manager
At the bottom of some of its receipts, Heine's Fine Foods prints its
phone number and asks customers to call in with comments. And each
week, Tom Heine,
who runs the 17-store chain in the Cleveland area with his twin
brother, Jeff, listens to a recording of those calls as he drives to
work in his Chevy Blazer.
This week, he let me listen in as we made a lap of the suburbs,
visiting his stores and those of the competition. While lots of
self-styled shopping experts have
been
trotting out the same tried-and-true advice recently on clipping
coupons and avoiding the store while hungry, I thought we could
learn something new about shopping tactics by talking to a grocer
who actually sets the prices.
It’s a tricky time to be selling the high-quality foods Heine's
offers. Egg prices in May were up 18.2 percent from a year ago,
while bread rose 15.9 percent
and
milk was up 10.2 percent, according to Consumer Price Index data.
With those kinds of spikes, the big question most consumers are
asking is whether it’s time to switch grocers.
On those phone calls, Heine's customers
are indeed complaining a lot about prices. But so far, most of them
seem to have stuck by the chain.
Their loyalty suggests a couple of things
about
the kind of middle- and upper-class shoppers Heine's tends to
attract. While they are concerned about price, they’re increasingly
thinking about their foods’ origins and quality. So they would just
as soon not trade down from a store like Heine's that offers
handsome local radishes and an excellent stir-fry station.
And they almost certainly don’t want to drive around to six
different stores cherry-picking deals. “With two adults working and
the kids going to soccer, I defy you to show me how they can do it,”
Mr. Heine said. “They’ll be in the nuthouse.”
But the chain has chosen to do a number of things differently, given
that Whole Foods entered the Cleveland market last year and regional
chains have been relentlessly papering the area with circulars.
(Whole Foods itself has its own initiatives under way, which I’ll
describe below.)
If your grocer isn’t trying some of these same experiments, you’re
probably paying more than you need to. And the questions the Heine
brothers and others have been asking are the same ones you should be
asking of your grocers. Here are a few of them:
HOW MUCH ARE YOU THROWING OUT? According to one Agriculture
Department estimate — though it is more than 10 years old —
Americans waste 27 percent of all food available for human
consumption. Tom Heine is well aware of this, since grocers have to
get rid of all sorts of food past its prime. But he thinks that
grocery shoppers share some of the blame as well. His solution is to
spend more money but waste less food.
He explained his logic in front of a display of sausage-stuffed
Hungarian peppers, assembled in Heine's kitchen and ready for
cooking at home. “It’s not cheaper to make it yourself if you throw
parts of the peppers or the sausage away,” he said.
The theory here is that if you buy marinated meat or washed lettuce
or other convenience items, you’re not creating any waste in the
preparation. If you chop and stuff those peppers with sausage
yourself, however, you may buy too much of one or the other and
neglect to use it or throw out parts
of
the pepper that don’t work in the recipe. You may also buy the
ingredients but never get around to making the dish.
This way of shopping puts money in the grocer’s pocket, so take it
with a grain of imported sea salt. But if you value your time and
find yourself throwing
away
half-heads of lettuce on a regular basis, these sorts of convenience
foods may be more economical than you think.
WHERE ARE THE ARTISAN-QUALITY DEALS?
Heine's has won “best cheese selection” honors from Cleveland
Magazine for several years running, a tall order for a no specialty
shop. To keep that title, with cheese prices up 14 percent in the
last year nationally, the store’s managers knew they had to make
some adjustments.
“We went to vendors and said to them, ‘Go out and find us artisan
equivalent cheese,’ ” said Chris Foltz, the company’s director of
operations. What Heine's was looking for was the unusual, the
delicious and the gently priced.
Now, Heine's is selling an Australian cheddar and Monterey Jack
cheese for $5.99 a pound and is promoting those new offerings with
signs that say “Heine's Great Value Cheeses.” There’s an offering
from Wisconsin, too, for shoppers concerned about how far their food
has traveled.
If this all sounds a bit familiar, it’s because Trader Joe’s has
been using similar strategies for years, helping it to develop a
cult following. “Too many of our customers think they’re too cool,”
Tom Heine said of Trader Joe’s. “We’re worried more about them than
we are about Whole Foods.”
Your grocer ought to be eyeing the competition, too. Does it offer
fair prices on unique products? Is there a conscious effort to stock
interesting and inexpensive wines? Good olive oil for under $10? If
not, ask why.
IS IT LOCAL? One way to keep prices low is to buy local produce,
since it travels fewer miles to the store and tends to pass through
fewer hands. Heine's now has a produce buyer whose primary job
during the warm months is to shop the local produce auctions. The
chain buys from 45 farmers, most of whom are no more than two hours
away.
This last week, for instance, radishes and green onions from K. W.
Zellers & Son in Hartville, Ohio, sold for 99 cents for two bunches,
and they sit under a “Home Grown” sign highlighting their origin.
When local bell peppers are in season, they sell for 59 cents a
pound, a fraction of the price that peppers from far away fetch in
the winter. At Heine's, local produce is cheaper about three
quarters of the time.
Local products aren’t always less expensive. Heine's carries a goat
cheese, for instance, that costs about $24 a pound. But grocers
generally promote such items anyway, since many shoppers like the
idea of supporting nearby businesses and buying items that didn’t
consume too much diesel fuel to get to the store.
WHO’S MY TOUR GUIDE? Not every grocery store bothers to highlight
local products. So you may need to ask what comes from nearby and
who grew or made it. “One of the things Whole Foods taught us is the
need to tell stories” about our products, Mr. Heine said. In fact,
Heine's has 50 stories that it trains employees to tell customers
about its meat, produce, baked goods and other items.
This month, Whole Foods took another step forward on this front,
designating one employee from each store as a “value guru.” Those
employees now give regular tours highlighting sales, local and
seasonal items and popular selections from its private label brand.
I learned a couple of new things on my tour with Ally Kroch Smith in
the company’s Union Square store in Manhattan. First, you can order
many grocery items by the case and receive a 5 percent discount. In
the health and beauty aisle, where many grocers try to rob you
blind, Whole Foods has its own brand of shampoo and conditioner.
They each sold for $3.79 for 32 ounces in New York, which is a nice
deal.
Though your store may not have a guru per se, there ought to be
someone knowledgeable enough to answer the following questions:
What’s new? What’s local? What’s exclusive to this store or chain?
What’s the best deal in the store right now? What did you buy this
week for your own pantry?
WHAT KIND OF GROCER DO YOU PATRONIZE? Running a grocery store is a
tough way to make a living. Industry veterans refer to it somewhat
derisively as a “1 percent business,” because of its rock-bottom
profit margins. The stores are labor- and logistics-intensive and
riddled with waste and costs of every sort.
So this is what you have to ask yourself: If you are patronizing a
grocer that doubles your coupons, discounts your gasoline or runs
other expensive promotions, how exactly are they staying in
business? Are they gouging you on the second most popular brand when
the most popular one goes on sale? Do prices bounce around so
frequently that it’s impossible to keep the baseline in your head?
Shoppers can play the discount game and win by shopping six
different stores, buying only the sale items and products they have
coupons for, buying in bulk and then cooking from the pantry and
freezer.
But if you don’t want to live that life, you shouldn’t beat yourself
up. Demanding more from a single store on price — and quality —may
be a better way to fill your belly.
