Student loans

Casey Jones wrote:

HawkTheSlayer wrote:
I can tell you some stories.
My family was in the grocery business for 73 years!
From 1931 to 2004. Three generations, including me.

Even though we were in the leading wholesaler, Associated Grocers of Baton Rouge Co-op since the 60s things were changing.
What member stores had built since the mid 50s was changing and was being destroyed by corporatism and a hybrid form of business that was unrecognizable but yet, still enjoyed the government perks of being a co-op.

Things went from everyone paying the same price to "buying brackets" for every category from groceries,  meat, etc. to surcharges for distance from the warehouse to "unload time" which pretty much required every store to purchase a forklift.

Then, the Italians ( you just knew who started the co-op) started hiring lawyers with non-italian names( still italian on the mothers side. Lol) to be CEO and President.

The co-op values were long discarded for corporate greed and in house kickbacks from brokers and companies by-in-houses  buyers.

Still, it's the only way an independent grocer can compete today.

Or you can go AWG .



https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associated_Wholesale_Grocers

Interesting.

And a few days ago I was trying to tell you about the profit percent in grocery retailers.  My mistake...as the hedgehog said, climbing off the toilet brush.

I'm not so quick to blame the bogeyman monster, "corporatism."  That's the form it's taken, but the real problem is:  The current generation does not have the values the previous generation had, or the WWII generation had.

Fair deals are fools' mudholes, to them.  It's all about the benjamins; how many, how fast, and we'll deal with the cost, later.

I was never close to the industry except as a sidewalk observer.  But I've seen the co-ops come and go.

There was one such in Suburban Cleveland - Stop-N-Shop.  About eight families joined together with independent stores, to better fight the Fisher-Fazio monolith.

Well, that fell, hard, after a couple of name changes, and conversion to the "retail food warehouse" format.  Also an ill-thunk expansion to California, because the Fazios wanted to move there.  Didn't work, either.

Meantime, the two most-successful familes in Stop-N-Shop, the Rini and Rego families, bought the rest of them out, and ran all the stores as one.  A co-op, with all the stores owned by two families, jointly.  I'm sure there was legal benefits to that, but not many to the consumer.  Except that they weren't collapsing like A&P and Fazio's.

Well, the last generation, my own generation, took over...and shopped the stores around.  Giant Eagle out of Pittsburgh made an offer they liked; and that was that.  Giant Eagle is upscale - nice stores with prices that'll cause heart palpitations.  I liked what they did with our local store, and liked that I could shop there 24 hours a day (handy when on the railroad) and get all the great deals and cold leftovers off the deli rack; but nobody talked about saving money there.

The changing values of successive generations.

Calypso Jones wrote: