Supermarket
The supermarket typically comprises meat,
produce, dairy, and baked goods departments along with shelf space reserved
for canned and packaged goods as well as for various nonfood items such
as household cleaners, pharmacy products, and pet supplies. A supermarket
is a departmentalized self-service store offering a wide variety of
food and household merchandise. It is larger in size and has a wider
selection than a traditional grocery store and it is smaller than a
hypermarket.
Most supermarkets also sell a variety of other household products that
are consumed regularly, such as alcohol (where permitted), household
cleaning products, medicine, clothes, and some sell a much wider range
of non-food products.
The traditional supermarket
occupies a large floor space on a single level and is situated near
a residential area in order to be convenient to consumers. Its basic
appeal is the availability of a broad selection of goods under a single
roof at relatively low prices.
Other advantages include ease of parking and, frequently, the convenience
of shopping hours that extend far into the evening. Supermarkets usually
make massive outlays for newspaper and other advertising and often present
elaborate in-store displays of products. Supermarkets are often part
of a chain that owns or controls (sometimes by franchise) other supermarkets
located in the same or other towns; this increases the opportunities
for economies of scale.
In North America, supermarket
chains are often supplied from the distribution centers of a larger
business, such as Loblaw Companies in Canada, which owns thousands of
supermarkets across the nation. They have a distribution center in every
province — usually in the largest city in the province.
Supermarkets usually offer products at low prices by reducing margins.
Certain products (typically staples such as bread, milk and sugar) are
often sold as loss leaders, that is, with negative margins. To maintain
a profit, supermarkets attempt to make up for the low margins with a
high overall volume of sales, and with sales of higher-margin items.
Customers usually shop by putting their products into shopping carts
(trolleys) or baskets (self-service) and pay for the products at the
check-out. At present, many supermarket chains are trying to reduce
labor costs further by shifting to self-service check-out machines,
where a group of four or five machines is supervised by a single assistant.
A larger full-service supermarket
combined with a department store is sometimes known as a hypermarket.
Other services that supermarkets may have include banks, cafés, creches,
photo development, video rental, pharmacies, and/or gas stations.
|
