Blog – Shopping The “Big-Mart” Store

Like many of us do, I shop at the local “Big-Mart” store. You know the one, the huge store that sells everything from groceries to tires. Sometimes this is the only place you can get a particular item. The advantage to the Big-Mart Store is that you can get many of these items at a much lower price than the other stores around town.

A few months ago while shopping at the “Big-Mart” store; I noticed that the grocery department was out of certain items that I usually purchase. They had shelf space allocated for these products but there just wasn’t any product on the shelf. Since some of these products are not available at any of the stores closer to home, I would have to drive all the way across town to another store, which I knew had these products, to get my desired selections. Sometimes I just don’t want to do make that trip for a small purchase.

Recently, I noticed that the allocated shelf space for the products that I wanted, the same allocated shelf space that has been empty for the last few weeks, was now gone. The shelves were reorganized to fill up the missing space and low and behold, the products filling up that space were the store’s generic brands.

I started looking around the store at other product groups and I noticed a larger percentage of each type of product has been replaced with the store’s generic brand. I remember noticing that in the past the shelf space was allocated mostly to the brand name manufacturers and a small corner of each product type was devoted to the generic and/or store brands. Now, the current brand name products occupy a small corner of a product section and the majority of the space is allocated to the store’s brand.

I also noticed that there use to be three or four different brand names for certain types of products and now there are only one or two brand names on the shelves beside the larger selection of store branded products. What happened to the other manufacturers? Did they go out of business? I don’t know.

Some may argue that the store brand is just as good as the brand name. I agree, for some products. Yet there are other products that the brand name is a better quality product than the generic or store brand version. There are some products that I do prefer the brand name version and I shop to purchase those particular items.

Now that my local “Big-Mart” store no longer carries many of the products I prefer to purchase, I have been shopping at my local chain grocery store. Yes, the prices are a little big bigger, but they are more convenient for me and that convenience does relate to some money saved over fighting traffic to the “Big-Mart”.

I have now noticed that instead of three or four trips to the “Big-Mart” store each week, I have only been there once in two weeks. Not only have I have reduced the number of trips to the “Big-Mart” store overall, I have dramatically reduced the amount of money I spend there, I wonder if anybody is doing the same.

It is interesting to note, I started this blog entry yesterday. Today, in the news section on my home page, there is an article describing exactly what I am talking about. Many of the “Big-Mart” stores have been forcing brand names to compete against one another and the brand name offering their products for the lowest price gets the shelf space. Then the “Big-Mart” store fills up the shelves with their own brand.

I liked going to the “Big-Mart” store because it had everything. It no longer does.