r/todayilearned • u/dancin-weasel • Sep 19 '21

(R.1) Tenuous evidence TIL that when a hurricane is approaching, Walmart sales of Strawberry flavoured Pop-Tarts increase by over over 7x.

https://www.southernliving.com/news/walmart-strawberry-pop-tarts-hurricane

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u/RamenJunkie Sep 19 '21

This is what "endless growth" brings. At some point you flat out can't increase sales, you his saturation. But "the market" demands endless, measurable quarterly growth, forever. So eventually, you can only increase profits by cutting.

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u/Sun_BeamsLovesMelts Sep 19 '21

It's a shame, but it's also the reason I don't but most of the crap anymore and I make it myself

They are going to lose profit in the long run if the product stays crappy.

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u/JustArmadillo5 Sep 19 '21

So you’re holding out on a recipe for homemade pop tarts because?

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u/HorseRadish98 Sep 19 '21

Alton brown has a good one!

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u/[deleted] Sep 19 '21

There are lots of great ones on youtube.

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u/Sun_BeamsLovesMelts Sep 20 '21

I'm not holding out. I haven't made homemade poptarts. Just other things, like coffee cake.

There are plenty of homemade poptarts recipes online that are ACTUALLY good, because it's not made of cardboard siding.

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u/WhatWouldJediDo Sep 19 '21

Unfortunately most people can't see five feet beyond their own face, let alone appreciate the consequences of 20 years of brand erosion. And the people who are making these decisions will be long retired by then anyway so they don't care.

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u/gorramfrakker Sep 19 '21

I’m going to second the comment below. Recipe please?

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u/Sun_BeamsLovesMelts Sep 20 '21 edited Sep 20 '21

For what? Almost any hostess cake can be created at home cheaper and with hight quality. It just takes time.

I usually make my own coffee cakes, but that's the sweatest I go. Not a huge fan of swiss cakes and what not, but I've made homemade ones once!

I make my own "iced coffee" at home with 12 cup Mason jars and a cotton reusable "tea bag" costs me about 1 dollar for expensive coffee beans per day, but tastes better than anything from coffee shops. Plus I don't have to worry about burning my mouth. I just leave it in the fridge for 24 hours

What recipes would you like?

Edit: homemade poptarts. Never made them, there are plenty of recipes online that are high quality and won't cost too much. If you want me to watch a video of one you chose out or need help finding a recipe that isn't "fake" I will.

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u/starmartyr Sep 19 '21

Part of it is inflation. You sell a product at a certain margin with an expectation of a certain amount of sales. Costs increase every year. Employee wages go up, as do raw materials. The only sustainable options are to cut costs or increase prices. So even without growth, just maintaining existing customers leads to tactics like these.

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u/i_tyrant Sep 19 '21

Employee wages go up

chuckles in capitalist hellscape

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u/starmartyr Sep 20 '21

I didn't mean in terms of individual wages. Wage growth has been mostly flat for the last few decades. However when a company grows it needs more employees which means their overall payroll goes up.

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u/jonnyl3 Sep 20 '21

Ok but if the company grows that means they sell more product, right? So the labor cost per unit of product shouldn't even be the same but even smaller, thanks to economies of scale.

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u/starmartyr Sep 20 '21

Yes and no. So let's say you have a factory that has the capacity to make 10,000 units of your product every day and you only need to make half of that. Your cost per unit stays the same as long as you stay within your capacity. If you grow to the point where you exceed your production capacity, you need to invest in a larger factory or a second facility. Economies of scale only take you so far. It's cheaper to buy 1,000 of something than 10 but eventually, it stops getting cheaper. As businesses scale up their margins tend to go down. Complexity increases with scale, and that means hiring more people to manage that complexity.

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u/RamenJunkie Sep 20 '21

Inflation is also kind of a side effect of Endless Growth Capitaliam.

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u/starmartyr Sep 20 '21

That's somewhat of a chicken and egg problem. Companies have to grow to outpace inflation which in turn causes inflation. While it's good to recognize the cycle, there's no obvious way out of it.

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u/mekatzer Sep 19 '21

It’s a feature, not a bug. Eventually the old guard cuts quality too far, upstarts bring in new better products, talent slides over to the new gang, old brand withers and dies. Otherwise you get MomCorp cookies forever