I’ve been drinking Diet Coke for years now and am completely hooked on this delicious, delicious beverage.
Roughly half of the time I go to the supermarket, there is no Diet Coke. There is a lot of Coke. There is some Diet Coke sans caffeine. There are occasionally Coke Zeros. But no Diet Coke.
Some stores will have the sad little hole in the stock, showing where the Diet Coke would have been had they had Diet Coke.
Other stores will rearrange the Coke to hide the spot where the Diet Coke would have been had they had Diet Coke.
If there was a sale on Coke products, the likelihood of finding Diet Coke falls even further.
I keep getting told that the free market is incredibly efficient and gets products into the greedy, greedy hands of the consumer.
And yet, there isn’t enough Diet Coke. It could be the supermarkets failing to buy enough, the distributors failing to stock enough, Coke failing to make enough, or space aliens coming along and buying it all to fuel their space ships.
So, where the hell is the Diet Coke? (And no, I don’t care if YOU have Diet Coke. I care if I have it. So you telling me that you never have any trouble finding it doesn’t solve the issue.)
Do you always go to the same store or same chain? I would ask the manager about why they don’t have it, they may not even know about the problems you are having.
There is a trend for companies to have to pay for the shelf space and they manage what is on that space - in other words Coke controls what is there, not the store. Also the store will provide feedback to Coke about what sells.
Your Coke is in the delivery truck,because the store doesn’t analyze it’s sales to see they are out of it 80% of the time. It’s a bad way to run a business for sure.
This is at multiple chains. Last night it was Kroger and Walmart, neither of which had any. The Kroger reshuffled their shelf so you didn’t see a big gap. The Walmart didn’t bother.
It has also been a problem at Giant Eagle, Pick ‘n’ Save, and the market up the street.
I noticed a similar thing with clothes. By the time a few are left of a particular item (eg. a shirt) it’s all super-large sizes. I have never found the last few items being Medium or Large. Why can’t they stock things in proportion to how they are purchased? Is it simple incompetence, or are there some other market forces that result in this?
And while we’re at it, who do I have to fuck around here to get some cranberry juice? Just cranberry, not crangrape, crantastic, or cranberry cocktail. I want cranberry juice, pure and tart.
Sounds like it doesn’t sell well in your area or it sells more than they tend to stock so it sells out before they can restock.
I was surprised they still make Tab since I haven’t seen that in a store in at least 10 years. But I guess somebody must drink it if they still make it.
The amount of stock of Coke is controlled by the salesman. He has a"build-to" amount of each product but he needs the store manager to tell him if a certain product is selling out early, otherwise he’ll continue to order the same amount.
Some stores have a policy of not allowing “holes” on the shelves, other products are shifted to fill in.
If your store consistently does not have the one product that you must have, then go to another store. Otherwise, isn’t it kind of stupid to continue to patronize a business that has failed you?
Just about anybody around Warren Wisconsin can get you fresh cranberry juice. You’d probably be a hit at the Warrens Cranberry Festival. It is the center of cranberry production in the USA.
I’ve seen the all-cranberry-all-the-time juice at the health food store, or Whole Foods but never been brave enough to buy it. The chain grocery store only seem to carry the sugared stuff.
But back to the missing diet beverages, where’s the store brand diet black cherry soda? I love that stuff and the northern California Safeways have stopped carrying it.
The market has failed me as well. I got sold on Cherry Coke (which I coveted as a lad, stirred from syrup and soda water at the local malt shop).
I have to go to the third supermarket away from me just for that, so I stock up more than will fit in my kitchen cupboard, so I usually have some staged in my trunk.
And I can never get it on sale. Regular Coke is sold at half price in cases, but not Cherry Coke.
My guess is that most stores do order merchandise in proportion to how they are purchased. But since I’ve seen the exact same thing you describe, I can only surmise that some stores are not very good at calculating the appropriate proportion, or that unusual circumstances caused the proportion they calculated to be un-applicable.
This stuff is all carefully marketed. Where I live in Chicago, it’s so easy to find Diet Coke and so hard to find Coke Zero. I go into a store on Sunday there is both, I come back on Monday and the Coke Zero is gone and they don’t get anymore in till the next shipment. Seems like the Coke Zero flies off the shelves so Diet Coke is left.
A guess could be that the Diet Coke and the Coke Zero sell equally well, but the Zeo is bought quickly while the Diet Coke takes a while to move, but in the end the sales are similar.
She listed four other places where she’s run into this problem.
Sounds like you need to start scoping out the gas stations next, jsgoddess. At least around here, there’s a glut of gas stations, all willing to sell me any soda I can imagine. Granted, it’s often at a slightly higher price but if you need your Diet Coke fix, you need your Diet Coke fix!
I notice the exact opposite trend! I find that the larger sizes are always gone but they have plenty of 4s, 6s, and 8s left. It may be because different clothes look better on different sized people, so cuts that look great on a smaller woman would look weird on me and stuff that looks good on me would look odd on a smaller woman so that item may not sell in certian sizes.
This is a little bit off topic, but chances are that they do, but with random distributions, you can see things like this that may seem strange. I’ll use a fairly extreme example to illustrate the point. Let’s say that a T-Shirts, Inc. analyzes and figures that they sell 100 t-shirts a week at a particular store and, on average, 99 of those shirts are medium, and 1 is large. Following this trend, they send 99 medium shirts and 1 large shirt. Now, if you assume that the customers follow the same trend, there’s a 36.6% chance that out of 100 customers that come in to buy a shirt, all of them wear medium, so that when the 100th comes in, all they see is the large shirt and are left wondering why, with their size being so popular, they don’t order more.
Obviously, that’s not a realistic example. But I imagine the same sort of principle applies because sales projections are based on averages and expectations. Maybe they find that they’re selling Coke and Diet Coke at pretty much the exact rate that they’re shipping them in at, but the difference is that there’s a buffer of extra Coke, while the buffer for Diet Coke has been exhausted and, since it’s selling at roughly the same rate that it’s being shipped at, it never gets to build up again. Of course, that’s something the store managers and/or Coke should realize and they should probably ship a little extra to help compensate.
I think it might also be possible that there’s other unseen market pressures going on. Perhaps Coke is trying to ween people off of Diet Coke and onto another product like Coke Zero. Who knows?
Either way, if it seems like a consistent problem with many stores, I really don’t know what to say besides to try to talk to a manager and make them aware of the fact that you can never find that product in their store and it’s inconvenient to go elsewhere to get it. Maybe if they hear enough complaints they’ll consider ordering more at some point.