There are supermarket supply item catalogs for independent stores. Chain stores have their own suppliers. And some grocers such as my employer no longer even use conveyer belts and dividers.
As you might imagine, supermarket supply items disappear either through carelessness or theft all the time. A quick Google shows an estimated 36,000+ grocery stores in the US alone. Lots of business.
A true story. In 1980, a relatively small company named Minnetonka was planning on releasing a new product - liquid soap in a pre-filled dispenser. They were confident the product would be popular but were worried it might be too popular. If they introduced their product and people were buying it, bigger companies would quickly introduce copycats and knock them out of the market.
So Minnetonka called up plastic manufacturing companies all over the country and placed orders for the little dispenser pumps they used. The orders were big enough that it took months to fill them all. The other soap companies could make liquid soap but they couldn’t find any companies to make the pumps they needed. By the time, the plastics companies finished all of Minnetonka’s orders, Minnetonka had been able to establish its product’s place in the market.
How does this work? Can you not unload your cart while waiting in line? Doesn’t this make everything a lot slower?
No. You roll the cart right up to the cashier. You step around and the cashier unloads the cart while at the same time scanning.
Absolutely. Crocs, Inc. and Zippo Manufacturing Co. are often cited as the most successful examples.
But… Carelessly losing the plastic divider bar that sits on the conveyor belt?
I suppose you could be an EXTREMELY distracted checkout clerk and accidentally bag it with the groceries… But that doesn’t seem like it would be q common occurrence because it would include not noticing you’re grabbing and moving a plastic bar instead of a food item.
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You are way over thinking this. Manufacturers make them because supermarkets will buy them. They make money doing it because they charge more than it costs them. That is a complete answer to your question.
I think your confusion comes from an assumption that if one can’t make much money from manufacturing something, it won’t get made. This isn’t a safe assumption. If there is demand for a product, and the manufacturing cost is lower than the amount that potential purchasers are prepared to pay, a manufacturer will make it.
Not likely, because they often have a way to monetize waste.
I worked at a factory that produced seed plugs. The scraps from cutting, or improperly shaped plugs, were ground up and sold as fertilizer.
Looks like it was 2 manufacturers, and they ordered 100 million of 'em.
Yes, I can confirm those sticks fall off the belts, get kicked under candy/junk ranks and otherwise migrate around the place. A few nights again during a slow spell at work I spent 20 minutes fishing these things out from under/behind stuff at the checkout lanes and recovered about 15 of them. There were at least that many more I couldn’t get without moving some large shelving units so I didn’t bother.
Busy lanes will snatch them from unused lanes as necessary.
Occasionally, one gets destroyed. I expect they do occasionally walk off because there’s a type of person out there that will steal anything. And kids do stuff like that sometimes, we get a lot of 5 year olds grabbing stuff and eating it/playing with it/walking out the door because they have undeveloped morals (adults who do that stuff we tend to be less forgiving of).
There is a certain amount of attrition.
My company has over 200 stores, presumably they buy these things in bulk and they can be ordered from central supply as needed. Heck, for all I know the number-crunchers have worked out on average how many disappear permanently from the average store each year and just send out that number every 12 months.
There also seems to be an assumption that there is a factory somewhere making nothing but these dividers, which is almost certainly not true.
While I was in college, I worked one summer in a plastics molding plant. The molding machines are hydraulic presses ranging from big to huge that use swappable steel molds and inject plastic melt from a hopper on top of each machine. The plant I worked at had two sections, with several dozen of the smaller presses in one section and a number of larger to huge ones in the back section. Different machines are fitted with different molds and inject different types of plastic as the order demands. Some items I remember making including cases for Makita drills, plastic gears for Makita drills, several styles of Tupperware-brand kitchen implements*, plastic cases for enclosing splices made to power lines, and I no longer even remember other various bits and pieces. Other items made on the large presses (that I never worked with) included large plastic storage bins (the type with the two-part hinged lids that have interlacing “fingers”) and whole, single-piece dashboards for Mac trucks.
If a company wants dividers for checkout counters, they call up a plastics manufacturer, tell them what they want, a machining plant designs the proper mold and sends one or more copies of it the manufacturer, who bolts it on the number of machines they need to meet the order and loads the proper type of plastic in the hopper. When the order is met, they swap out the molds for something else a customer has ordered.
(*Different customers had different demands on what made an acceptable part, and what percentage reworked plastic could be used–“reworked” meaning that if you have a bad part, you toss it into the grinder that sits beside each machine, and the plastic chips that fill the hopper underneath are added back to the melt hopper on top–a customer may accept 20% rework plastic in the products, or more than that, or none at all. With Tupperware parts, they had to be cosmetically perfect and they didn’t allow much if any reworked plastic, so the (many!) pieces that came out with some slight cosmetic blemish were literally piled into shopping carts and occasionally wheeled off to a dumpster. Of course you weren’t supposed to help yourself to any of them, and of course I (and probably everyone else) did, and I ended up with a lifetime supply of Tupperware spoon/ladle/strainer-like thingys with small cosmetic blemishes.)
You manufacture them in bulk. Either made to order for larger chains who might want to stock several thousand at a time to send to stores as needed or else to sell to business supply companies who sell this sort of stuff when you only need ten or twenty.
A slight side-track: I really love the “hand-phasers” the cashiers use to scan bulk/large items and have wondered (sometimes aloud, to the cashier [who usually agrees with me]) if check-out would go faster/be more accurate if we laid our items out on the belt and they were scanned lickety-split?
It is faster that way - I have some customers who lay things out that way and it really does go faster. The thing is, most people don’t want to take the trouble to do that.
It works for me.
Understood. Plus, it’s doubly “troubling” to get the UPC face up to be scanned. 
One of my friends bought one, as part of a treasure hunt- one of the conditions was that it had to be bought, not stolen, as witnessed by an independent observer. Had to get the store manager involved, and it was listed on the receipt as something incomprehensible, but he managed it.
It helps if you go to a little store, preferably run by someone with a sense of humour.
The OP divider is a lot cleaner than the ones in the stores , I really don’t like touching the store dividers they’re really dirty looking . There has been a few times when there was no dividers when I was checking out and if I don’t watch cashier
I could end up paying the person food behind me . I like the OP idea ,
I was joking.
I can’t remember when I’ve been this disappointed… I was about to start a MPSIMS thread: “John Mace has his own supermarket checkout divider. What’s a quirky thing do YOU do?”
But thanks for 'fessing up, John. I’ve been walking around thinking “Whaaaa? Why…?”