Thoughts about candy and retailing

Nov 21 04:16 UTC 2000

I don't eat very much candy.  Indeed, given the choice between, say, candy
versus chicken salad, or candy versus oatmeal-raisin cookies, or candy
versus another hour researching political history, candy is likely to lose
out.

However, candy does have its place, and on infrequent occasions I do buy
and eat some.  Over the last dozen or so years, those occasions have been
often enough that I have noticed a disturbing trend in American candy
selling.

The big name at the candy counter used to be Brach's.  Brach's is a bit
like AT&T before the breakup: big and stodgy but extremely reliable.  I
don't know much about candy history, but I'm guessing that Brach's
invented, or at least adopted many decades ago, the varieties of candy
which are commonly sold in stores. 

In an age when many of the old line brand names have been downgraded into
low-quality parodies of their former selves, like Maxwell House coffee,
Brach's has continued to provide a product of consistent high quality.  A
Brach's candy may not be the most exciting thing in the world, but it is
never disappointing. 

There is another brand of candy which you probably won't recognize unless
you frequent convenience stores: Sathers.  Sathers makes candies in all
the familiar Brach's varieties.  In store after store, rows of Sathers
packages have completely displaced Brach's. 

Sather's isn't priced any lower than Brach's, and package for package, it
LOOKS like identical stuff, but that is where the resemblance ends. 
Sathers apparently is made with ingredients of grossly poorer quality than
what Brach's uses.  A Sathers candy is always disappointing, and has that
awful chemical aftertaste.

Try buying a package of Brach's and a package of Sathers in some identical
style of candy, and comparison taste test them.  You will never buy any
Sathers again.

Given the lack of any significant price difference between Brach's and
Sathers, the profit margin on the latter must be tremendous.  That huge
profit margin must drive big rewards for retailers who agree to carry
Sathers. 

Some stores carry a few Brach's items along with Sathers, but only in
varieties which Sathers doesn't have.  Stores which carry a lot of candies
of a wide variety of brands don't seem to have any Sathers.  Those things
suggest to me that Sathers insists on an exclusive contract for every
style of candy they make. 

When a retailer carries Sathers, excluding other brands, it's a symptom of
systematic contempt for its customers.  Retailers with a more positive
attitude toward the clientele, like the Quality Dairy chain of convenience
stores around Lansing, do not have Sathers.

Contempt for customers -- coming to see the customer as the enemy -- is a
natural tendency in all retail trades, because after all, practically
every problem you have as a store is caused by customers.  Dealing with
the public is exhausting; too many of them are rude or ignorant or
demanding or all three; and short-term bottom-line considerations tend to
trump longer-range thinking.

Resisting this tendency, in any organization that lives by public contact,
takes constant attention and leadership from the top.  A few of the
retailers I have noticed which have succeeded in sustaining respect for
customers over many years: 

   - Meijer's
   - McDonald's restaurants
   - Hudson's department stores
   - Quality Dairy (already mentioned above)

A few other companies which seem to have gone in the opposite direction
all too often:

   - Rite Aid drug stores
   - Kroger's supermarkets
   - Burger King restaurants
   - Toyota car dealerships

Obviously I'm speaking mostly from my own limited experience, and in some
of those there may be huge variations from store to store or from region
to region.  For all I know, some of y'all may even reverse these two
lists.

response 2 of 81:

Nov 21 06:05 UTC 2000

Meijer sells lots of Brach's, or so my listings tell me.  I had never heard
of Sather's.  Candy is not my thing.  

I'd appreciate hearing where people find Meijer to emphasize customers more
than other retailers, since I, obviously, have no impartial perspective
whatsoever.  Heck, I'm not even privy to everything in my own store.  

What is clear is that quality is no longer the major selling point for most
merchandise;  image takes the cake.  Brand equity is gold.  Politics, sports,
food, everything sells it.  

response 4 of 81:

Nov 21 14:15 UTC 2000

WEll, I would have to disagree with one of your statements, the natural
tendency to see the customer as the enemy.   As a clerk, you might end up with
a we vs them attitude, but for a company to survive adn flourish, it needs
to see the customer as their freind.

As to why slathers is selling over brachs, I would think it was a more
aggressive approach to selling to the retailer.  Why does hershey's sell more
chocolate than godiva?  Is their product better?  No!  But they know how to
aggressivly sell the product on a continuous basis.  Perhaps brachs is resting
on their laurels and finding their market disappearing slowly, or more likely,
not expanding at the rate tehy could expect if they maintained an aggressive
sales posture.

Many retailers go thru cycles like this.  They aggressivly promote in an area
till they get a constituancy built up, then they turnm the advertising to
other markets and let the established stores fend for themselves.  When sales
begin to slump because otehr marketers have turned aggressive in their
established markets and are taking away their customer base, they have to
retool (so to speak) and go back into the area and market aggressivly all over
again.

As to candy, Does anyone know where to find the chewy nougat candys they used
to make with the jellied candy pieces inside them?  They were white
rectangular shaped with colored jelly showing thru?

Can't find them anywhere!

in some cases, the marketing has changed.  Ever try finding Blackjacks?  They
used to be a staple in every candy store in the world or so it seemed.  Now
I can find them only in specialty stores.  Same goes for rock candy and other
old fashioned candys.  They are still manufactured, but only specialty stores
carry them.

response 6 of 81:

Nov 21 15:44 UTC 2000

The first step in "more agressive" marketing is to cut costs.  

As for beer... even Budweiser is a pale shadow of what beer used to be in this
country.  There used to be lots of local/regional breweries making good beer.
Really good beer!  The recent trend toward craft and microbrew beer has been
a good thing in my book.  But back to Bud... guess what it costs to make a
bottle of [insert national brand name here] beer?  Maybe 5 cents?  10?  I
dunno, but I've read that something like 33% of the price is distribution,
33% is advertising, and most of the rest is packaging.  Budweiser has done
as well as it has because they've generally had the best advertising (think
about all those famous/funniest beer ads and then count how many were for
Budweiser).

response 8 of 81:

Nov 21 17:06 UTC 2000

One thing not mentioned above is how much (or how little, actually) the taste
matters to people. If the cheap stuff sells, it's either because people just
can't taste the difference between the cheap stuff and the good stuff, or
doesn't value the good stuff enough to pay extra for it. In other words,
manufacturers get away with cheapening their product because the customers let
them get away with it.

response 10 of 81:

Nov 21 17:29 UTC 2000

(I should add, with regard to Callard & Bowsers, that the evil Kraft Foods
empire bought them a number of years ago, and decided that there wasn't enough
profit in making their nougat.)

I like good food. I can name several brands of mustard, for example. I can
name several different manufacturers of wine, and am willing to bet that
most here can also think of several. I rarely drink beer, but I can think
of dozens of brands. (The joy of heavy advertising, I suppose - I can also
name numerous brands of cigarettes, even though I don't smoke.) I can even
name different manufacturers of Ramen.  I can only think of one
manufacturer of custard powder, though - Bird's. 

It is a bit hard for people to know what they're missing, if they never
have an opportunity to try the good stuff. It also seems that most people
are pretty limited in their culinary exploration, and thus never even try
the good stuff. I can't imagine eating Spam and Velveeta sandwiches on
Wonder Bread, but I know somebody who lived on those "foods" during
undergrad.

danr's point about marketing shouldn't be overlooked. Hershey Foods thought
it had an insurmountable lead in the chocolate market, so it didn't pay
much attention when Mars started blanketing North America with ads. By the
time Hershey caught on, it was playing catch-up. Brand name dilution can
also hurt product sales - as Kraft Foods learned when it decided it could
leverage its brand name from cheese into a wide range of grocery items.

response 12 of 81:

Nov 22 00:04 UTC 2000

I wish my Pepsi habit had been all marketing!  It took four days in the
hospital with NO fluids to break my addiction.  Gareth is activly trying to
break his addiction now, and Anderyn has basically given up trying to break
the habit.

Callard and Bowsers were wonderful many years aga, an are still better than
many US candies today.

response 14 of 81:

Nov 22 00:55 UTC 2000

  Larry's #0 touches on one of my pet peeves -- another example of the
  customer contempt mentioned in #0 can be found (sometimes strikingly)
  in grocery-store bakery sections.

  At some time in the past fifteen or so years it became fashionable for
  upscale grocery stores to have specialty sections like a deli counter,
  etc, where they'd offer selections that had previously mostly been
  the purview of smaller independent specialty stores.  One of the more
  common specialty sections to roll into stores at this time was a bakery
  section where they'd offer fresh-baked breads, cookies, cakes, etc.
  This movement became so popular that most larger grocery stores now seem
  to feature such a section.  Even smaller stores do, although the goods
  often aren't baked on the premises.  When this trend first started,
  I was quite happy about it -- some of the store bakeries were pretty
  good and virtually all were good enough that I much preferred a loaf of
  their store-baked bread to a loaf of "Wonder Hearth Krust" or whatever
  was the only option available before if you weren't fortunate enough
  to live in a neighborhood with a good independent bakery.

  However, as the trend spread from the high-end specialty stores and
  was adopted by most full-size chain groceries, the quality of the baked
  goods declined dramatically, even in those stores which had previously
  had pretty decent bakery sections.  These days I'm amazed at the low
  quality of the products the store bakeries turn out.  They clearly know
  how to make visually appealing baked goods but have just as clearly
  found a way to make them virtually inedible -- certainly unenjoyable..
  Largely this comes from using the cheapest available ingredients --
  fake butter, fake vanilla, the lowest possible quality chocolate
  (when they use chocolate at all), etc.  Often the stuff even smells
  good: if you happen to walk past the bakery section just as they're
  taking out loaves of bread or a tray of hot cinnamon rolls it's pretty
  hard to remember the sawdust-like "chocolate" chip cookies you bought
  the last time you were in that store -- cookies that not only didn't
  taste like chocolate but didn't actually taste like much of anything.
  What's the point of a tasteless cookie?

  What's most galling to me is that not only do the baked goods being
  sold in these sections often cost as much or more as (and taste worse
  than) the pre-packaged goods available in the same store, they also
  cost just as much as the goods available at the few remaining decent
  independant local bakeries but outsell those bakeries by many times --
  in fact they've done a remakable job of killing most of the neighborhood
  bakeries that still survived.  It drives me crazy that people are so
  oblivious to taste that they're willing to buy the baked goods produced
  by a Kroger bakery section, but clearly people *are* buying these goods --
  the grocery business is very competitive and I doubt that the stores
  would devote so much floor space to bakery departments if they weren't
  either turning a profit or bring customers into the store..

response 16 of 81:

Nov 22 02:57 UTC 2000

I have not given myself over to my Mountain Dew addiction (disgusting stuff,
really), but I have found that it is highly impractical to attempt to break
it from within my current situation.  It is highly integrated into my work
schedule.  When that changes, I might be able to kick the caffeine as well.

response 18 of 81:

Nov 22 04:08 UTC 2000

Refrigeration slows down the mold greatly.  THe commercial stuff has
preservatives in it.  Bread can also be frozen but it gets a bit dried out.
As toast you would not notice the difference.

response 20 of 81:

Nov 22 08:34 UTC 2000

Never heard the saying 'variety is the spice of life' huh.

response 22 of 81:

Nov 22 15:44 UTC 2000

        I'm not so sure about Hudson's.  Perhaps it was my age at the time,
but I always held the store in a sort of awe in the 1980s, and wondered if
the employees were specially trained like butlers or other professional
servants in how to be polite and respectful - even if their customers weren't
- but these days I see a more human, if more realistic, side to their staff.

        I'm still floored by the professionalism of the staff at La Paresienne.

response 24 of 81:

Nov 22 20:49 UTC 2000

Re #18: Never tried refrigerating it.  I was afraid it'd either get soggy or
pick up refrigerator odors.