News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
Getting numbers for these kinds of things is quite difficult, since a lot of it is negotiated with a salesperson and is based on a mix of the quantity you're looking to buy and the value you present as a long term contract to work with (i.e. how much other stuff do you buy, and how regularly).
But let's look at examples to demonstrate the point. This article claims Costco sells 25lb flour for $13 and that matches my local experience (mine is actually milled and bagged like 5 miles from my house, which rocks). That works out to 3.3¢/oz. If I order the same brand (King Arthur from the article) for pickup from Walmart, a 5lb bag will cost $5.24, or 6.6¢/oz, or roughly double. Walmart's store brand is actually a little cheaper at $4.34 for 10lb bag, or 2.7¢/oz, but that's going to be a bit different in terms of quality. If you go to your local grocery instead (not Walmart), prices will be another 10-30% higher in my experience (like $7-8 for the same 5lb bag of King Arthur flour at my local grocery). If you're a bakery, you'll be able to get even better prices on flour.
Your local coffee shop isn't going to be buying their beans from Walmart or Costco (though they may get their milk/creamers from there), but I'd expect the cost difference to look similar for low volume vs high volume shops. So something like 10-50% cost difference, depending on the item.
But that's a pretty small percentage of the overall profit margin equation, especially for coffee where costs are more dominated by labor than ingredients. And in this case, larger orgs win again, here are some examples:
And so on. Larger orgs have lower base costs, their marketing dollars go further, and they get higher volume of customers. So the only way for a smaller business to compete is to offer something different, so they usually focus on overall experience (quality of service, interesting branding, etc) instead of cost. If they tried to compete on cost, they'd lose.