Supermarkets: Products

Large supermarket chains could buy goods in enormous volume, enabling them to earn unprecedented price breaks from manufacturers. This also gave supermarkets tremendous power over food companies: Big chains could threaten to discontinue particular products if the manufacturer or wholesaler did not offer sufficient discounts. The selection of products offered in supermarkets has grown substantially over the years. In the 1940s an average store carried about three thousand different items; by the late 1950s this had doubled. By the 1970s supermarkets typically stocked more than ten thousand different items. The stores themselves expanded in size to accommodate their ever-growing inventory: The average supermarket is now about thirty thousand square feet, and the very largest stores stock as many as ninety thousand products in spaces of fifty thousand square feet or more. The seemingly unlimited variety of items in today’s supermarkets is arranged in long aisles of bright, eye-catching packages designed to attract shoppers and enhance sales. In 2010 the Food Marketing Institute reported that Americans spend $562.7 billion annually in supermarkets.