The Supermarket After the Pandemic
Brandon Hill’s parents met in the 1980s as common links in the rickety grocery-store supply chain. Both were packaged-goods wholesalers selling wares to the Price Chopper supermarket chain in Schenectady, New York. Hill’s mother trafficked in lunch meats; his father hawked aluminum foil. For a medium-size chain such as this, figuring out what to buy was a manual process. A couple of times a day in its stores, a floor worker would pull out a clipboard and walk the aisles. They’d look at how much Reynolds Wrap was left, or how many Oscar Mayer wieners, and mark it on paper. Then they would repeat that for every item in the store.
Thirty-five years later, many grocery stores still work the same way. Annually in America, “billions of dollars of food are transacted on sheets of matrix-printed paper,” says Hill, the CEO of the grocery-supply-chain-technology start-up Vori. A grocery store tends to get its goods from hundreds of separate vendors, many of which still communicate their offerings on printed catalogs dropped off by delivery workers or by sales reps such as Hill’s folks. Stock managers then can spend hours each week transmitting orders by phone or fax.
Attempts to automate this process have never quite panned out. As early as 1983, a computer program Price Chopper avoid accepting inventory it hadn’t actually ordered. Big operations such as Walmart have adopted sophisticated supply-chain-management systems, and Hill’s company assists smaller chains and their suppliers in doing the same. But the whole grocery business remains stubbornly resistant to automation and complete, digital tracking. Unless everybody uses the same tools, it’s back to the clipboard in the end. The largest stores, all shifting constantly between shelves and carts, stockrooms and promotional endcaps, orange crates and produce-display piles.
