Tesco have the fake asparagus out this morning
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Supermarkets using cardboard cutouts to hide gaps left by supply issues
Public mockery as problems with deliveries and a move to fewer product lines result in empty shelves
lol a few of my more reactionary relatives are sharing these images around with captions like "this will be our future under communism" fam this is what's happening in capitalism now
Anything to give the impression of abundance. Can't let the proles get any funny ideas.
I used to work at a grocery store and we would do stuff like this even when there weren't shortages. We would arrange stuff on shelves not necessarily in a way to make it easier to find or easier to grab, but spread out so it looked like the shelves were always full. It's like when a child spreads their vegetables out on their plate.
What's even the idea here? That they can trick customers into thinking things are normal by putting this up? I feel like this just draws even more attention to the shortage. I wouldn't think twice if the store were simply out of asparagus, but seeing this would be weird.
If the customers in the store I used to work at were any indication, the only people who are going to notice it's not real asparagus will be the ones who try to reach for it. Nearly every customer I interacted with was in a kind of exhausted haze and just wanted to get in and get out. It's an optical illusion that will work on nearly everyone.
It is why online stores show you things that are out of stock that most closely resemble your search.
They want you to know that they are "capable" of getting the items you want, even if they don't have them.
I feel like people would be more likely to buy other things in higher quantities if you drew attention to what's low/out of stock.
Eg, when TP was low during the start of covid, people bought more TP, paper towels, baby wipes, etc.
Idk, I thought the reason they have people working is to produce surplus value since self checkout is constant capital unless I misread this (its 2am)
Self-checkout still requires labour, it just makes it possible for one worker to work eight registers instead of one, thereby increasing productivity and enabling greater exploitation of labor.
Managers justifying their existence. Same mentality that drives Boomers to keep their houses in absolutely flawless tidiness seen only in furniture catalogues, where there's no indication that anyone ever lives there. They're trying to uphold this image of a Well Run Store [tm] because if The Store is good then The Manager did good. Just that weird like, petit boug/middle class pagentry shit.
What’s even the idea here?
It makes no sense to me either. They should just put up a sign saying something like "asparagus unavailable". Somebody seeing that nonsense from a distance might think they have asparagus, walk towards it, and then realize they've been played. If that were me - I'd be really annoyed.
We're out of asparagus, what do we do?
"If we leave the spot empty, people will notice and they'll associate us with not having what they want in stock. We'll put pictures of asparagus in its place."
Yeah but it's not actual vegetables so they'll notice we don't have them anyways.
"But it doesn't appear like we're out."
It does though because those are pictures and not the food item which they can consume.
"What if you squint and stand far away?"
Live footage of these being set up
Someone please edit this and put Tesco branding on the building and Boris Johnson's face at the end
New title for YouTube video:
Westerner visits Cuban supermarket for the first time - Capitalism to Communism
briton sees something british happening britishly in britain: what are we a bunch of ASIANS?!?!???
