The grocery business has always been a low-margin operation; less than 1%, as I recall, is not atypical. It's no wonder that for at least three decades, grocery stores and supermarkets have been trying to increase their take by introducing new categories of goods for sale, and even new services.
In its early days, the trend kicked off with the inclusion of new departments (maybe a bakery, a deli, or a seafood case) as well as the addition of new categories (drugstore items like nonprescription medicines and toothbrushes, for example). To some degree, those adaptations seemed to succeed. The addition of special "departments" helped bring about a broadening of the products available, since a seafood department had to have more to offer than just the few packages of prefrozen perch that might have been the store's only seafood offering up to that time. And people gradually got used to buying their aspirin and corn plasters along with their food; after all, it was more convenient to make one stop than two, even if the prices on those goods were (and still are) generally higher than at the drugstore.
But it's gone too far, 'way too far -- amidst all the effort to turn these stores into purveyors of anything a consumer could want, groceries have been deemphasized to a ridiculous degree. As major and minor supermarkets rush to make sure you can buy a cup of coffee, get cash from your bank, leave off your drycleaning, and pick up a bouquet of flowers under their roofs, food takes a back seat.
In supermarkets my wife and I visit regularly, changes we've seen over the past five years include extensive expansions and remodeling of stores to include some of these new services, and despite increased space, the alterations inevitably lead to less space for actual food, which in turn means less variety as managers pare back choices to fit their merchandise into smaller space. That one brand of crackers you especially liked is gone; fresh fruit is great, and better than canned or than fruit juice; yet all the canned fruit disappears from the store, those canned sour cherries (not pie filling, but actual cherries) you rely on from September to June to bake that cherry pie are sorely missed.
It's especially noticeable if you buy fresh food and cook it yourself, rather than prefabircated meals. The supermarket "improvements" we've seen in our area have consistently engineered in reduced space for meats and produce so more non-grocery products and services can be featured. The one good, fairly large store we've relied on lately for our supermarket shopping is busy reducing its produce section by half in order to accommodate huge volumes of mediocre cheese.
Not that the typical supermarket is a great place to buy most produce anyway. But in part that's because they so obviously don't care about the produce they're offering. We head for a farmers' market in season or for Whole Foods, which so far remains a step above in quality, selection, and as is well known, also in price. But (speaking of convenience) it isn't really very handy to shop in three or four different places every week just for basic groceries; we would buy more produce in supermarkets if there were more.
My other objection to the current fad is that I don't, and won't, use many of those extra services they're putting in. I don't think other people do either. The fancy coffee bar they put in two years ago at one place never has any customers; often, there's no one behind the counter, so if you did want coffee, you'd presumably have to wait until somebody noticed and came running over from some other department. But the store's response to this obvious failure was been to provide people still more adjunct services that they won't use either.
After all, what are the odds that these add-on services are any good? If you're completely indifferent to the quality of the dry cleaner you use, of if you believe that the manager of a bank branch located in your supermarket is the best person to work with to get a mortgage, then by all means, use them. But I think most - or many - of us choose these services differently, so odds are that the ones tucked into that corner over there by the frozen foods aisles aren't the ones we want.
So please, grocery chains of America, let's call a halt to a trend that's run its course, and put food back on the menu in our supermarkets.