Have self-service supermarket bars seen their salad days?
Grocery stores are scratching their heads on how to reconfigure this lucrative offering amid Covid-19
New York — Grocery stores are doing whatever it takes — including deploying robots — to save their lucrative salad bars from becoming relics of pre-pandemic shopping.
In a frantic push to ease skittish consumers and shore up sales, some chains are tossing prepackaged salads into the bar’s now-empty bins, a stopgap measure that’s easy to do, but eliminates the customisation that shoppers want. Publix Super Markets placed an employee next to the bar to take orders during peak hours, but that full-service option slows things down and adds labour. Others are letting space to food-service chains, which eats into profit and cedes control...
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