Remember when they tried to have self-service frozen food? You would go to this frozen dump bin full of various types of frozen meals and you could build your own steamable(?) feedbag and it was priced by weight. You could mix and match and put stroganoff and scampi in the same bag if you wanted to. But all the frozen food was in clumps so you could just pick out all the meat and leave rocks of greenbean/potato or whatever. I wish I could find a higher quality image because it was ridiculous and absurd. This is literally the only mention of it I could find online. Everyone seems to have forgotten. I didnt forget.
>>22044614one of my local asian stores has an open bin of fish balls and you just scoop them up with a spoon and put them in a bag.
>>22044614I recall this but can’t remember if I saw it in store or just read about it online
>>22044614No? Those closest I've seen is at the seafood counter you request that it get sealed in a bag with butter and herbs.
>>22044929the article seems to imply it was only conducted in test markets. i dont live in VA but i guess we are a popular test market area. I guess it failed and that would explain why you might have never heard of it.>>22044925it was crazy to watch people spoon up frozen lumps of meals. i dont understand why anyone thought this was going to be popular.
>>22044984this is what happens when you get too deep with focus groups. their frozen bag meals werent selling because they were a bad value but instead of abandoning the product they kept asking how they could make it a slightly better value, but never came back to ask if it was a good enough value to actually buy it. the problem with this idea is that frozen meal bags are for the extremely lazy who dont want to be bothered selecting ingredients or thinking about how to cook them. the grocery store sells all of the ingredients seperately at much better prices. and its frozen so spoilage isnt an issue for single people. i could see something like this working for fresh food. kind of like a salad bar but all raw food scraps at clearance prices for the purpose of cooking immediately. i would hit that every day even though its a food safety nightmare.
>>22044614>steam-in-bag seafoodThis means crab boil, which has a specific demographic target. We'll see how long THIS lasts.
>>22044614Instead of it being direct self serve, they should have made it into a crane game with no dividers between sections. Each food type would be placed in its own pile but they'd merge with each other at the edges. Make it $1 per crane scoop. And yes, it would be a scoop that actually can grab product instead of some loose prongs. You're still trying to get dinner, not a sawdust filled purple ant-eater doll.
>>22045615is that real food or food-shaped keychains
>>22044657Two of mine do that but they're part of the same chain. >>22044614Iceland in the UK started this way before shifting to garbage horse lasagne and shit like that. And the now defunct Murry's chain on the US Mid-Atlantic coast was exactly this but for an entire store. They were always located in the most ghetto areas but they were cheap and if the majority of the negroes who shopped there weren't addicted to garbage food to begin with, actually provided decent access to vegetables (though very little fruit). The bins had by-weight garbage like chicken nuggets, fish sticks, french fries and french toast sticks (all of which are still sold in other supermarkets in the region even now, long after Murry's went under) as well as broccoli, brussels sprouts, lima beans, green beans, peas, kernel corn, bell other stir fry mix, cauliflower etc etc etc and per unit items like frozen steaks, frozen heat-and-eat baked potatoes and frozen fish steaks (basically the McDonald's filet-o-fish sold directly to consumers without buns).I've never been to these stores but the business model was utterly fascinating to me when I heard about it. >>22044984>VA>why would this be popularSo when did they try that? Cuz Murray's was headquartered in DC and had plenty of stores in that area from the 70s through the early 2000s. The model was popular with low-income demographics (IE groids) so maybe Kroger were trying to knock Murry's out of that niche. The chain existed from Hartford down to Raleigh or Charleston. Pic related is all that's left of their once sprawling ghetto empire. Had to convert this shit from webp>>22045616lmaoI was at the supermarket yesterday and saw "fried chicken ice cream". It was an ice cream bar that looked like a fried chicken drumstick. I didn't try it but presumably, you bite into it and get tasty, tasty vanilla ice cream with chocolate fudge inside.
>>22045657And here's an old commercial. See the shelves of soda and shelf-stable goods and the rest is nothing but freezers?>>>/wsg/6162334
>>22045678would
>>22045657>when did they try thatthe article i read is from 2018>>22045678i am humbly asking you to let me go back
>>22045690Yeah, that would've been long after Murry's heyday and even after the last location closed, afaik. Weird.
