would you use an environmentally friendly, packaging free supermarket?

Question

i.e. one where you brought in your old coffee jars, detergent bottles, egg boxes, washing powder boxes etc etc and had them filled up. It wouldn't sell everything, but most of what you need. If you had no container, it would be supplied in a paper bag, or in a container you could re-use next time. Products would be the same trusted brand names that are sold everywhere else, not cheaper, inferior versions.
Please answer honestly as I'm opening this shop next year, and this is my paper-free, environmentally friendly market research!

Answer 1

That is a great idea, and it already exists ... it is called "bulk buying". All the goods are brought into the store in bulk and the customers takes as much or as llittle as they want.

If you can't digest this long rant in one sitting, just read the last paragraph.

What YOU want to do is apply a bulk buying model to all packaged goods sold in your store. You need to think of a marketing model that will work, i.e. you need to answer the following questions

Will people easily break their habit of tossing their empty containers in the recycleables in favor of taking them back to the store to be refilled,
what suppliers will supply YOU in bulk, and how much volume, weight or quantity will you have to buy unpackaged for any real economic gain,
what about cleanliness and Health and Safety issues (contaminated food, spilling something harmful on your skin, inadvertently mixing incompatible chemicals, failure of large volume packaging, etc)
training your employees in WHMIS, TDG, HazMat, Food Handling Science, etc ...

You can't afford all that at a one store scale. If you open in one year without addressing those questions you will be sued out of business the first time someone gets injured or sick through something you sold them or something that happened in your store.

I think a scalable model might be a supermarket chain forming a partnership with the suppliers of all/some of the product lines they carry and with a recycling company as well as a packaging company in order to create the same system the beer and liquor stores have just introduced in Ontario. A deposit on containers to induce people to return them for cleaning and refilling, perhaps the cleaning and refilling plant could even be on the store premises in order to reduce shipping costs ... in order to be the first store to do that there would either have to be an economic advantage to the store, or a Regulatory reason to do it.

Basically, I think the near term solution to your question is to:

Build a bottling plant(S) in the rear of a supermarket, say a supermarket backing onto an industrial park idea. Standardize all packages on the shelves (square bottles give the most volume per unit shelf space) and,
provide an inducement (less expensive method of returning packaging cleaned and filled to the shelf = lower prices to consumer + benefit to the environment)

The most acceptable model to a consumer is the model where they do the least amount of work to receive an additional benefit. You will have to come up with continuing improvements on your model in order to keep ahead of the big chains as well.

I think you should work on a model that you could present to a supermarket chain. Instead of running one little shop you might end up running an entire chain of environmentally friendly, packaging free supermarkets.

You have a GREAT idea but I think, same as you, that it needs further market research. You will have to research the business model, i.e. the cost of designing a packaging plant into a supermarket versus the cost of distribution through current channels ... the price of fuel is going to be one of many deciding factors, you're gonna have to know the savings of bulk delivery versus packaged delivery.

If you want to present a green idea to an investor, you also want to show the business model, i.e. where the money is saved.

This is the problem every entrepreneur has getting an idea to market, so much you have to know, but only one person to know it all and do it all. All great enterprises are a result of team work ... you need a management team with knowledge that will answer the questions I asked above.

Your model might work in a simplified fashion by just adding a package deposit on a standard package for only those products that the average consumer couldn't screw up and hurt themselves if they tried.

Answer 2

Most definately if you were in my area! We recycle all the time and I think it is a massive waste how some of the stuff is supplied in the supermarkets............ I hate it even more when they then try and put some stuff in litte plastic bags at the checkout. But how much extra would you charge for this service? If it were very expensive it could be a problem. Good luck and please keep us posted about this!

Answer 3

Yes I certainly would. Hopefully your products would also be less expensive as there wouldn't be any packaging to pay for.

I'm glad you are doing your research but I hope you have your idea protected - it's such a good one you wouldn't want anyone to nick it before you get your shop opened!

Good luck with it all and I sincerely hope you have a shop near me very soon.

Answer 4

Health and safety wouldn't let you do it with anything food related.

Containers that you could re-use - yes they're called carrier bags, people dont re-use them because they cant be arsed - most people don't care.

And as for environmentally friendly market research, hmmm so you've used a pc thats chewing up electricity and has had a shedload of energy expended on making the thing, then theres the cadmium involved, then the power thats keeping this question alive on a server, and the power being used for tree huggers to read it - oh yeah thats really environmentally friendly.

If you open this shop i'll give you 3 months tops before you're bankrupt.

Answer 5

Certainly. Long overdue to my mind. The Body Shop has been doing this for years, time the BIG 3 or is it 4 followed suit. Good luck in your venture.

Answer 6

That's a great idea!! All the plastic they give you at the moment annoys me. You could also include places for people to wash out their old jars etc, and recycle the material they have at home.

Answer 7

Yes I would. Nowadays I use my own bags for my loot instead of using the supermarkets own free bags. I was so ashamed of hoarding so much plastic bags and throwing them away was such a waste.

Answer 8

Absolutely. I would love a shop like that, and I think it would really fly. It is an excellent idea, and I wish you the best of luck with your business venture.

Answer 9

What a brilliant idea, if you start a franchise I bet you would receive a lot of interest. I would certainly use your shop

Answer 10

Yes of course. Your idea should be follow by manufacturers and bigstores. I pray for your success goodluck.