Profits fall at Ingles Markets

NC-Max wrote:

If you read the story. It says sales were up. The main reason was they opened or remodeled 11 new stores in the past 9 months. Wait till next quarter. There is no way profits will be down. Just look at your grocery bill.
Prices went up with gas prices. They have never adjusted down yet. I do not beleive they ever will.
Well except for meats. The price is so high now that they forced to throw away a bunch. Due to people not being able to afford it. They can only take a hit like that so long.

Dionysis wrote:

I've shopped almost exclusively at Ingles for many years, and I can say from my experience that there are at least two factors at work: 1. High prices; Ingles' prices are typically higher than other grocery stores (although they do have better selection and nicer stores) and 2. Lousy customer service. I almost always run into either indifference by the clerk (on a good day) to outright rudeness.
This is all too bad as the typical profit margin for grocery stores is really low (unlike furniture, for example).
Dollars to donuts that come the spring, we'll see an upsurge in home garden plots.

Yep wrote:

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I shop Ingles routinely and they have great service, well except for the slow deli...but I rarely buy that stuff...they usually have a good meat special or two, and their bags of lettuce reduced to $1.49 helps. Eggs just dropped to .95/doz, sausage went from 2.69 down to 2.17...
Home gardening is great for all children to learn because in the future we may lose the luxury grocers. How will YOU grow YOUR food?
Do you know how?

Ravenz Moon wrote:

Well what do they expect to happen when they keep raising food costs? People are out of jobs and people cant afford a higher grocery bill.

Mountain Gal wrote:

Ingles profits are declining because they are losing a lot of merchandise/groceries to shoplifters. I have a friend who works at one of the stores and says managers just turn a blind eye to the thieves. They refuse to prosecute anyone, and all they do if they catch you is make you turn over the merchandise and leave the store. Employees are forbidden to follow shoplifters once they set foot outside the store. Thieves steal everything from huge, expensive cuts of meat stowed in backpacks to over the counter medications. Some have been caught stealing beer and drinking it in the bathroom stalls, leaving the empty cans behind. It pisses me off that the company doesn't do something because their laziness is why all the rest of us have to pay such high prices for groceries.

granny wrote:

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Go to Food Lion and you will think Ingles is selling items cheap. I buy a bag of cat food at Ingles for 12 dollars and the same bag at Food Lion is 16 dollars, their milk is also a lot more expensive. I will go to Ingles to buy groceries unless I am at WalMart then I buy there.

just an observer wrote:

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I'm wondering if that may be the policy at particular stores and not at others. I used to shop at an Ingles near me, and one particularly burly (and surly) employee bragged to me about how he chased some guy two blocks over a couple of steaks and tackled him on a residential sidewalk so he could retrieve the steaks. This same employee used to take great pleasure in following ALLEGED shoplifters out of the store and slamming them into walls and getting in their faces and screaming at them. He also bragged to me about the time he tackled a shoplifter IN the store and beat his head into the concrete floor until the floor was bloody. Nice behavior, huh? And then there are the armed guards in most of the stores. Almost every store in Asheville has 'em. I'd say that not only does Ingles takes shoplifting seriously, in some cases they go way overboard about their reaction to it.