Ice Cream

I love Ice Cream (who doesn't?) and America is the country of Ice Cream. But coming from country, where finding chocolate ice cream means you have a lucky day, I'm having troubles. On average supermarket shelf in San Diego, there is about 25 different flavors of Ice Cream, usually from four or five different producers (brands). But, finding the simple chocolate ice cream is not easy. It does not exists. Oh, there are flavors that contain chocolate (chocolate mint, double chocolate cookies fudge, or whatever - I mostly have no idea what the name means), but no simple chocolate.
In large stores, you can find "Best of both", which contains both Vanilla and Chocolate. This is a good substitute, if you like vanilla.
The point of the story is that too much of horizontal differentiation is, uhmm, too much :-)

Discrimination

The US is the country of discrimination. No, I'm not talking about racial discrimination - I haven't seen any, so I can't really tell. I mean price discrimination.
First, it is everywhere. And it is huge. And it has many levels.
It starts with "club cards". Many shops offer (excessively) high prices, but reduce them significantly for members of their "club". It is usually free and requires your address etc.Even with this card, some discounts apply only if you buy larger quantities (but not always, even when you see 4 for $4 you pay $1 for 1, regardless how much you buy).
Then, there are coupons. There is plenty of them. The discount differs based on how difficult it is to get them. The easiest are available at the stand with the particular food - you just take it. Others come in the mail or with Sunday newspapers. Some of those can be copied or doubled, but those really valuable cannot. Some even impose minimal purchase.
Also, there are hidden offers. Starbucks has "short" coffee that you cannot find on their menu, but you can ask for it. It contains less water but the same amount of coffee as the "tall", but is cheaper. Similarly, Amazon has offer that are almost impossible to find - sometimes offered by other sellers on Amazon marketplace.
There are also mail-in-rebates, which take long time to get the discount, but sometimes it is significant.
Last, but not least, there are various time-limited offers, offering various discounts. One of the most famous is woot.com, the type one day, one offer, where they sell limited quantities for really discounted prices. Except you do not know what they will sell tomorrow and how fast it will be gone.
This is an example of a developed market. There are very rich customers around here, who simply do not care and thus pay high price and poor ones who do. Price discrimination allows one shop to serve both and make nice profit on both.

Walmart

Well, you knew it was coming. The Wal-Mart has a shop near the Social Security administration, where I had to go anyway.I couldn't miss such opportunity.
The Wal-mart's shops are probably the largest shops, but they do not seem to be particularly large to me. You could compare it to the Tesco outside of the city center (the biggest ones). The prices are good (sometimes very good), they have a good selection of cheap clothes, which I usually hate in these shops, but they have excellent prices as well as good quality, colors and materials. Except for that, nothing special. Sometimes, they were even poorly stocked on things. And it was next to impossible what you actually came for.

Tax

As you probably know, there is no VAT tax in the US, but there is sales tax. But the prices you see at the selves do not include it, which unfortunately means that you do not know how much you will pay at the counter.Unsurprisingly, there is some research out there showing that including the tax in the price posted on the shelve would decrease your consumption of that good.

Marshalls

When I was packing for the US, I was quite efficient - I throw the oldest cloths away, left at home those of "middle age" and took only the new ones. So I needed to buy some more here. Fortunately, my landlady was so kind that she took me to an outlet, where for about $150 (3000CZK) I was able to buy couple of shorts, some T-shirts, swimming suit, socks and pair of sneakers. Given that (almost) each of these things ALONE would cost me somewhere between $50-$100 and that they are "branded" (nike, Adidas, Reebook, Ralph Lauren etc.) it was a good bargain.