"Time-arbitrage just means exploiting the fact that most investors - institutional, mutual funds or hedge funds - tend to have very short-term horizons," 

Consumers have been trained to have short term horizons.

Buying in bulk

When to buy and opportunities to reduce costs;

  - producer costs to pack and ship

  - manufacturers ship on production reducing storage requirements

  - customers increase storage requirements, using lasting or reusable containers

 - many foodstuffs have very long shelf lives ('drugs' ~  'dried goods')

- capital infrastructure and producer resources can be maximised (see 'cheese factory lives for christmas, working only for X months to produce for Xmas demand, idle in between due to such extreme seasonal demand

 - identify long lasting good, with high seasonality and expensive production costs

"Not surprisingly, in surveys done in 2011 and 2016, grocery stores reported the highest volume of sales in dry groceries. These are the canned vegetables, cereals, pasta and other packaged and canned products."

&

"In 2017, the average net profit margin of grocery stores was 2.2 percent."

https://smallbusiness.chron.com/profit-margin-supermarket-22467.html