Wow, your grocery stores must suck. None of these problems exist at my local Raley’s. Always working self check, the express aisle is always the second aisle open, if there’s a line, they open another register and the lines move quickly.
I try to be a good customer in return. I have my payment ready and I can blow through a self check like a boss.
If there’s anything I’d want changed, it’s to be able to pay for alcohol at the self check, but that’s a state law and out of the store’s purview.
Many refrigerated products are together because they are in the refrigerator. You cannot stock cereal next to milk. You cannot stock deli meats next to bread. No matter where you stock the poor Velveeta someone will think it should be somewhere else.
I LOVE self-checkout. I haven’t gone through a cashier line in years at a store with self-checkout. I even have memorized the numbers for bananas and other frequently purchased produce.
Yet for some reason I’m an oddity. At my Giant Eagle I regularly walk up to an open self-checkout while there are long lines at the cashiers.
Sure, but there’s nothing stooping you from stocking it to an adjacent aisle as opposed to the opposite end of the store.
Usually the produce is at the beginning of the store with all the fresh products, preprepared meals and bread. Dairy and frozen are at the other end (or at least at the end of the food section) to minimize the amount of time these items are out of refrigeration/freezer and sitting perishable in your cart. Most frozen and dairy are kept together because they are stocked from the same backstock cooler/freezer area and again every effort is being made that such stocking goes quickly and efficiently.
The idea is that customers shop the loop. You enter and first find all the beautiful fresh produce, bread and prepared foods. These are the things meals are prepared around. As one weaves through the store, the the supplemental items are there with the meat generally along the back wall and then either the non-foods or the dairy frozen at the end. Sure it is less convenient if you are only shopping for milk and cereal. But if you are doing your family’s weekly shopping it makes sense.
Do the majority of people really do “weekly shopping”? I like to buy what I need shortly before I use it. Why buy “fresh” fish today that you cook five days later?
Then you indeed would miss out. Advertise 10 for $10 and people buy 10. Run 2 for $3.00 and people will usually buy 2. This is fair marketing.
Organic produce sections should be clearly labeled and obvious to the customer.
You would not be fired as the store manager has no say in the advertised pricing and it is in everyone’s best interest to maintain organic produce integrity.
Don’t frown. While grocery store managers do make a very good salary, it means being there 50 to 60 hours a week every week, missing holidays with family, driving in during terrible weather events because you HAVE to be there. It’s huge pressure to make a profit in a business with tiny profit margins and lots of ever-changing competition. If you are sick you still have to be there. Most every week you will have 10 hour shifts where you try to get out by 11pm because you have to be back at 6am the next morning for another 10 hour shift. You have 100+ employees and you have to help them and deal with their issues. They can call out sick, just not you. And if a bagger no-shows it may be YOU out pushing in carts in the rain and staying even later to file reports or handle a customer complaint.
We get a lot of both.
The store I go to has that available. Except it’s not on your smart phone, It’s a scanner that you grab when you come in. Pretty much sucks. Only about half the stuff in produce will even scan. Last time I tried it, my trip took about twice as long.
They should have worked out the bugs before releasing it to the public. I’ll probably never try it again.
Soup and crackers in the same aisle.
I had the same experience. About a month ago I ended up going to every grocery store within a 20-minute radius (which is like 8 different companies) before I found a bottle of Tapatio. It used to be everywhere!
My gripe is with the manufacturer’s coupons that don’t ring up. I am a coupon master. No, not getting $100 worth of groceries for 10 cents, but I know to get the exact correct item. Not “close.” Not “gee, this brand looks better, so I’ll try it instead.” The Exact. Right. Item.
But for every cartload, there will be 2 or 3 “item not found” and the poor cashier will have to root through the bags and physically re-confirm the item and then override the register. Waste of time, people!
If you can fix this you can be my manager.
Not specifically about how items are placed in a grocery store, but nonetheless. I was buying beverages for a group lunch at work and I was trying to decide whether to buy sparkling waters or sodas and which ones of each. I thought it would be helpful if Coca-Cola, for example, sold party packs, with a mixture of regular Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite and so on. And one of the sparkling water brands could do the same thing with different flavors of sparkling water in one multipack.
As for the complaints about the ten items express lane, even if the cashier can’t enforce that, how about an item counter on or above the cash register, perhaps one that goes red when the ten-item count is exceeded? That at least would make it obvious to the customer and those behind him/her that the limit had been exceeded and by how much.
WalMart of all places has a pretty functional app that will tell you what aisle a product is in at the specific store you’re at. I’ve used it a bunch of times and never had an issue.
A store-issued license would be required to use the express line. It’s free, you just have to pass a simple test. Sample questions:
Is it OK to get in the express line if you have 1 or 2 items over the limit?
After you’ve placed all your items on the belt, the next step is:
(a) Stand there slack jawed & with a vacant look on your eyes, then act completely shocked when the cashier gives you your total.
(b) Immediately retrieve a method of payment so you’re immediately ready when the cashier gives you your total.
Once you have your license, it can and will be revoked at any time by a cashier for things like getting in line with too many items, not having your payment method ready when the total is given, or trying to argue that multiple separate items of the same thing actually count as 1 item.
The red light should be accompanied by a siren, bell, or at least a sad-trombone.
This doesn’t bother me so much, because I refuse to fall for it. But if the store jacks up the regular price, then REQUIRES buying the item in quantity, we have a problem.
The Safeways in this area do this all the time with soda. “Buy two 12-packs, get two more free!” Sounds good, except the regular price for one 12-pack is $7.99. WTF? There is no reason a 12-pack should cost more than $4.00! So in order to pay the price I should be paying in the first place, I HAVE to get four 12-packs. Or get ripped off. Or just not buy it at all, which is what I usually wind up doing.
So what I would do… treat soda like the rest of the items, and just offer a three-for-special-price deal.
First practice I’d change is that the Hispanic food section in most markets has only a small sliver of selections, but corn chips, tortillas, salsa, queso are all scattered to the winds in other different aisles.
Look, when I go to the zoo to see the reptile exhibit in the reptile building shown on the map marked ‘reptiles’ with an alligator icon, I’d be pissed if they told me lizards, geckos, and snakes are actually elsewhere near the pandas, penguins, and butterfly exhibits.
This one’s going to be a little controversial on this board, because I’ve seen some grocery-bagging screeds here in the past, but:
If cashiers (1) are being explicitly trained to not bag as they go, and (2) are implicitly expecting customers to bag their own groceries, please make those expectations clear to customers.
I know in some parts of the world and some parts of the U.S., expecting a grocery-store cashier to bag your groceries is gauche and rude. But in this area, the very longstanding business/cultural convention with groceries is that customers never bag. Ever. This is not Germany or the U.K. This is not the Pacific Northwest, or a northeastern college town. Re-usable bags haven’t made any inroads (available, but rarely used), and aren’t going to anytime soon.
So when I buy $200 worth of groceries, don’t slide all my items into an ever-growing pile as you scan them. Please don’t wait until everything is rung up, and then start bagging. If managers or senior personnel are teaching y’all to do it that way, please don’t (and shame on your trainers!). While, yes, I can and do get in the bagger’s stance and bag my own groceries at times, I view it as a significant inconvenience and a shirking of the store’s duty (and in this town, it very much is – this is not idiosyncratic).
Now then. If you want to change the local culture by making things happen a certain way in your store, that’s fine. Be upfront about it. Post a friendly sign near the checkout lanes that reads something like “To keep prices low, we respectfully ask customers to please bag their own groceries …” Around here, that would be a non-starter for most shoppers … but maybe your store can make the inconvenience worth the effort in some other way – prices, selection, better sales? Dunno. But the seemingly passive-aggressive piling up of scanned groceries is really off-putting.
I know, I know. I should cheerfully bag up my own groceries and like it. And by the way … have I ever worked as a cashier? Yes, yes I have. I have sympathy for a lot of things … but not for failing to bag as one goes. And if that somehow runs counter to modern grocery theory or something … the store is wrong. A cashier who scans a cart of groceries in 3 minutes and then takes another 3 minutes to bag it all is doing a worse job than a cashier who takes 7 minutes to scan-&-bag the same cart – the minute saved isn’t worth it.