I want an LED device attached to my shopping card, with a small keyboard. I type in, let’s say “Annie’s Mac” and hit enter, it returns to me:
ANNIE’S SHELLS 6 OZ $1.75 STD PRICE – AISLE 3 SHELF 4 – 17 IN STOCK
(along with other relevant hits for what I entered)
Don’t think anyone yet has suggested some minimum competency testing/training for baggers.
Not sure who thought bagging goods that people spent $ for a task appropriate for impaired folk. 
The ones at our local store who aren’t apparently impaired, are incompetent and argumentative.
As with just about any retail, a store should not make it difficult/lengthy to give them your money and get out of the store w your purchases.
Okay, who here is not aware of bar codes. So why do customers bring up two items and say “I want this one, but it didn’t have a price on it, so I brought you one that does.” If the item has a bar code, I can ring it up.
And if I tell you something is 69 cents and you have ten of them don’t look at the receipt and complain “I didn’t have anything for $6.90. What did I buy for $6.90. Get a manager here. She made a mistake It says $6.90 and I didn’t buy anything for $6.90.” At that point, I told the customer and the two store employees that had come up that he had 10 pencils at 69 cents each and I rang them up together." To which the customer said “Well, she should have rung them up separately.”
Some days, I’m amazed I get people rung up at all.
My regular supermarket used to ask this but they seem to have stopped. But I wonder what they’d have done if I said I couldn’t find something they did have. Would they send a runner for it and thereby delay me and everyone behind me? That would be annoying, particularly if I’m in the express lane.
You get trained to do that at stores like TJ Maxx and Marshalls. I swear that at least a quarter of the stuff on the racks doesn’t have any kind of price tag or bar code. So if you bring up a similar item, you save a lot of time and the cashiers are most grateful.
Yes, most likely they would.
You might enjoy this:
Customers First - 80’s Jewel Training Video
Getting a forgotten item is at 1:55.
I’ve been trained to do that by TJ Maxx/Marshalls etc - but in those places, I’m doing it because there aren’t any of the item I want in the correct /size color with a price tag. For example, maybe I want the blue blouse in size 6, but there’s only one and it doesn’t have a price tag ( which is where the barcode/SKU is located on many items in these stores) So I bring up the identical blouse in a different color/size so that the cashier know how much to charge me. But there aren’t many* items in the supermarket like that , where the same product product comes in different colors/flavors and has the bar code on a separate, attached price tag rather than on the box or on a sticker on the item itself.
Just as an aside, I’m so old that I can remember when the sign said “5 ITEMS OR LESS”. Nobody paid any attention to that one either. And yes, I know they should have been grammatically correct and used “fewer”, not “less”, but what the heck, they were a bunch of grocery clerks.
Well, then, please talk to the people who program our registers to make it EASY to allow “other customers through” in the middle someone else’s transaction, because it’s a pain in the ass to do it currently.
Please talk to the people who set up the staffing schedules so there is actually someone in the department that I can page when a customer needs something.
There is a real problem in the industry that the people who set up processes, program the machines, and set policy don’t actually communicate with the actual people who have actual customer contact. The guys at Corporate just make their assumptions and to hell with what real customers want or don’t want.
(Yes, I had a stressful day at work - does it show?)
Grrrr…
We know you’re packaging the ground beef etc yourself, we can tell from the packaging. There is no excuse for every package to be effectively exactly the same weight. But I see it all the time. Why not put out a few that are half or quarter the size?
Same for the Chinese grocery, things like choys, (yu choy, bok choy, su choy), all packaged on site, sold by weight, every package about three times what I can use in a week. Right beside other produce I can easily choose the portion I wish, like sprouts etc! Grrr!
I believe most supermarket butcher shops will repackage the meat, if you want only half the amount of ground beef, or only two chicken legs instead of four. You just have to find someone to help you, which admittedly isn’t easy in many of these stores.
Yes. Also the produce department – my brother worked there one summer, and they would on the spot cut up the larger squashes and such for customers. (He had his own official machete – ooh!) He said the other half (or quarters) would generally be sold within a couple of hours.
Though there were a couple of elderly housing apartments near that store, so maybe the demand/need for smaller portions was higher than normal.
What I’d like to see would be an online butcher shop function. For example, rather than show up to the store, and browse to see if they have the kind of ground meat I want, it sure would be nice to be able to specify what I’d like, and then have it ready when I showed up within some specified window.
I know some high-end places can do that on the fly (Whole Foods and Central Market come to mind), but it would be nice to be able to just specify ahead of time that I’d like 3 lbs of coarse ground beef for chili, and not have to wonder if they’ll have it, or have to buy an entire roast or brisket just to get it ground the way I want. Or if I want 1" steaks/chops instead of the more usual 1/2 to 3/4" ones I typically find. And so on…
Every aisle should be big enough to fit 3 carts side by side. And there should be subtle grooves in the floor so everyone naturally keeps to their cart to the left or the right, only going down the middle to pass.
I shop at one of those pack-your-own places with aisles that wide. One idiot can still block the whole damn thing.
I’d ban having different things on both sides of the overhead aisle signs (i.e. the left side of the sign (parallel not perpendicular to aisle) covers the stuff on the left side of the aisle). It hasn’t happened often, but always annoys me when it does.
I would sell fresh meal kits with recipes, a la Blue Apron.
Like have them available in the deli area near other prepared foods, but just- packaged for the recipe. The right amount of pasta, vegetables, spices, cheese, whatever, and the recipe.
That way, you could decide while you were shopping that you wanted to get and make them. You could pick and choose only the ones that sounded appealing instead of signing up for a service and getting some that you liked and some that you didn’t. You could pick one up for special occasions or if one looked really good and never get them otherwise. Or you could get them every single night. You could get several of them if you were cooking for a crowd. You could get one for a date night if you normally live off canned soup and Totino’s party pizzas, but are cooking for two and want to impress.
I figure this has to be a thing somewhere, given the popularity of meal kit subscriptions, but I’ve never seen it.
And now for something completely different…
I’d bring back the taller shelving. My eyesight isn’t that could, and I have to lean over to see the items and prices in the dairy section. And when I was carrying a kid, that was difficult.
It used to be Ok, then they must have had a change of mind, because when they remodeled they took everything down a foot. They also got rid of the top shelf throughout all the stores, which again, was a shelf that I bought from. I’m tall, but not exceptional – I buy mass-market clothes.
Albertsons (which owns Safeway and probably other names) bought Plated (one of the meal kit companies) a couple of years ago and I’ve seen the meal kits in my local Safeway.
Our remodeled ShopRite did that. And one person will leave their cart on one side while looking at something on the other side, managing to block the entire aisle. Or two people going in opposite directions will stop the talk to each other and block the whole aisle.
I would make it illegal to stand at the register for more than 30 seconds after your transaction is complete. Do not take ten minutes to examine your receipt against every item in the bag, put your receipt and change away, then send a few texts and talk to someone you know who happens to be in the store. Particularly if there is a line.