Your store sells kohlrabi for eight dollars a piece? Yes, that’s crazy high. Typically, there will be three, bundled together, for three or four dollars. The size varies up to about the size of a softball.
Yeah, big box hardware store employees are a joke. E.g., the guy in the plumbing section who never heard of teflon tape.
Just about anything that’s a not a weekly buy at the local grocery store. How can someone work in a produce department and not know what ginger is? What about coconut milk? No, idjit, not a coconut, coconut milk. It comes in a can. Pearled barley? It’s a type of grain. (And of course the store puts grains in 4 different aisles.)
Moving and having to learn a new store’s layout is bad enough. But to keep things fun for customers they repeatedly move stuff around.
This reminds me I was looking for Tapatio hot sauce at my local Food 4 Less store, for some reason it wasn’t in the condiment aisle with the rest of the hot sauces. I asked an employee and the employee was ADAMANT “Sir if it’s not in the condiment section we don’t stock it”.
Turns out it was in the “Exotic/Specialty” aisle for some reason and they had like 60 bottles of it so it wasn’t obscure. How do you work at a grocery store and not know there may be another aisle where hot sauces are stocked.
Because new hires aren’t hired for their expertise in identifying vegetables and other produce, and ditto for those in dry grocery. The company chiefly values people who show up on time, stay for their entire shift, and actually do some work.
It also sucks for the employees who also can’t find anything anymore when they do that.
Because some stores have their employees only work in one small section of the store so during their entire shift they never leave that corner and thus are completely clueless about the rest of the store. Most commonly found in big box stores, but even a modest-sized supermarket can have that problem.
People keep saying this by I’ve been the the food/drug business for over 30 years and my father for another twenty before that, and no one that we know of would “repeatedly move stuff around” to “keep things fun for customers”.
Every chain we’ve been associated with has remodeled stores every 8-12 years and reset every section (a fraction of an aisle) in the store an average of once a year. New products are added and others deleted on an ongoing basis, but once a year each a section of the store is “optimized” to reflect the cumulative effect of ad-hoc assortment changes, customer preferences and item profitability. Rarely do these yearly changes move an item more than a few feet.
The major store reconfigurations cost many millions per store. It boggles the mind that people believe it happens all the time.
There are stores that do not remodel or reset sections for long periods of time. It’s because they are dying companies that are barely surviving. The companies that have great customer loyalty and growth change a lot more. I mean the assortment turnover at Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods is huge, but they are consistently among the best loved food retailers.
I don’t use a lot of Super Glue. It seems useful for modest repairs. I remember those commercials where they would glue the construction helmet in place. However, I suspect this clever marketing gimmick was bullpuffery. Anyone think enough superglue could do that? Even if you sanded a flat spot on the helmet? Maybe the “construction worker” was two kids in costume?
The helmet had a metal block attached to it, and the block was glued to another block on the support.
This is basically the easiest job for superglue - no gap filling, and 100% normal loading (no shear load).
I’d bet the helmet would break before the joint would.
ETA:
Here’s the ad:
Superglue is good against tensile forces, that is, something attempting to pull two things apart.
It is not particularly good against shearing forces, that is, side-to-side forces.
So a sufficient dollop of properly applied superglue (because technique matters) over a large enough area could indeed support the weight of an adult male human, at least for a shot period of time (long enough to get a shot for a commercial). And as long as said human did not wiggle side-to-side or back-to-front.
You are correct that it would need to be applied to two flat surfaces.
Not sure this is 100% on topic, but giving it a go anyway.
The AAA offices in Florida sell gift cards for any typical business you might be a customer of when on the road, or just shopping near home. AAA gives you discounts on your annual bill, between 2-5% of the cost of the gift card. Last year I took more than 50 bucks off of my bill.
So I stroll into an AAA in a suburb of Cleveland, wanting to get some more gift cards to use on my vacation. Asked the lady clerk where the kiosk was for them…
She, to my utter shock, had NO idea what I was talking about. I thought franchisees had to hew pretty closely to their parent company’s standards and practices, so I have zero clue why Florida AAA has gift cards and Ohio does not,
Having worked in CPG marketing (consumer packaged goods) I can attest that it does happen. It is conventional wisdom that grocery stores need to move things around because, by doing so, it gets customers to see new products. Customers get in a groove and go to where they know what they want is. By moving things, they see other products and are likely to buy/experiment with something they wouldn’t have. It does work.
You need to not do this very often because customers HATE it.
There are other smaller tricks like this…like if you have many product/flavors to not put them in alphabetical order as it causes customers to look at other flavors they wouldn’t normally see/buy. Again, you do have to consider that customers will find it irritating.
I have noticed over the past few years that not alphabetizing is used less so there may have been more research done since I retired.
How to organize a store, particularly groceries, is something I worked on frequently. It is surprisingly in depth. It also works to do these analyses 
Einstein Brothers does not sell bagels. They sell round fluffy bread with a hole in the middle.
I am reminded of the brunch the morning after our wedding for the out-of-town family. Wedding reception dinner had been Persian buffet, so Sunday brunch was, in a nod to my actual ethnic heritage, bagels and cream cheese and coffee cake, etc. We had some lox, but the Trader Joe’s kind (our budget didn’t allow for the good stuff for 50-ish people). But we had real bagels, dammit (from Kaufman’s for you Chicago-area folks).
As we were setting up brunch, one of Tom_Scud’s uncles pointed at the platter of lox and pulled me aside to ask what it was. “Ummm, lox” “What’s lox?” (are you serious, man? I was thinking.) “Smoked salmon.” He nodded his head and grabbed some.
Later, I had to ask Tom_Scud how it was possible that his uncle had apparently never heard of lox. Yes, he lives in Texas, but there are at least some Jews in Texas? Plus all the cultural references on TV and in film - hadn’t he ever seen an episode of Seinfeld? Apparently not.
"But where did your uncle go to college? “The American University of Beirut.”
Ah well, fair, I guess.
Is it possible she just didn’t know the word kiosk?
I don’t think AAA is a matter of franchises - IIRC each club is independent and the member clubs jointly own AAA, sort of like a cooperative.
I would be shocked if as many as 1 in 3 adults in metro New Orleans knew what lox was.
I used to work at Walmart. That particular store been remodeled 4 or 5 times over the last 20 years.
Home Furnishings is where Electronics & Sporting Goods used to be; Sporting Goods is where Toys used to be; Electronics is where Shoes used to be; etc.
Even the general grocery section gets changed around. Coffee is about 7 aisles down from where it used to be. Hostess/Little Debbie was originally at the front of the store, got moved elsewhere, and is now back more or less where it was 20 years ago.
I’ve worked at the store I’m at for 11 years and I can only think of a handful of times that products were moved to a completely different aisle. Yogurt and juice swapped places (one was in the door of the dairy cooler, the other in the open case on the other side of the aisle). Fruit snacks moved from the cereal aisle to the chip/snack aisle, Hostess’ products lost their space to Little Debbie when the old Hostess went belly-up and got a new space on the bread aisle after their zombified corpse shambled back into motion, and candles, sewing equipment, and shoe polish moved from the cleaning aisle to a miscellaneous section opposite the baby aisle. That’s about it.
We do, however, frequently get people asking when we moved the beer. Our beer has been in the same spot since the store opened, but some of our other locations in the area have it in a different part of the store, and this seems to perplex people who assume that every single one of our store layouts must be identical down to the millimeter.
Did you count up the number of major remodels from the records of the store, or are you going by memory?
You can get the data from annual reports and press releases. Kroger is remodeling 20-30% of its stores OVER THREE YEARS. That’s less than 10% a year. Spending 2.5M per remodel.
Food Lion has been remodeling about 150 stores per year and has a total of 1100 stores. So once every seven years. Spending 1.2M per remodel. Other Ahold Delhaize chains in the US are less frequent than that.
Walmart has a two year plan to remodel 1000 of its 4700 stores in the US. Again about 10% per year.
As BlinkingDuck says, customers are annoyed by these changes. I’m saying that is why they overestimate how frequent they are.
My local grocery store is doing a MAJOR reshuffling right now, been hard at if for at least three weeks. Not just moving what is on what shelf/aisle, but they’re actually moving a lot of hardware. The stretch in the middle that used to be open with short ‘tub’ style fixtures to hold seasonal items now has regular shelves…but only for 2/3 of the length at present. The rest is (apparently) an open space where they park those big pallet rolling things that they don’t have a new home ready for yet. Meanwhile another ‘open’ area adjacent to the produce – that has been a mostly useless wasteland of giant jars of pretzels and cheese balls and stacked up 24 packs of soft drinks … well, I really don’t know what to call it. There’s no pattern to what’s on those shelves that I can make out.
Elsewhere it’s the usual ‘shuffle’: the first real aisle used to be cereals and things like cocoa mixes. Those are now six aisles further along. Instead they have areas of foreign/exotic/ethinic foods? Except the mexican, italian, and chinese stuff are somewhere else.
My husband has some childhood favorites he clings to, one of them being Chef Boyardee canned ravioli. I’d been across pretty much the whole store hunting without luck. It USED to be the same aisle as canned meat, but no longer. I ran into one of the long time butchers, a guy I’ve chatted with frequently for over a decade, and in desperation I asked if he had any idea where it was. “Hold on,” he said, and ducked back into the working area, and came back with a four or so page list. A cheat sheet for where stuff would now be located for the sake of bewildered employees. (But do they think of posting a copy somewhere customers could see it? Hah.)
Anyway, he flipped through it. Nothing under “Chef Boyardee”, nothing under “canned pasta”, oh, here’s ravioi: in the frozen food cases. Another employee passed pushing one of the pallet things and he asked him, and he actually knew since he’d been the guy who did that move.
Guess where it was? About 18 inches down the aisle we happened to be speaking at the end of. Yes. Within touching distance. Isn’t it always like that?
If I didn’t like the employess, I’d swear I’d never go there again.
I was pretty old before I found out what lox actually was. I’d heard of it, knew it went on a bagel, and that it was a stereotypical Jewish deli kind of thing. If pressed, I would have guessed something like caviar (but obviously cheaper) - so I guess I knew it was fish-based from context someplace.
I’ve known what lox is since a very early age, since I went to nursery school at a synagogue close to where my mother taught school. Hated it then, hate it now.
The last major rearrangement that took place at my local chain was a couple of years ago, when they standardized the layout of all of their stores. Turns out neither of the stores I regularly shop at were arranged like the template store. Was annoying at first, but I understood the reasoning. My major beef was that the new system did away with the section devoted to specialty marinades and such. Some of my favorites they just stopped carrying at all, and the rest are scattered.