My store does that, too. The purpose is to communicate with the cashiers. Anyone who fails to maintain a certain level of speed is fired. That’s the point of it, to let cashiers know if they’re keeping up with requirements or not.
This is now causing friction with some customers now complaining they feel rushed. Well, I’m sorry - so many people complained to Corporate about slow lines and long lines and having to wait in lines that Corporate felt a need to do something. Since they are having trouble getting new people hired the response was to make those present work faster.
US stores must do this a lot more than Canadian stores. Where I live, some shelves switch every week, but they’re the end-of-aisle shelves, and are almost always used to highlight the weekly specials. But almost everything else largely stays where it usually is. And not just general product categories, like bread shelf vs. breakfast cereal. Even most specific products stay largely in the same place.
Yeah, I’m in the US and I’ve never seen this supposedly common “reshuffling” either. Everything is always where it’s always been, the only things that would change are end-cap specials.
The industry standard for a major renewal of a store, when at least the dry goods aisles might have locations changes is once every 8-10 years. These are to reflect the changing face of the business or different priorities, or demographic changes in the area the store is located. An example might be that what previously was a dedicated section in the store for natural and organic section would be done away with and the natural and organic items interleaved in the regular sections. Or the reverse. They may add more refrigerated space, or increase the size of the fresh food areas, add more prepared foods, specialty cheeses, etc.). Or add a large section of large size foods that appeal to certain ethnic groups (big sacks of rice, corn meal, beans etc), a whole section of tropical fruits and vegetables. And even these changes are not usually huge. Moving the shampoo six aisles to the right and the cereal five aisles to the left has NEVER happened unless the chain has been acquired and the stores completely rebuilt by the new owners. Example, when Safeway bought the Harris-Teeter stores they would have moved a LOT of stuff around in the first remodel.
The individual sections (e.g. the baking aisle or the cold cereals) are “reset” every year or two. This means a new arrangement of items but all items will remain within 8, 12 or 16 feet of where they were before. This is to rationalize the plan-o-gram that is messed up by ad hoc additions and deletions of items during the year. If Del Monte introduces a new size or flavor of chillies, it is squeezed in (if Del Monte gives out a free case per store!) and the adjacent facings are squeezed down to make room, but this is not optimal for inventory and margin management and this is fixed annually or biannually by optimizing the shelf arrangement to the sales and margin on various items.
This idea that grocery stores are rearranging stuff just to confuse people and make shopping longer is something neither I nor my father have seen, and collectively we have been in the business since the 1960s in a number of chains in a large swath of the country. It makes for entertaining conspiratorial articles and YouTube videos.
In real life literally 95% of the complaints after a remodel are from folks over 75. That’s the demographic that complains about every change. Actually its a tiny subset of that demographic.
I believe this to be much less common reason for change then people seem to think. I have been in the grocery business for over thirty years and the reshuffles I see have much more to do with new products, new seasons and changing trends than the purposeful bewildering of the customer. Intentionally making it harder to find the product a customer wants to buy will more likely cause frustration and lead to loss of a sale rather than additional impulse purchases. Stores know this.
Wasn’t this about the same kind of technology that George H.W. Bush seemed to be so impressed with (the highly capable scanner combined with a built-in scale) that then got him made fun of for another two plus decades?
Not really. That was just a cash register where the scanner and scale were integrated. So that instead of picking up the tomatoes putting them on a scale and punching in the code of “tomatoes, Roma, conventional” the cashier just put the on the same surface that the scanner was in and it weighted the item.
We mutter about that rumor at work - that reshuffling is done to deliberately force customers to wander looking for things - but usually it’s not that extreme. Some reshuffling on the shelves, but not flipping entire sections around.
I was a 3rd-party vendor in Walmart for 3 years. (Representing various companies such as Hostess, Colgate, etc.) Evidently a lot of you people don’t bother to pay attention to the world around you. Now it is true that the single-aisle resets happen much more often than the bigger-scale reshufflings. But those big ones do, in fact, happen.
Take just ONE example–the Walmart where I’ve done the bulk of my shopping for the last several years. The Sporting Goods dept. is where Toys used to be; Housewares is where Electronics used to be; just within Grocery the coffee is about 8 aisles from where it used to be; Dairy is about twice the size it used to be; and so on.
King Soopers does not change quite as much, but the overall layout of the nearest store is approximately reversed from what it was when I first moved to this neighborhood. It used to be that when you entered the store, you turned left to reach the frozen section; now you turn right.
People who have worked in the business (both in the stores and in corporate) for decades are telling you that supermarkets do not make major format changes more than once a decade or so.
But you, based on your experience with one grocery store over an unknown period of time and three years as a THIRD PARTY VENDOR can trump this. Yup.
I pay attention to this stuff for a living. I live and breathe this. I can’t go on vacation to Indonesia without stopping into half a dozen stores to see how they are organized. I’m a lifer in retail, I grew up in a grocery store. My father was in stores and corporate for 47 years.
The Whole Foods near me has moved all their packaged good around and added an entire freezer run. In the almost 20 years I have been here they’ve done this exactly once.
Big Y has changed pretty much everything around after they acquired stored from Hannaford five years ago, who in turn changed everything around when they acquired that store from Victory 16 years ago. In one of those changes the store was “flipped” in that produce and deli was moved from the left to the right, and frozen went the other way.
The Shaw’s has had a couple of format changes in the last 20 years as well. Because they’ve had ownership changes and the new owners had different ideas of the standard format a grocery store should have.
None of it has anything to do with DELIBERATELY confusing the customer and making them wander around the store. Jerking around your customers like that in a very competitive business makes no sense.
The store I go to has they bag, you bag, and self checkout. I don’t do self checkout but do my own bagging. I start while they are scanning and by the time I have to pay there us usually only a couple of items left to bag.