I do that too. I also look at the price per unit, which most stores display in teeny letters. Because sometimes the larger volume bag (whatever) is not the cheapest, and it hard to tell when it’s $3.97 for 300 ml, and $10.99 for 750 ml.
I do blame myself when I forget to check very carefully for what I grab off of a shelf; I do think there’s also some blame to share with the store, however, for setting customers up for failure (well, failure from the customer’s perspective). They know customers aren’t all checking SKUs before they put something in their cart, and most people aren’t going to refuse to buy something they need because they got the one that isn’t on sale in their cart at the checkout; it could be a coincidence that I have often grabbed a more expensive item when I was aiming for the on sale one, but at this point in my life, I don’t believe it. There’s also the fact that placement of things in grocery stores is a science - they herd us like cattle in there.
I guess what irritates me is that I KNOW they’re doing this, and sometimes I forget how the game is played and get careless.
It is different in my stores - if you have to buy a quantity to get the sale price, you have to buy the quantity.
I love it when stores put the price per unit on the shelf tag - I wish all stores did that.
Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity or apathy. Stockers, for the most part, don’t particularly care if they put everything in exactly the right place. Employees who “face” or “zone” the aisles generally only check to make sure that things look pretty. I’ve stocked shelves at a mass merchandiser for the past 3 years, and I’m always fixing facings that are wrong, always obviously due to confusion about product sizes, types, or brands that are hard to determine from the shelf label alone unless you make some kind of effort. For what stockers are paid, effort is hard to conjure up sometimes. Add that to the fact that morning stockers are rushed to finish and get out of the store by penny-pinching managers, and a lot of mistakes happen.
The above applies to my experience only, of course.
“Blame” is an interesting word. I don’t blame them for stocking as they do, if by blame you mean I think I didn’t make an error and they’re evil cocksuckers.
When I show up at the checkout with the wrong item (and yes, I do generally check SKU’s, but I do make mistakes sometimes) I don’t “blame” anyone at all. I do expect, through years of experience, that they will either take the item as unwanted and not ring it up, or someone will run back and get the one I wanted. Even when I offer to go back myself, it’s always met with, “No, that’s okay, Sam can go get it for you.”
I do think they do shelving the way they do consciously, testedly and intentionally to increase sales, that’s all. They encourage customers to make mistakes because they make money off it. Still the customer’s mistake, but made much more likely on purpose.
I try to do that as well. One way it’s been made harder is that the per unit price often uses a different measurement by brand or even by size. One will list the per ounce size and another the per ml size and the third option will be per container.
Halloween candy is the worst for this - every type of candy comes in a bag with a different amount of pieces in it - try to comparison shop when you have 15 different sizes! I’m seriously tempted to make an Excel spreadsheet to figure out which candy has the best per unit cost.
In those cases, I just whip out the iPhone and do the math myself.
Nope
This seems relevant:
You attribute far too much corporate planning to people who work for minimum wage.
I think you attribute far too much control of shelving to the people you see at the grocery store. If it’s a corporate store, they get POP schematics in weekly, all designed by someone hired by corporate. The drones are just following orders.
WhyNot,
Former Drone (Blockbuster Video; same deal, different scale)
You don’t know what you’re talking about. You dont know the first thing about how supermarkets are operated. You don’t know which party actually determines sale prices. You dont know which party is actually funding the sale. You don’t know the kind of margins involved. You don’t have a shred of evidence to support the crap you’re saying. What you do have are several posters who have worked in the industry telling you what is actually going on. Listen to them.
I was referring to your claims about products being put in the wrong place intentionally to encourage people to buy them under false beliefs. At least where I work, the drones pretty much have absolute control over that.
Are you saying that sale prices and store layout are determined locally? Not just locally by management, but by the shelf stockers? I’ve never worked in a supermarket, so I dont know. But as far as the large chains around here, I could walk into a Publix around the corner or across town and the layout is exactly the same.
I imagine store management can make some decisions regarding perishables. “Do we turn the nearly expired fruit into fruit salad or just mark down the price individually”. But isn’t the store as a whole managed from corporate?
Is this a response to Loopus?
The shelf layout for a chain store is determined by the region, district or whoever. The stocker gets a plan (sometimes called a planogram), stock, and a bunch of stickers to put on the shelves. Same with prices–manager specials aside-- and all that, just as you’d expect. Shelf plans are changed regularly, partly to make room for new and seasonal items, partly to make consumers search for goods in hopes they’ll see something they’ll buy on impulse, and partly, I always suspected, to keep the stockers busy.
If I’m reading it right, the complaint is that the promotional signs are in the wrong place, which could mislead somebody into picking up the wrong item. I doubt that misleading sign placement is ever put into the centrally-distributed plan, because all you’d need then is a disgruntled employee and you’d have an easily proven case of fraud. It’s more likely that the sign was put up incorrectly or got moved.
If the sign and the price don’t match, we used to call it scanner error and the customer got a discount on the item. Cat Whisperer is in Canada, which has a voluntary scanner code of practice. Participating stores will give away items under $10 if the scanned price is higher than the advertised or displayed price. Michigan had a law about it. However, the sign or ad obviously has to be for the item, not some other size or flavor or whatever that somebody picked up because they didn’t read past the big print.
Here they tag the same items which might be $3.99 also with a per unit price so I can easily see that I am paying .39 an oz or whatever. I find shopping to be magnitudes easier actually now.
What about Air Delights? I literally laughed out loud when I saw the commercial for this. Way to go, Hershey’s! I admire you having the balls to not even lie about the fact that you’re charging more to sell us air.
Sale prices and store layout are determined by corporate, but when it comes to actually placing the items onto the shelf with the correct label, that it absolutely determined by stockers. Their work, of course, it checked, but mistakes happen, and a cursory examination by a manager won’t always discover, for example, that the 100oz laundry detergent is where the 75oz laundry detergent is supposed to be, or that a non-sale item has been placed in a sale location. The latter is especially common because sale items have a tendency to sell out, leaving a big blank space on the shelf so that it’s easier to put the wrong thing there without the stocker realizing that it’s wrong. Incidentally, stockers neither know nor care what is or isn’t on sale in most cases.
Now if Milton Hershey can come up with a way to fill the bubbles with caramel… :eek: