4 ms·

I recently finished a book called "The Secret Life of Groceries" by Benjamin Lorr. Amazing book. I learned that grocery and supermarket stores of the past, seem

by Ajay-p 3y ago

I recently finished a book called "The Secret Life of Groceries" by Benjamin Lorr. Amazing book. I learned that grocery and supermarket stores of the past, seemed to have worked very hard to give the best customer experience possible. Today it feels that customer experience has been replaced by cost cutting. Self checkout has been rife with problems, internally and socially, but supermarkets keep pushing them. I can only conclude it is cost cutting.

MisterBastahrd 3y ago
One of the various jobs I had during the 90s to put myself through college was stocking store shelves in a large grocery store. During my time there, I placed every item on the shelf by hand, rotated forward, so that the shelves were easy to front and look respectable by the time the morning came. After a few months, it was fairly easy to eyeball an item in the case, lift it while rotating, and place it on the shelf facing forward. It also became reflex to hear something fall and catch it without looking. We also mopped the entire store by hand, twice, before getting down to the business of fronting the shelves one final time. As time went on, they hired a cleaning crew to clean the floors with a machine. They'd miss things. After my time, they started having their employees cut boxes and just plop entire boxes onto store shelves, ripping the fronts off of them. I'm sure it saves a little bit of time, but you end up with a store that is a complete mess full of discarded cardboard. All of that adds up to a terrible customer experience.
- hackable_sand 3y ago
  I appreciate the effort. I think manual, menial labor is pushed very hard in the US today. One thing that really bothers me is that older stock is not brought to the front and they just push it back with the new stuff. It's doubly frustrating because sometimes products change so you'll find what you're looking for after digging through three layers of assorted items. I don't really blame the apathy directly, but there are doubtless solutions over the horizon.
  - MisterBastahrd 3y ago
    Well, the stock issue is sort of a manpower issue. For example, back home, the shelf with canned green beans, corn, and pre-cooked red beans was 4 cans high, and each section of those items was about 12 cans across. It'd be nice if we could simply spend the time to rotate and stock the items, but that just isn't feasible. It's far easier and more cost effective for the store to periodically check for expired product than it is to rotate them. It's even harder with tiny items like seasoning bottles. It would be nice if someone could design a shelving system that could be moved and stocked from the back, but that'd be quite an engineering feat given the sheer weight of the shelves and the proclivity for items to fall over when they're moved. All of these stores have budgeted in losses. My managers were almost fired for the sheer amount of negligence they gave the store when it came to ordering product. Each location has a certain cadence to them when it comes to what people are buying. My managers didn't understand it, so they ended up with 25 rolling carts packed solid with backstock (these are 8 feet tall and have two shelves), and another 20-30 pallets. If you're unfamiliar, for a normal sized grocery store, you should really only have backstock on the top sides of those carts. Instead of filling the shelves with the product they'd already bought for the store, they were buying entirely new product! I managed to wrangle the order gun from them for the grocery department and they went from losing $30K a quarter in inventory to gaining about $15K. I kept an inventory in my head of what we had in the back and made sure not to order it. How? Because when pallets inevitably tumble in the distribution centers, the centers can't waste time sorting through inventory to determine what's damaged. So they count it as a loss and toss the product into crates so that store employees can sort through them. Good stuff goes on the shelf, damaged stuff goes in the trash. Apparently the distribution centers damaged a lot of product, lol. My managers got cash bonuses for turning things around, and I got a 6 pack of beer.
- seabass-labrax 3y ago
  There is a possibly unexpected advantage to stocking the shelves with boxed items: if the customer wants to purchase items in bulk, they can retrieve the boxes just as easily as they were put there. As a customer, I do that a lot for unperishable goods.
  - MisterBastahrd 3y ago
    Not going to work for them because they're tearing the front covers off of the boxes.
deciplex 3y ago
> cost cutting When the savings are not passed on to the customer (and they usually are not, as in this case) it's more accurate and descriptive to call it "profit maximizing."
CSMastermind 3y ago
Self checkout is a better customer experience for me personally.
- babypuncher 3y ago
  I hate it, especially for large trips to the store. The scale freaks out too often after I scan an item and put it on the bed, because the weight is slightly off for whatever reason. Then I have to stop scanning and wait for an employee to come over and scan their badge to authorize the sale. I've gone back to just waiting in line at the standard checkout unless I have < 5 items in my cart.
- ska 3y ago
  I've never experienced one reliable enough for this to be true (for me).
  - CodeWriter23 3y ago
    Try the ones at Home Depot. Pretty sure they developed it in-house. It may not prevent loss but from a customer experience, a good barcode scanning gun and legible barcodes is about as friction free as it gets.
    - kjkjadksj 3y ago
      Home depot is so overengineered. They are using 24” high res touchscreen pcs with an i7 to just run self checkout. Whoever locked in that contract must be pretty pleased.
      - Dylan16807 3y ago
        A couple hundred dollars is nothing compared to the costs surrounding that PC. Compared to how often systems like that get underbuilt and laggy, using an i7 is a good choice.
        3y ago
seattle_spring 3y ago
> Today it feels that customer experience has been replaced by cost cutting This seems to be true of all businesses, and I really hate it. Flying sucks, trying to reach a human for any reason sucks, lines are huge everywhere. Life just seems a lot more stressful purely to put a few extra bucks in shareholders' pockets.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  Why they build 24 bag claim desks when they ever staff two of them I will never know
lm28469 3y ago
> Today it feels that customer experience has been replaced by cost cutting. I feel like it's the case for literally every single industry, everything is getting worse for the end user point of view. Public services, jobs, hospitals, cars, new houses, online services, mobile apps... I think globalisation allowed things to get better and cheaper up to a point and now that we can't delocalize to cheaper places we have to cut corners somewhere else and the entire stack is suffering from it

by Ajay-p 3y ago

MisterBastahrd 3y ago

One of the various jobs I had during the 90s to put myself through college was stocking store shelves in a large grocery store. During my time there, I placed every item on the shelf by hand, rotated forward, so that the shelves were easy to front and look respectable by the time the morning came. After a few months, it was fairly easy to eyeball an item in the case, lift it while rotating, and place it on the shelf facing forward. It also became reflex to hear something fall and catch it without looking. We also mopped the entire store by hand, twice, before getting down to the business of fronting the shelves one final time. As time went on, they hired a cleaning crew to clean the floors with a machine. They'd miss things. After my time, they started having their employees cut boxes and just plop entire boxes onto store shelves, ripping the fronts off of them. I'm sure it saves a little bit of time, but you end up with a store that is a complete mess full of discarded cardboard. All of that adds up to a terrible customer experience.

hackable_sand 3y ago
I appreciate the effort. I think manual, menial labor is pushed very hard in the US today. One thing that really bothers me is that older stock is not brought to the front and they just push it back with the new stuff. It's doubly frustrating because sometimes products change so you'll find what you're looking for after digging through three layers of assorted items. I don't really blame the apathy directly, but there are doubtless solutions over the horizon.
- MisterBastahrd 3y ago
  Well, the stock issue is sort of a manpower issue. For example, back home, the shelf with canned green beans, corn, and pre-cooked red beans was 4 cans high, and each section of those items was about 12 cans across. It'd be nice if we could simply spend the time to rotate and stock the items, but that just isn't feasible. It's far easier and more cost effective for the store to periodically check for expired product than it is to rotate them. It's even harder with tiny items like seasoning bottles. It would be nice if someone could design a shelving system that could be moved and stocked from the back, but that'd be quite an engineering feat given the sheer weight of the shelves and the proclivity for items to fall over when they're moved. All of these stores have budgeted in losses. My managers were almost fired for the sheer amount of negligence they gave the store when it came to ordering product. Each location has a certain cadence to them when it comes to what people are buying. My managers didn't understand it, so they ended up with 25 rolling carts packed solid with backstock (these are 8 feet tall and have two shelves), and another 20-30 pallets. If you're unfamiliar, for a normal sized grocery store, you should really only have backstock on the top sides of those carts. Instead of filling the shelves with the product they'd already bought for the store, they were buying entirely new product! I managed to wrangle the order gun from them for the grocery department and they went from losing $30K a quarter in inventory to gaining about $15K. I kept an inventory in my head of what we had in the back and made sure not to order it. How? Because when pallets inevitably tumble in the distribution centers, the centers can't waste time sorting through inventory to determine what's damaged. So they count it as a loss and toss the product into crates so that store employees can sort through them. Good stuff goes on the shelf, damaged stuff goes in the trash. Apparently the distribution centers damaged a lot of product, lol. My managers got cash bonuses for turning things around, and I got a 6 pack of beer.
seabass-labrax 3y ago
There is a possibly unexpected advantage to stocking the shelves with boxed items: if the customer wants to purchase items in bulk, they can retrieve the boxes just as easily as they were put there. As a customer, I do that a lot for unperishable goods.
- MisterBastahrd 3y ago
  Not going to work for them because they're tearing the front covers off of the boxes.

deciplex 3y ago

> cost cutting When the savings are not passed on to the customer (and they usually are not, as in this case) it's more accurate and descriptive to call it "profit maximizing."

CSMastermind 3y ago

Self checkout is a better customer experience for me personally.

babypuncher 3y ago
I hate it, especially for large trips to the store. The scale freaks out too often after I scan an item and put it on the bed, because the weight is slightly off for whatever reason. Then I have to stop scanning and wait for an employee to come over and scan their badge to authorize the sale. I've gone back to just waiting in line at the standard checkout unless I have < 5 items in my cart.
ska 3y ago
I've never experienced one reliable enough for this to be true (for me).
- CodeWriter23 3y ago
  Try the ones at Home Depot. Pretty sure they developed it in-house. It may not prevent loss but from a customer experience, a good barcode scanning gun and legible barcodes is about as friction free as it gets.
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    Home depot is so overengineered. They are using 24” high res touchscreen pcs with an i7 to just run self checkout. Whoever locked in that contract must be pretty pleased.
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      A couple hundred dollars is nothing compared to the costs surrounding that PC. Compared to how often systems like that get underbuilt and laggy, using an i7 is a good choice.
      - 3y ago

seattle_spring 3y ago

> Today it feels that customer experience has been replaced by cost cutting This seems to be true of all businesses, and I really hate it. Flying sucks, trying to reach a human for any reason sucks, lines are huge everywhere. Life just seems a lot more stressful purely to put a few extra bucks in shareholders' pockets.

kjkjadksj 3y ago
Why they build 24 bag claim desks when they ever staff two of them I will never know

lm28469 3y ago

> Today it feels that customer experience has been replaced by cost cutting. I feel like it's the case for literally every single industry, everything is getting worse for the end user point of view. Public services, jobs, hospitals, cars, new houses, online services, mobile apps... I think globalisation allowed things to get better and cheaper up to a point and now that we can't delocalize to cheaper places we have to cut corners somewhere else and the entire stack is suffering from it