4 ms·

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 e

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.

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.