The Grocery Store

This could be any grocery store or at least parts of it that people can relate to. It’s full of rather odd characters to some but may be normal to other people.

The Dairy manager is a chain smoker of biblical proportions. Before entering the store each morning he finishes off a cigarette he just lit while getting out of his truck. He is a busy worker who is great at his job but nearly every hour he can be found standing in the front of the store smoking a cigarette. Doesn’t matter he has a pallet of dairy items sitting out on the sales floor or having the dairy cooler wide open, his nicotine fix comes first.

And Lord help the person who takes his cart out of the cooler. He will literally complain to everyone in the store about his cart being stolen. He even wrote his name on the cart so as to quickly identify it in case the overnight stock crew uses it without his permission. Which he would never give. Again friendly to all the customers but cross him and he wouldn’t give you the time of day if your life depended on it.

The stock crew is still alive. The majority of them are drug addicts who only work to earn enough money to buy drugs.  During the night they play gangster rap music over the stores PA system using a cell phone. It’s ease to know when they will go on break. While the music is playing, the phone will chime in notifying them of a text message. A minute later about three of them are heading outside to take a break as a car pulls up to talk with them. Something is exchanges between them as the car leaves and they come back in after they have a smoke.

But they too are hard workers. They spend at least eight hours working on the same isle all night. So by morning as the store opens up they are quickly walking out the door leaving a few others to finish the rest of the stocking. The remaining members of the stock crew consist of former assistant managers who got busted down for not brown-nosing enough or they didn’t fit into the company model of “doing what they are told to do even if it’s wrong”.

The Scan Analyst has just returned from maternity leave. She just gave birth to another child for this year. I’m not saying she has a lot of kids but the last time she took her family grocery shopping they had to use a school bus to get everyone to the store. She is still unmarried but dating when she has any free time. After all, her oldest kids can babysit the younger ones.  As for her job skills, let’s just say she always have plenty of tags left over at the end of the day as with no signage on a majority of the displays.

The Produce Department and the Meat Department is about the only sane area of the whole store. It’s also the ESPN center as well as the gossip corner for all manner of conversation.  If someone did something wrong or there was a sport related event, these guys would know all the details before anyone else would.

The Deli Department can be summed up with this. The Deli manager needs to shave her beard and mustache.  And don’t ever eat the food. Ever.

The Frozen department is currently run by an assortment of employees. There is one guy on it but the area is so heavily shopped that he can’t keep it full stocked up.

The cashiers are the run of the meal type. Elderly ladies, young teenager girls or teenage boys hoping to get off the registers and on with the stock crew. One cashier in particular is still having a real up and down life. He was on the stock crew and then became the dairy manager. He got so lazy at it while bragging about his girlfriend that he was demoted to cashier. His girlfriend dumped him for being as she put it, “A total loser”. He’s paying child support and dreams of making it to the big time as a musician while playing his harmonica in front of the store at night.

The receiver is great to work with. She gets along with all the vendors and store personnel. She works a second job at night at a local diner. And to hear her life stories comes with a NC17 rating. Let’s just say she use to have lots of boyfriends and she can hold her liquor. Her life story could make an interesting TV show on the white trash/playboy channel.

And Management, well they’re trying. The store manager just left the store. Gave up and went back to becoming an assistant manager at another store. But while he was the manager he nearly killed everyone else there. He would always micro-manage everyone. He goes around and writes down everything he wanted done in that department for that day, and then checks to make sure it‘s completed before they went home for the day. All the while he would stay in his office or hang out in the Produce department talking like a motivational speaker on one of those infomercials.

The assistant manager who recently came to the store feels like he is in way over his head. He has to cleanup a backroom full of grocery items that has yet to be stocks, build displays and fill up end-caps of items that was to have been built days ago. All the while finish everything on the manager’s to-do list and take care of the normal store activities.

There is a temporary assistant manager who came to the store when the manager left. He is trying as hard as he can to get out as quick as he can. Too much work and is already stressed out for the amount of work he has to do every day.

The night time manager is basically trying to date every young female cashier that he can. At the same time he is trying to do as little work as possible. He does hang out with members of the stock crew at night as he joins them from time to time for a quick break in front of the store.

This could be every grocery store someone had or is currently working in. These people are real and there are more stories about these people but not for underage kids to read.

Food Lion's New Deal

Krispy Kreme Table

Food Lion is a grocery store that over the years has been working hard to clean up its image with one being visible and another one not so visible; until now. The obvious one is the amount of displays up and down the aisles and throughout the store.  Customers’ who operate the shopping cart the same way they drive their car keep hitting and knocking them down as these displays kept getting bigger and bigger. These displays are all gone now. A cleaning program was started to where an employee’s only job is to go around the store all day cleaning. Now it is very easy to shop in these stores.

Also they have a computer system that is doing all the ordering for the stores. It knows what was ordered a year ago and what has been ordered and sold from past orders. Basically, it’s working great in many of these stores but no so good in the ones that use to be a high volume store. One store has five pallets of juice backstock. Hopefully this ordering system will be a great deal better than the one that orders for Wal-Mart.

But there is another side to these new Food Lion programs that many people may have begun to notice. To stay in business one has to sell products people want to buy. Make it cheap but sell it for a greater profit. Even though Food Lion is doing great in sales and has a long future in the grocery business, one thing has become clear as to what sells and what doesn’t. And for Food Lion, their store brands do not sell as well as the name brands. The store brands are cheaper to make with a high profit margin compared to the name brands that has a small profit margin. So what is a company to do?

Well right now, all the Food Lion stores in the Raleigh, North Carolina area are in a ‘Pilot Program’. That means Food Lion executives want to see what would happen if all the vendors’ displays, shelf space and promos were taken out of those stores. And in its place would be their store brand names of; Food Lion, My Essentials and Home Essentials. With that, many vendors saw their position in the stores going from an endcap to a floor stack in frozen foods or to nothing at all. In some of these stores the Krispy Kreme table, which is a common feature in all grocery stores in the area, are collecting dust in a few Food Lion backrooms as their donuts are now located in a small side cubby hole on a back endcap.

And now that a computer is doing all the ordering for these stores, there has been another grocery reset with many more name brand products are condensed or removed from the shelves altogether to make room for more store brand products. Food Lions Pilot Program is basically to see if their products start selling better than the name brand items. If it works to their advantage then all their stores will follow suit. Thereby giving the company greater profits as many of these companies that deal with Food Lion have to cut back their sales and products to the chain store.

The worst case scenario is these companies will eventually have to cut back production of their products eventually including laying off many employees as well if the Food Lion Pilot Program is successful and as other grocery store chains follow suit. If not then this program will quietly disappear along with all the other different ideas over the years.

Storming Shopping Carts

It’s kind of fun watching a huge ego get deflated in front of onlookers. Do to the extreme heat and humidity, an afternoon storm came through that was scary and rewarding. Rewarding that we finally got some rain and scary that it looked like the flooding scene from the movie 2012.

I was in a grocery store when one of these highly charged storms was preparing to hit the area. As the rain came down, slow at first, eventually increased to the point no one could see any cars in the parking lot. The last thing people saw were shopping carts being pushed all around the parking area like a giant pinball game. Everyone in the entire store was looking out the front store windows taking in this monstrous view.

As the storm eventually died down people walked outside to survey any damages as well as to head home with the food they just bought. One man came back in the store and proceeded to talk with the Assistant Manager about damages to his truck. Everyone was taken aback by the number of dings and dents the shopping carts had done to his vehicle. The Assistant Manager stated that the store wasn’t responsible for any damages caused by the shopping carts but if the man wished, he could still contact the police and file a report against the store.

The man looked like he was satisfied with that decision until the Assistant Manager mentioned that he would have to explain to the police why he was parked in the fire lane while he was grocery shopping. The man simply turned around and left the store. No charges were filed against the store.  

Easter Dinner

Kroger grocery store Raleigh, NC