Ice Hockey and Rugby Players Now in Your Local Supermarket

Nothing lends more credence to the viewpoint that today some people think more about themselves and behave in a seemingly narcissistic manner than by walking the aisles of their local supermarket. One thing that is certain is that manners seem to be something that is left at the front door when some individuals pull a shopping cart out of the row at the front of the store.

I have often wondered if the reason for some of the behavioral traits that I will write about in this post originate in the early days of mankind when we hunted for our own foods – the times of the cave man. Back then we fiercely competed with one another to bring down a wild animal that could fill our stomachs with much-needed sustenance and for the most part we did not want anyone else hording in on our kill. To me these primitive traits are especially prevalent in today’s supermarket meat and deli departments but more on that a little bit later in this post.

So let’s begin now with an example of some of these peculiar shopping habits. Some people use the grocery cart to stalk and capture their prey. Shopping cart etiquette begins when one selects a shopping cart or lasso’s it from the cart corral so to speak. This etiquette ends when you put the cart away at the end of your shopping trip – if you even do that.

First though let’s talk trash. The trash that I would like to talk about here is the type that a previous shopper leaves in a shopping cart for someone else to deal with. In today’s supermarket labor environment there just does not seem to be the resources to keep the shopping carts as clean as they should be and we put our food in these carts. Anyway this type of rude behavior can set the tone for a shoppers food purchase experience and it might not be a pleasant one at that.

I have seen, as well as been a victim of, shopping cart trashing syndrome. Having a store’s paper advertisement laying somewhere in the cart is not the type of trashing that I am referring to. No I am referring to the spilled coffee, empty coffee cups, crumbs from fast food establishments that a previous shopper had left in the cart. Another example is the smashed produce items in a plastic bag that some how got damaged between checking out and being tossed into the family mini van for the trip home. Tomato drippings, banana ooze and apple chunks along with leaking milk or spilled hot soup can make for a slippery shopping cart. One of the most disgusting examples of leaving one’s trash in a shopping cart is the used Kleenex or tissue. This just flat-out makes me want to heave. How can someone wipe their nose or their mouth in something and then leave it in a shopping cart? My favorite instance of extreme shopping cart trashing was when a customer, in a store that I was working at, brought a used diaper to the counter and said that it was left in the shopping cart she was using and could we dispose of it for them. Well at least that it was not a used Depends.

Anyway some people just live like swine and the common courtesy that one should exercise by taking their personal trash from the shopping cart before they push it into the middle of the road or cart corral is for the most part lost on them.

Back to our shopping trip now. With your narrator now in control of their wobbly wheeled shopping cart they begin their journey up and down the aisles of the store doing the hunter gatherer thing.

What I have really begun to fear at my own local grocery store is the Denny Crane like senior citizen, though they might not be carrying a firearm like Denny always seemed to be doing on Boston Legal, some seniors seem to use the shopping cart as their weapon of choice with which to wreak mayhem throughout the store.

Senior citizens seem to be most forceful in the dairy department. Is it their pressing need for yogurt or cottage cheese? Perhaps it is the juices that are commonly found in this department. Whatever the heck it is I can tell you that standing in front of a dairy case for more that 10 seconds can subject a shopper to a body check that would please any member of the audience watching the Montreal Canadians playing the Chicago Blackhawks. My knees have been bumped and checked by numerous 70-year-old seniors on more than several occasions.

While today’s supermarkets do not have yellow lines painted on their floors or traffic signals like roadways do there is an unwritten directional map that 99% of us follow when we are in the supermarket. Most people know that we go in the front door of a store then we follow the crowd around the perimeter of a store as we navigate up and down the center aisles as we go. The senior citizen either does not remember these mental directional maps or chooses to ignore them by claiming some form of mad cow disease.

Last week I was shopping in my local supermarket when I found myself in the dairy department and was immediately mesmerized by a shelf containing 16 or 17 types of yogurt. It took me a few seconds to decide what variety of this custard looking yogurt to take off the shelf when I felt a searing pain shooting up my leg from the area of my knee. As I looked down at my leg I saw that there was a shopping cart attached to my body exactly at knee level. At the handle of that shopping cart was a very prim and properly dressed white-haired lady roughly born about 20 years before Ronald Reagan. Of course she slammed into me from the opposite direction of the store’s normal traffic flow especially for that particular area. This proverbial little old lady stood about 4 foot 8 inches with an obvious calcium deficiency. No wonder I did not see her coming at me since she was short and on the wrong side of the road so to speak. Well she wanted in at the yogurt and nothing was going to stop her for getting to it not even my now wounded knee. There was no excuse me or an apology uttered from her lips instead there was just a self-absorbed look that also said out of my way you jerk.

Have you ever noticed how today’s grocery shopper is forced to confront all of the product displays in the shopping aisles? It used to be that a shopper would see a few of these product displays in the aisles during certain holidays like the aluminum pans around Thanksgiving or perhaps a promotional display from one of the sugar-water producers for a product featuring the image of some hyped up athlete.

Anyway pushing one’s basket up and down the aisles in the store today requires that the shopper dodge more of these numerous product displays that have been placed almost everywhere in the store. I guess these stores get promotional money or pay less for the products in these floor displays but that topic is for another post. In addition to dodging these promotional obstacles a shopper has to be aware that these displays can also be used as a refuge for some shoppers that wish to spring an ambush on their prey so to speak.

A few months back I was making my way through the spice aisle and all of a sudden, from behind a 5+ foot high floor product display for some new sugar substitute my shopping cart was t-boned by another cart even though I was not in the meat department. Apparently some shopper, a short one at that, had pushed their cart to the side of the previously mentioned floor display and was carrying on a conversation on their cell phone.

I do not know what made me more upset the fact that they were able to get phone reception in this store, because I never can, or that they slammed into my cart while they were talking on the phone obviously not looking where they were going or who might be around – kind of like the way some people drive today.

Well after the two of us eyed each other for a moment possibly waiting for the other one to say something the driver of the other shopping cart did not miss a beat with her phone conversation and now was slowly proceeding up the aisle away from me. I was thinking about running after her and demanding her driver’s license and proof of insurance or at least insist that we should exchange our stores valued customer saving card information but it was too late as another customer curtly said “excuse me” because I was now blocking the narrow aisle.

To be continued on another post.

AB

Copyright @ 2010 Supermarket Stories

Blackberry’s Are Not in the Produce Department and Can You Wait for Just a Minute I Have to Make a Call

Someone recently said that cell or smart phones are not the reason for a perceived increase in rude and ill-mannered behavior by some people in public. The fact of the matter is that these types of people act selfishly and rudely with or without the use of technology. We do not need to use a cell phone to explain why people today exhibit bad manners in public places because behavioral traits like these operate without the need for an electric charger.

Wander through the aisles of your local Supermarket and you will see, what appears at first, to be people talking with themselves. Then upon closer examination one realizes that these people are actually speaking to someone else on their cell phone through some sort of ear piece device. Cell Phones are a handy way for one’s wife, husband, significant other or elderly parent to get in touch with a shopper to ask them to pick up this or that since they are already at the store. If only this were the case in reality.

Listening to people talk on their cell phones in the supermarket can be an insight into our social norms or possibly a case study of conversations at a mental health clinic. For one particular group of shoppers, sorry young ladies, being at the Grocery Store seems to be the time that they can catch up on the gossip of what their fellow girl friends are doing and in some case doing it with. In the case of the busy 30 something male it is a chance to catch up on voice mails from the office or planning for the next sporting event. Every social group that I have observed talking on the cell phone in the Grocery Store have their own particular subject matter that needs to be talked about as they pickup the sodas, chips and frozen food. Why is this? Sociologists I am sure will have an answer and the statistics to back up a study on this type of behavior. Psychologist will have their perspectives on this subject and most of the rest of us will still go around scratching our heads as to why people feel the need to talk about things so loudly on the cell phone in public.

In the interest of full disclosure I own a cell phone or smart phone as they are referred to today. I have never really felt the need to wander through some public place and carry on a conversation with someone else at the same time. Remember though so far I have only been writing about customers using their cell phones in public at the Grocery Store.

So who says that Supermarket employees should be excluded from exercising a little bit of narcissistic tendencies on the job as well. I know for myself that they do so regularly and see it just about everyday or every time I go into a supermarket.

Let’s briefly go off the current subject matter for a moment so that I can provide some background as to why this socially rude and unacceptable behavior of using a Cell Phone at work in the Supermarket has been allowed to grow roots.

Technology is a wonderful thing in most cases. Technology allows for one to be more informed, in touch and have access to the volumes of the accumulated wealth of man. Years ago in many American business, not just the Retail Food industry, computers perpetuated the reduction in numbers of mid-level management positions in an organization. In older businesses the executives would set policies, then area directors would package them for use by the managers who in turn would supervise those policies implementation and adherence to by the line employees. Whether this was a manufacturing, traditional office or service operation mid-level management were the supervisory Bee’s in the business colony.

Technology, namely computers of all different sizes and capabilities, allowed executives to monitor productivity and the operations of a business at all levels. In the interests of cost savings and organizational profitability it was determined that there was too much mid-level management in place. More managing could be done with less management and more technology. Executives could have their finger on the pulse of an organization all of the time. Anyway this change in the organizational thought process worked its way through every industry in the United States even the humble Supermarket Business.

Depending on the size of a particular Grocery Store the organizational structure use to include a store manager, assistant managers, department heads, office personnel, inventory clerks, front-end supervisors, cashiers and perhaps someone to load your purchases into your car. Well to the owners and executives of the Grocery Stores this was just too many people to have on the payroll. Right Uzzi? After all the owners and executives now had the technology to manage every aspect of the business. They did not need someone else interpreting results for them or even carrying out some policy because they could do this themselves or through others further down the organizational chart. In addition the age of hello e-mail good-by personal visits by a mid-level managers was dawning.

So the Supermarket Industry went through an organizational change at store level. First store managers, through the use of technology, could do more to monitor the different areas of their stores. They did not need 3 or 4 assistant managers to help in the running of the store, now they just needed a couple of assistants. The need for multiple department heads was no longer needed either because technology has proven to the owners that the Dairy Department Manager can also be the Frozen Food Manager. Instead of having a pseudo bookkeeper at the store the computer would keep track of things and flag any exceptions which now the store manager must look into first. Front-end Supervisors became more and more extinct in most stores. Instead an office type person can help the cashiers or attend to the odd customer inquiry now and then. Cashiers can be cashiers or Self Checkout Registers can even eliminate the need for the number of cashiers as well – more on this in another post. The store can now reduce their over all store payroll by two to four percent. Considering that a Grocery Store can have a payroll of 7 – 14 percent of its total retail sales the savings are huge. So fewer eyes and more technology was the answer to a store’s profit and service be damned just ask the Holy Grail of retailing Wal-Mart.

So now we can better understand why in some cases no one is watching the proverbial store anymore – other than the closed circuit cameras that are for the most part not being monitored just recorded, the store is on its own as are the customers.

The other day I was in one of the Uzzi Family company stores and I noticed that a cashier, a young man, seemed to be fidgeting with something or with himself while he was waiting on a customer. Of course my thoughts were that perhaps the customer is really a robber and threatening the young cashier. However upon closer observation I saw that the cashier was still checking out or scanning a customers order it was just that the customer was not really putting the products on the check stand with any particular sense of speed. Heck there was not even a rhythm to this process for this customer was just slow putting things on the checkout belt.

This cashier apparently felt that he could use these snippets of 10 or 15 seconds between the groups of products being dug from the customers cart to carry on a Text Messaging conversation with someone who he knew. How’s about that? This cashier certainly practices some type of extreme time management if you ask me.

In the past I had noticed that even at my own local supermarket younger cashiers almost always seemed to have their cell phone or smart phone within close proximity to where they are working. Occasionally I would hear a ring tone similar to a Lady Gaga hit single or some other current R&B or Hip Hop artist going off in the employees pants pockets or purses that were placed under the counter of their workstation. I also noticed that if an opportunity presented itself either after the customer had finished checking out or before the next customer’s order was completely placed on the Checkout Belt that the cashier would reach for the phone and see either who it was that called earlier or what the Text Message said that just came in. There have been times where I have seen the cashier either respond to the Text Message or make a quick phone call before checking out the next customer.

I must be sensitive to this type of behavior now because I see it more and more in the retail stores that I am in. The points that I would like to make here with this post is that rude behavior and poor manners do not need technology to bring it out into the open. If people acting like this today were allowed to do these things and act like this growing up it certainly was something that the parents failed to communicate to their children as to what is acceptable and what is not acceptable forms of behavior. It is not up to the schools or businesses to be surrogate parents and teach their employees not to be rude however the businesses should always provide good examples of proper behavior. However it is up to the schools and the businesses to let their students or employees know what the rules are along with the consequences of not following them. Hello kids do you want fries with that order.

The second point that I would like to make here is that with the lack of supervision in more and more Supermarkets today it is not surprising to see that this type of rude behavior and employee malaise can occur. Store owners and management have an obligation to their customers to provide food products in a clean and sanitary environment with efficient and effect service at a reasonable price. No more and no less. Without proper supervision and periodic associate reviews that include addressing behavioral traits these forms of rude behavior will continue to find fertile ground in the supermarket.

As an aside it is not just the cashiers who are using their cell phones whenever they want to at work it is also the cart person, the meat cutter and the person behind the deli counter. At times I have heard more colorful language emanating from behind the counter from my location on the sales floor than I have heard in some bars.

Quickly to give Uzzi some credit he has a very strict policy on the use of cell phones in a store while an employee is on the company’s time or as he says his time. This policy requires that the employee not use their cell phone when they are working or on the sales floor only when they are on break or leaving for the day. Of course you always see Uzzi when he is in any of the stores with his cell phone at his ear but I guess that he is using it for company business – yea right.

It was only 10 years ago or so that if someone mentioned or used the word Blackberry in a Supermarket one would think of a particular type of fruit berry in the Produce Department. Today one’s first thought is of that famous type of smart phone. Oops I have to run now because I just got a Tweet from Paris Hilton and I want to read it right away.

AB

Copyright @ 2010 Supermarket Stories