- Author
- 01/27/2021
- 1,609 Words
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- 11 Comments
Names, places, characters, events, and incidents are based on the authors' lives and experiences and may be changed to protect personal information. Any resemblances to actual persons (living or dead), organizations, companies, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.
Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you.
Dear, Grocery Shoppers - 8. This...is a Rant.
This is an outrage! Pure devastation to production! Pure poppycock! I thought the way of stocking groceries was simple enough. But now, it is complete hogwash! Horse hockey! I’m so mad, I could spit! As a former Hoosier, I need to let y’all know that I haven’t done that in many years. C’mon...who spits anymore?
My job. The way I do my job. Has. Been. Micromanaged! Down to the footstep. Down to the singular boxcutter slice. Stocking groceries has been micromanaged to death. I feel as if I have been told to start walking with my left foot forward first, and not my right. This is unnecessary!
Before you start comin’ at me as if this is just another retail event that just “has to happen,” I’ll pump the brakes on ya right here. I understand that change in the retail environment is healthy! It is a necessary action that is a striving factor in successful businesses. I spent money on a college degree to know that this is a fact! The company I work for is all about change, and I have supported them through every major change while I have been employed by them. Through company slogans, to projected attitudes towards shoppers and employees. Those are great changes.
When you tell me how to do my job by turning our system upside down, shaking it for all the loose change in the piggy back, just to re-insert the coins in a new triangular shaped hole instead of the tiny slit-shaped slot...nope! It’s on! That’s right! Aaron’s pissed! We done skipped 'irritated' and 'agitated.' Straight-up pissed. I’m about to go on a queen-sized rant!
Stocking groceries was a simple art: Get the pallet, see what’s on the pallet, take the pallet to the proper aisle, move pallet to the proper area for stocking, move pallet again for the different product, repeat the last step about three more times, take the empty pallet and stack it, grab next pallet, and you’re done! During this time, you also have your cardboard cart. It has a plastic trash bag attached to it so you can separate plastic and cardboard. You put your damaged goods in the children’s seat with the protective plastic butt flap up. The collapsible empty totes would go on that weird undercarriage rack.
No. Take all of this simplicity and dump it in a landfill. Why? Because change had to happen!
Don’t get me wrong on this, I heard about this process a couple of months ago. It sounded nice...on paper. I gave it a shot on my aisle one night and I told my boss to shut the new concept down the second it hit our store. Collectively, about twenty-five store managers across the company shot this new concept down when it was rumored to hit stores.
And here it is. A wonderful concept that our industry has dubbed "case-spotting.” Boy, oh boy. If I could take a word, and throw it out of the retail dictionary, I’d shove it off a skyscraper and watch with binoculars.
The process is still simple, but it was made for the people who can’t handle stock crew work, and by work, I mean remembering where every single product is in the entire store. This...is an easy task. A waitress is expected to memorize everything on a restaurant’s menu, down to the subtle ingredients. Memorizing where everything is in a grocery store is no different. Name me a product, and I can guarantee a ninety percent success rate that I can give you which shelf the product is on.
I admit, I have been in the grocery game a lot longer than most people. But I bear no exceptions onto others. If you can’t remember which one of the two frozen aisles the TV dinners are on, I have no time for you. I’m going to reference Nigel Powers in Goldmember when he laid into that poor henchman without a name tag. ‘You stand no chance!’
Here...is the new process. For every shift, we now have two workers coming in an hour early to begin spotting. Spotting is the term used in grocery-ville to take an unopened case of product, take it to the place where it is to be stocked, and place it on the ground...unstocked. This process is to be repeated for every case of product, from every pallet, for every aisle. Once completed for an aisle, there will be stacks of product along both sides of the aisle.
Then, once the remaining stock crew members roll in, they are to work on the aisles that have been spotted while the spotters continue until the job is done. Once the stockers begin stocking, this is where the appeal of spotting comes into play. The concept is that once an aisle is completely spotted, a stocker can start at one end of one side of the aisle, and work their way down, and around the other side of the aisle. This would minimize the total steps taken for the stocker to take between grabbing the pallet, moving the pallet, and moving their cardboard cart along the way.
It sounds nice on paper, doesn’t it? By the end of the spotting process, everything is all nice and neat, lined up and ready to be stocked. It sounded nice to me when I first heard about it. Well, I’ve learned from experience. This whole thing sucks. I can’t even come up with a fancy term for how it makes me feel. It just sucks.
Not just for me. I’m actually on the customer’s side on this one! You know it’s gotta be bad when I take up for the shoppers. I did this whole spotting nonsense on my aisle Monday evening, and I spotted about twelve cases of canned tuna. Each case of tuna is a three can by four can square case with each stack of tuna being four cans high. In layman’s equivalence, each case is about as tall as a soda can. Per instruction of the spot training we received, they want us to make stacks of the like product to minimize clutter. So...I made two stacks of six cases on the floor. This process had to be done with two half-sized pallets of varying product being laid across both sides of my aisle, with a pallet slapped in the middle of the walkway.
The customer can not pass me. They can not pass the pallet. No way in Hell! And that is where I will draw the line! I hate customers as much as Noah, but we both know they’re the reason we have a paycheck. They need to shop. Before this spotting bologna business, I would place my pallet along one side of the aisle, opposite to where I was stocking. This allowed about forty inches of walkway, an easy task for a shopping cart to be pushed past. Now there is about twelve inches, and that is not OSHA standards. A wheelchair, by law, must be able to get down a walkway with thirty-six inches of space.
“But, Aaron! You can move the pallet!” Yes...yes, I can...and I must...for every shopper that comes down my aisle! And, knowing my luck, I’ll have an electric wheelchair cart coming from one end, and I’ll move my pallet just to find my other exit has been blocked off by another. This scenario should have been enough to strike this concept down to the ground before it got cleared for take-off!
“But, Aaron, what about doing this at a later hour?” Impossible. Our store is closed from midnight until six in the morning. We can not stock our store within six hours with our current payroll allotment and staff, and then have the store looking grand-opening ready. It is not feasible. We have always started stocking at 9:00 or 9:30 in the evening.
Another issue with this whole spotting shenanigans is another grievance with the piles of boxes accumulating on the aisles. These piles are preventing our shoppers from easily purchasing the product along the bottom two shelves. These piles can easily be moved, but I personally do not have time to be moving these piles of boxes left and right this entire time. Then I’ll be moving the pallet to let customers through. Then I’m moving piles over. Then I’m moving the pallet. Then I’m getting yelled at for not getting anything accomplished.
There is a possibility to have us come in at midnight to complete the spotting, and that will be the best option. By the time the store has opened, the majority of the product has been stocked and all spotting would be completed. This...is the only solution I can see being successful. But...it won’t happen. The company would frown upon the stock crew still being there with the store in shambles at the time of opening. That is strictly forbidden! The store must look immaculate by six in the morning! And I don’t want to be there when Mister McGoogin comes in wanting his jarred clam juice and needs help getting it off the top shelf.
This just hit our store this week. The schedule was already in effect and until the schedule for next week is posted and accustomed to our new nightmare, we have our spotters and stockers working together on the same dang aisle. It’s...oh, I give up. I don’t even feel like doing an outro paragraph anymore. This was a pure rant. Completely one-sided, and I’m not looking forward to my shift tonight. I’m off to go cry in my pillow.
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Names, places, characters, events, and incidents are based on the authors' lives and experiences and may be changed to protect personal information. Any resemblances to actual persons (living or dead), organizations, companies, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.
Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you.
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