Corporate grocery

[skilletlicker]

In the dried vs. fresh herbs thread earlier today I talked about a conversation with a Produce Manager who knew his product and seemed to enjoy his job. Sadly he also bragged on the cashiers and their boss who trained them and knew what they were ringing up.

So I'm just now looking at my receipt.

• Turnip greens rang up as kale.
• Poblano peppers rang up as chilacas.
• The cashier held up a beet and asked me what is this.
• Held up a turnip and asked me what it was.
• Held up a jicama and asked me what's this, and repeated the question three times then called her boss who asked me two more times. It was finally rung up for $1 more per pound than the sign in the produce department.
• Then a guy with a tie asked me if I found everything. I said, "Since wine sales were legalized in Tennessee they no longer stocked cumin seeds, only ground cumin.
  He said, "Well, are you sure?"
  I said, "I'm sure I haven't seen it."
  After a deep sigh he said, "Okay, I'll look for you. Follow me.--- Here it is, CUMIN!"
  "But it's ground and I was looking for the whole seed," I said.
  He looked at me like all people who believe they are superior look at inferiors and said, "I'll be sure to make a note of that."

This is corporate amurica.

So I'll shop more often at this store because of the produce guy and I don't have a better choice but it is a darn shame that companies don't invest more of their profit training employees and that our society tolerates the idea that a corporation's only responsibility is to its investors.

It didn't used to be that way.

 

[blissful]

ohhhhhhhhhhh that's kind of funny.
I have gone through the check out and identified items for the cashier too.

Some of the stores have numbers to identify items with their name, the customer bags it and puts a label on it and writes the number. Then the cashier uses the number, the item code, to price the item.

I sent DH to the store for me with DS, to get dill weed, fresh, and they came home with fennel. Fennel does have a dilly kind of frond. It happens.

 

[Andy M.]

That's kinda sad. No training and no personal knowledge.

Does the store put those little stickers on the individual veggies so the cashier can get the product code? Our supermarket has the stickers and when I see a cashier stuck, I chime in with the info.

 

[Andy M.]

...[*]Held up a jicama and asked me what's this, and repeated the question three times then called her boss who asked me two more times...

Sounds like you may have said, "Hicama" and they were looking for "Jicama"

 

[medtran49]

That's why I watch the display as the cashier is ringing things up, and also why I would never use an order and delivery service, besides the fact that we are both very picky about our produce. I certainly wouldn't pay $1 over the posted price. They can just run their buttstock back there and check.

 

[rodentraiser]

Welcome to the way America does jobs these days. They would rather pay less of a wage and invest less in training and less in their employees while in the meantime they're losing a fortune in having to hire new workers every couple of months.

I worked once for Sprint. More accurately, I worked for a company who worked for a company who worked for Sprint. Doesn't really matter, we were told we worked for Sprint.

Sprint didn't exactly start out with low wages. Their problems was they set high metrics which very few employees could meet. That's the why of the high turnover, and I'll go into those if you want me to, but that's not why I'm telling this story.

I trained as a customer service rep for Sprint. Sprint had between three to five classes of new trainees, twenty to thirty trainees per class, two to three times a year in the building I worked in. The classes ran for seven weeks each.

Each of those classes cost Sprint $100,000 more or less, per class, for training. So between a million and a million and a half a year. For one training center. Sprint has a lot of training centers. So multiply that out and then wonder why your phone service costs so much.

The tide is, hopefully, starting to turn a little. Consumer backlash is responsible for a lot of it. The image on the bottom tells me that things might be getting better. But what people, especially younger workers today don't seem to understand, is that the "new way" of thinking is actually the way it was back in the day pre-1980s when businesses actually invested in their employees and treated them as assets. That's pretty sad when you think about it.

 

[skilletlicker]

Rodentraiser,
Sprints 2017 revenue forcasted approx. 33 BILLION.

 

[Sir_Loin_of_Beef]

I doubt you could convince any grocery store owner to invest more time and money in training personnel because the grocery store employees are highly transient. For most it's a summer job or a "first job," not a career path.

As far as knowledge goes, especially in the produce department, my turkey stuffing is highly reliant on a chopped fennel bulb. I hit every supermarkt in the area and not only did they not have fennel bulbs, but the produce managers had no idea what a fennel bulb was. I finally found one at, of all places, Wallyworld's produce department, and it was labeled anise!

 

[rodentraiser]

Rodentraiser,
Sprints 2017 revenue forcasted approx. 33 BILLION.

Yup. Which is why they don't give a hang.

I doubt you could convince any grocery store owner to invest more time and money in training personnel because the grocery store employees are highly transient. For most it's a summer job or a "first job," not a career path.

I don't know. Checkers usually belong to a union and back in the 80s, they were making $16/hr at Safeway. Personally, if I could have gotten a foot in the door at that time, I'd have stayed there.


But it's only going to get worse. If Trump's food stamp cuts go through, the hardest hit (besides the people on food stamps) will be the grocery stores. In some rural areas, it's food stamps that keep the stores open and the employees paid. If the cuts go through, grocery stores will see a significant loss of revenue. This translates to jobs lost, employees laid off, and less groceries ordered, which means higher prices for the consumer and less choice overall.

This is gonna be interesting.

 

[skilletlicker]

I doubt you could convince any grocery store owner to invest more time and money in training personnel because the grocery store employees are highly transient. For most it's a summer job or a "first job," not a career path. ...

One percenters don't talk like that.

They think like that, but they are ashamed to say it out loud or write it down.

Wannabes and idealogue parrots say it but don't know what the words mean.

 

[larry_stewart]

I have a few ' Favorite' Cashiers who i know that they know most if not all items.
I actually get annoyed when they are not working that day, cause I know my experience will be different .

 

[skilletlicker]

...Checkers usually belong to a union and back in the 80s, they were making $16/hr at Safeway. ...

Not in "right-to-work" states." More should be said but Fiona would get mad at me.

 

[GotGarlic]

Not in "right-to-work" states."

I was about to say that - Virginia is a "right-to-work" state. I call it the right to be fired.

 

[tenspeed]

I finally found one at, of all places, Wallyworld's produce department, and it was labeled anise!

That's because the box it came in was labeled anise. I asked the local produce market (where they know what they are talking about) about this, and although fennel and anise are different plants, they have a similar taste, and the names are interchangeable when it comes to selling them.

 

[Sir_Loin_of_Beef]

Unfortunately, they are not interchangeable when it comes to recipe preparation. Anise is a leafy bush. Fennel is a bulb.

Try slicing or cubing anise sometime!

 

[RPCookin]

I guess that I'm lucky that my only full size grocery is Walmart. I'm never disappointed by the cashiers there, because I don't expect them to know very much. That said, I almost always use the self-checkout, so I'm inputting my own items.

 

[Roll_Bones]

I was about to say that - Virginia is a "right-to-work" state. I call it the right to be fired.

Or the "right to work for less" state!

 

[blissful]

Unfortunately, they are not interchangeable when it comes to recipe preparation. Anise is a leafy bush. Fennel is a bulb.

Try slicing or cubing anise sometime!

I didn't know anise was a bush. I never really thought about it. All I knew was that I could buy anise seeds, that's about it.

 

[skilletlicker]

That's because the box it came in was labeled anise. I asked the local produce market (where they know what they are talking about) about this, and although fennel and anise are different plants, they have a similar taste, and the names are interchangeable when it comes to selling them.

Not unusual. Some time, many decades ago, produce companies in the Southwestern United States were shipping Mexican poblano peppers labeled as pasillas. The mix-up grew to include chilacas, the fresh peppers that pasillas are made from. Dried poblanos are called anchos which somehow escaped the confusion. I'm sure that was the original source of that particular error on my Kroger receipt. It was never my intent to disparage the cashier.

Kroger is among the top 25 companies on the fortune 500 list. It has about 3,000 stores, maybe half a million employees, and revenues well over 100 Billion dollars. It would be stoopid in the extreme to use a hundred-year-old error by a mom'n'pop produce dealer as an excuse for their corporate incompetence.

 

[caseydog]

The Kroger I use most of the time has pretty reasonable turnover. I see a lot of the same people in visible positions for years.

I use self-checkout, because I bring my own bags. Cashiers like to keep things moving by using the plastic bag carousel and tossing two or three items in each bag. they clearly don't like it when people use their own bags. If I let them bag my groceries their way, I end up with twenty plastic bags for 50 items. On trash days, I end up pulling plastic grocery bags out of my bushes. I think they make up about 75-percent of the roadside litter around here. I wish they would ban those bags.

The worst cashiers I have found are at my local Walmart. But, these are people who earn so little, they need food stamps to buy their own groceries.

CD