Grocery Store General

A few days ago, I was in the grocery aisle trying to pick out some decent tortillas when some old lady kept saying, "Excuse me. Excuse me!"

I don't care that I'm blocking the aisle. I have every right to be there and I'll take as much time as I need to select my items. You can wait.

Fucking rude, impatient people...

Nah, fuck you.

10/10 bait, made me mad before I realized what you're doing here

>Tell us about your most interesting stories

Years back, I was standing in line at the grocery store check-out and the next lane over, this old man was rolling up and his cart wheel snagged on this huge cardboard display / container full of disposable razors on sale.

He tried backing up then going forward, grumbling under his breath but his cart was still hung up, until suddenly he yelled out “SON OF A BITCH!” and knocked over the entire cardboard display / container like a linebacker blitzing a quarterback, sending hundreds of disposable razors flying all over the place.

It was all I could do to not bust out laughing, as he then calmly rolled his cart up to the conveyor and started unloading his food, while the cashier got on the PA system and called for a clean up at the registers.

Serves ‘em right for putting those things everywhere in the store, getting in shopper’s way.

I was out shopping one day and was walking past a pair of ladies chatting away and focused on their phones. The cart one was pushing snagged the corner of a display of cheap wine and the whole thing almost came down. I grabbed it to stop it and only two or three bottles fell out with one busting open.

They proceeded to book it and left me awkwardly holding up gallons of cheap wine and surrounded by broken glass.

I don't have much. I recently fumbled a can while trying to inspect it and move out of some woman's way at the same time. Caught it though, and felt kinda cool.

I stopped going to Publix so much because I feel weird about having to tell the old woman with a wrist brace that I don't need her to push my cart to my car. Seriously, I'm 25 and she's passed retirement; have some mercy, Publix.

>I stopped going to Publix so much because I feel weird about having to tell the old woman with a wrist brace that I don't need her to push my cart to my car. Seriously, I'm 25 and she's passed retirement; have some mercy, Publix.

Yeah I've often walked out of there wondering if I look like I'm dying. It's nice that they want to help, I guess.

The other day I watched a lady take out an entire end cap of bottled cider at trader joes. Literally gallons of cider all over the place.

One time I saw someone push there cart into the meat counter as glass shattered over everything

>my cashier has dreadlocks
>decide to be social
>tell her I used to have them to make small talk
>spaghetti water at rolling boil at this point
>she asks why I cut them off
>pasta is now cooked to al dente perfection
oh i had to when I got a real job
>sauce looks done too
this is a real job

This was whole foods, I haven't been back

>oh i had to when I got a real job

I avoid poor people stores and areas like Walmart and Target. I don't like being in a store with a lot of minorities or sloppy people.

>implying HT isn't the same shit but sold at 3x the price

its overpriced at fuck but they definitely have a better selection of fruits/veggies/cheese and free samples are bro tier

only get select shit there though because the exact same shit at food lion is ~25-50% cheaper

>free samples

I don't know why, but it is the absolute height of pathetic behaviour to me when I see a grown man taking a free sample at a store.

This.

more cheese on toothpicks for me then faggot. enjoy your crippling social anxiety that prevents you from accepting free samples in public.

why is it pathetic to know whether you like a product before buying it?

10/10

You know what the samples are for, right? They're so you can sample the product before you buy it. There's nothing pathetic about that.

It's fine it's actually something new or interesting, but when dudes are grabbing samples of melon or crackers it's disgusting

Exactly. Fucking cut up pieces of granola bar or half of a little mini cinnamon buns? Ouuu a new frozen pizza or some shit-ass new flavour of cream cheese on a cracker?

You know exactly what the fuck it tastes like before you "sample" it. It's got nothing to do with social anxiety and everything to do with acting like a complete faggot in public.

>i don't have social anxiety
>if someone sees me eat melons at harris teeter they will probably think i am a pleb

How do you know it's not a new type of cracker or a melon that was just introduced, insecure little cuck?

>You know exactly what the fuck it tastes like
Aww, little cucky wucky thinks the only foods there can possibly be are ones he's eaten before. What an adorable little cuck!

>manchildren with no sense of self

I bet you fucks have had the same haircut for the last 5 years.

Please enlighten on me on these newly invented melons

Before shopping, I recce the store, memorizing each isle. Then, I go home and write a shopping list according to the isles arrangement, starting from the entrance all the way to the checkout. This list is also designed to follow the shortest possible route through the store. The next day, I go early and wait outside the store before opening time. This is to avoid crowds and also to get the best shopping cart with smooth wheels because they're faster and easier to control. As soon as the doors open, I methodically follow the shopping list while taking pics using my phone of the prices and punching in the numbers in my calculator. Eventually I reach the cashier and double check the receipt with my own calculations. The entire shopping trip should not take more than 20 minutes. I shop for a family of 9 (big extended family).

yep.

girlfriend shaves it for me. fade -> 3 on the top. lasts a long time before i have to cut it again and looks pretty gewd. cost $0.

about to go to harris teeter and eat some free samples later. have fun worrying about what strangers think of you.

>I bet you fucks have had the same haircut for the last 5 years.
5 years ago my hair was 3 feet long, and I cut it after a large section was burned when what I was working on exploded.

Sorry you're too afraid to try new things, Mr. Burch.

>literally every store everywhere carries literally every type of melon all year

Anything yo justify your phobia of new things, right?

Oh, I forgot to mention that I took those pics to input into a goods price Excel sheet I made. I use this to avoid going over budget. I shop once a week.

How do you make sure you get the good cart without testing a shitload of carts?

This is turning into the daily autism thread

>girlfriend shaves it for me

HER PUSSY AMIRITE

Autism aside, why are stores usually laid out so customers are routed to produce first?

All the cold stuff should be at the end so it stays fresher and ends up on top of the heavier items. I hate having to run back and forth trying to strategically grab stuff.

So that by the time you get to the junkfood aisles all your self control and will power has been expended and you make overpriced impulse purchases.

I've never understood why, but old people really really like me. I've gotten cornered by them so many times and looped into polite half hour conversations that I'm not able to get out of.

On occasion I've run into people who I knew in high school. We make eye contact and it ruins my whole day. We usually don't say anything to each other but we both KNOW.

There's a guy who works at my local place who I also see occasionally at the gym we both belong to. We've never spoken with each other in either setting.

I can't stand it when people try to use the self-check out when they have a giant cart full of items. It takes them forever. Don't they know it's for people with only a few items?

Do you actually believe your vegetables are going to rot in the time it takes you to move around the store?

Because all the fresh food draws your eye and leads you around the store until you reach all the garbage processed food

Psychological impact, a good produce section gives a store an atmosphere of fresh/appetizing food. Also why many stores now have larger deli and fresh food sections on a center island near the front. Produce is also a high shrink area that needs all the focus it can get. Milk is usually put in the back so that you are forced to walk across the store and make more impulse buys along the way. Smart stores force you down a impulse buy section on the way to the milk.

No, but it makes more sense to put them at the end.

Not particularly. You want to space a store partially out of shopability, but you also want to spread out so clientele must walk across sections they may not usually buy out of to pick up impulse buys. You also have to think in terms of facility layout, it is cheaper to place coolers/freezers in a line or together rather than spaced all over.

Fuck off, I'm right fucking retard.

"Hey Jeremy! We got any orange juice with something called pulp in it?"

-overheard coworker conversation

I watched a lady drop 4 croissants out of the self serve bin onto the floor, then pick them up and put them back into the bin.

I haven't felt the same about self-serve bread ever since.

Kay...

>Going to buy 2 lbs of tilapia from the meat department
>They're all out
>Ask woman behind the counter if they have any more
>"One second, hun"
>She goes into the back room
>Comes back out with 2 2lb bags of individual frozen tilapia fillets with a sticker on each
>"We don't have any more fresh ones, but I marked these for you so just show them the sticker up front and they'll be free. Give 'em a try"

>walk into store
>see produce
hm, today I will be healthy
>buy a ton of veg and fruit
>start feeling good about new health kick
hey a bag of cheetos won't hurt, I have a ton of spinach in my bin!
>cheetos eaten in a day, veg rots

They want you to buy as much as possible, it helps

those evil geniuses!

Why do you think so?

They want you to buy a bunch of veg first so you feel good about yourself, then you lose control with processed shit like chips because you already have the healthy tomatoes in your cart

I mean honestly the grocery industry spends millions of dollars studying the psychology of shoppers... why do you think Walgreens puts their pharmacy in the opposite corner of the entrance? so you have to walk through the aisles

not evil, just smart about human psychology

I mean you do realize how many millions these corporations put into figuring out how layout affects shopping behavior? It's not an accident

>fat weaboos coming to my favorite korean market for just snacks and instant noodles

It's not very interesting

Same. But they never go for the kimchi or meat or marinated meats so I'm good.

I guess most people either don't plan out their lists beforehand, or don't stick to them too strictly. I'm not immune to impulse buys, but I'm not going to pick up Cheetos to offset the spinach and broccoli I'm buying.

It makes more sense to me from a logical standpoint, cold stuff with cold stuff, you know, but I guess doing it like they do means better profits for the store and more walking back and forth for me.

Though talking about placing healthy stuff first, my Kroger has its produce at the entrance, but the health section is at the very end, so it seems kind of backwards.

Jesus Christ are you still sperging out that the lettuce isn't kept in the dairy cooler? I'm sorry you don't understand rudimentary principles of marketing and basic capitalist theory, but life is not arranged according to what would be most efficient otherwise you'd sit on a conveyor belt and shop in a store of revolving shelves like a car wash or something.

The health food aisle is full of pills and boxes. The point is that it doesn't look as healthy as a nice head of broccoli or lettuce, even if it is

I think you get the idea that as long as you are walking by a product you are more likely to buy it. That's why the most commonly needed sections are on the periphery

Deli
Meat
Dairy
Bakery

Everybody buys that shit so they have to walk all over the fuckin place and of course they are going to buy extra shit as they think of it when they see it

where the fuck do you live? the korean market I go to has just normal people shopping there. a lot of koreans, but also just people of all races from the neighborhood, shopping after they get done with work.

I feel sorry for people who live in areas where asians are like some kind of exotic alien zoo creature that attracts strange people who come to their stores to gawk

>military
>commissary

Everyone is either relatively Veeky Forums, fat or really old.

No taxes is nice.

Not him, but I live in Seattle where we have this massive Japanese supermarket. It has its own bookstore and other smaller type of stores inside of it.

Every time I go, I will always find a small group of weeaboos clamoring over at the snack aisle, ramen aisle, or bookstore.

>I'M JAPANESE NOW DAD, OKAY?

Yeah, you'll see a lot of those types of people. I feel bad for the older parents that have to go with their cat-eared, anime bullshit children because I always see them stand around awkwardly around the book store while their kids jerk off to anime figures.

>still sperging out

I am, goddammit. I understand the psychology of store layout in the sense that I remember some brief mention of it in a psych class, and it makes sense from an economical standpoint, which is most important, I guess.

user was asking why I thought putting all the cold shit together was best, and I think it is because it's more logical. It would make shopping quicker, which, as a consumer, I value that a bit more than a marketer's attempts to make me buy more stuff.

Do car washes revolve? I don't use automatic washes.

>heading up to register
>this disheveled lady pushes past
>puts up two bottles of tartar sauce, one with the lid up and open
>some bananas
>a giant can of fruit cocktail
>box of cheez its
>takes a squeeze of the tartar sauce
>starts to bag up her own things
>cashier says "I haven't given you the total yet"
>lady stops and waits
>hears the amount and then starts bagging again
>asks how much it is
>gets out her members card thing to scan
>then starts writing a check
>drops her keys while writing
she just kept fucking up what a weirdo

>work at local grocery store
>thought I'd seen the worst people have to offer (leaving used nappies / tampons etc)
>today seen a lady pushing her kid around in a trolley
>kid literary shitting liquid onto the floor and the goddamned parent walks through it
>line of human feces up the vegetable isle with shitty footprints

And people wonder why I prefer to buy my veg and meat at a farmers market

I hate getting stuck behind checkwriters at the grocery store. They always stand there waiting for the cashier to finish scanning everything and ringing up the total, then they haul up their gigantic purse and rummage around all the useless shit they carry around to find their gigantic wallet stuffed full of receipts and coupons to get their checkbook. Then it's another few minutes while they slowly scrawl out the check and look at the total on the screen two or three times before they finish and sign it. They almost always get cash back too and stand there pondering what denominations they want for their cash back. Drives me up the fucking wall.

That and the old people who can't comprehend how to scan their credit card. I was behind one of those last week. This old lady tried to scan her card 5 times and kept doing it wrong every fucking time with the card either backwards or upside down or facing the wrong way. Eventually the cashier reached over and took her card and swiped it for her.

>I hate getting stuck behind checkwriters at the grocery store.

This is a complaint from the 1990s. Nobody writes checks anymore. They haven't for 20 years.

>Being this salty about grocery store strategery

I process at least 3 or 4 checks a week. The people who write checks are usually either wicked old and terrified of debit cards or just a retarded contractor who gets checks from their boss.

>3-4 per week

And the odds of getting stuck behind them are about the same as winning the pick-3 lottery.

Arabs on welfare system buying too much food and bargaining if price is to high.

>HABIBI, IN DAMASCUS I BUY LIVE CHICKEN FOR ONLY 5 DOLLAR! WHY SO EXPENSIVE? WALAHI THIS COUNTRY IS QAMAMA

Try ten years, mother fucker.

Also, my barber is the only person to have cut my hair since 1997, apart from his daughter while he was out getting his knee replaced.

Git gud.

As someone who grew up in Saudi, complaining about food prices is a national pastime. Food was cheaper than the USA and most Saudi's don't work for shit, don't drink, no fun no nothing so all they got left is eating. That's why they're all so fat.

why would you ever change your haircut once you find one that works

meh whatever
>go to the gym in the morning before work
>stop at the grocery store after to buy some yogurt
>bakery has free cake samples in their little sample stand
>walk around in gym tights eating a birthday cake square at 8am while all the old women stare at my ass

>his personal style hasn't changed
found the boring person
I had a bowl haircut as a little kid, a flattop as a young teen, curtains as an older teen, long hair in a manbun in my early 20s, a pompadour in my late 20s, and now a standard "ivy league" in my 30s.

my hair has changed consistency a few times so what works doesn't work forever, but mostly it's just going with what phase in life you're in.

There's considerable writing about grocery store layouts and the impact they have on people's shopping habits

My grocery shopping tends to go a bit like this

youtube.com/watch?v=zwXjm64a3QE

Those things aren't as annoying as tasting stations. They set them up in the busiest places and the whole damn aisle gets jammed up. They set them up at the worst possible times, too.

>mfw I pop into the store on Friday after work, the store is packed, and there's some grinning bitch spooning cheese dip onto a cracker and looking at me invitingly

I went to a new grocery store today. When I went to the produce section, I saw they had all their goods on ice beds. Not like ice cubes, but crushed ice. I'm not sure what came over me, but the next thing I knew I was grabbing handfuls of the ice and shoving it into my mouth. As I was crunching and swallowing my frozen treats, an old woman started yelling at me about "germs". I panicked and shoved some more ice into my shirt pocket and ran out of the store

My old supermarket used to have a really good selection of samples by the deli. Would do laps of the store and keep going for more

That's brilliant

I'm autistic and I work in a grocery store. It's a great job for autists and robots, which describes most people I work with.

...

>i had a man bun

i don't give a fuck what you think or about your "style" faggot

Nothing particularly interesting lately. That tends to happen in restaurants than groceries.

I hate going to the self-check out and the machine loudly announces that I need assistance.

Oh yeah, I still haven't quite figured out the chip reader thing. I felt really dumb to be part of the generation that's born in this technology and not know how to use it, and a guy near retirement owns a smart watch to pay for his shit.

>when you ask people clearly if they need help finding anything and they just mumble out "yeah i'm having a great day"

Fucking this.

Every day is a daily autism thread.

>set them up right in front of the one register that's actually open
>can't tell if people are in line to check out or for samples

>General

Fucking this.
It's either going to the cheap stores and drown in rude muslim shitskins, or pay out of your wazoo in the more expensive stores.

My girlfriend sometimes ask me if we should go to a specific store on saturdays. The reason?
It's their free samples day, so she think of it as a perfect time to snatch some free lunch.
I always go "nah, it's too expensive for us to do the groceries in there", but in reality I find it to be white trash as fuck.

It's a customer service gimmick. A store I used to work at called it 'spoil them with service'. They strongly discourage people from dealing with their own carts by not having any corrals in the parking lot.

They say it's their way of making the company stand out, but considering their only serious competition here is Walmart, it ends up feeling like clingy overkill after awhile.

How do you guys deal with buying something cheap?

We here have a big supermarket but usually only one check out works so there is always a lot of people watching what you buy, familiar or not.

Sometimes I want something not that expensive, like a Bic disposable razor or some cheap body wash and feel like everyone is judging. I'm not even poor I just don't like spending that much money.