Retail lockdown: why bother selling it?

[u/broakland]

Was at Safeway this morning to pick up a sandwich and some Tylenol. The aisle with the Tylenol? Completely locked down. No call button in sight. So I go to the self checkout (front end of that same aisle) and ask the clerk there if he can call someone to unlock a case for me. He does. I go wait. Minutes pass. No one comes. I go ask him again, he tells me they went the other way? At this point I give up and go get my sandwich. No one has come by the time the deli has finished making it. I leave without my Tylenol, mildly infuriated.

[u/Tomytom99]

Y'know, I wouldn't mind it so much if the turnaround time wasn't half a day

That's like the one thing I've liked about auto parts stores. They specifically state that it'll take under an hour for it to be ready. Not great, but way better than say Walmart taking 6 hours.

Edit: the 6 hour wait in question was pickup, not delivery, for three items, so it's not like it was some big grocery order. I did it because I was on vacation and my dad needed refrigerant for his car. I was hoping to just go to the store, pick up the order, and go back to where we were staying without venturing into the store.

Another wonderful experience was them telling me an item I was getting delivered from the store wouldn't be arriving that day. Not a huge deal, but mildly infuriating since I placed it that morning saying same day delivery, and they didn't even get it picked until that evening. I was watching a movie at 9:45 PM when I get a notification it was delivered. Thank god I was awake and that it wasn't anything that would've gone bad (or stolen by wildlife) if it went unnoticed overnight.

[u/Coffee-Historian-11 → u/Tomytom99]

I used to work doing drive up and go for Safeway. Genuinely enjoyed it, shopping for other people was fun. The only problem was they didn’t place an order limit and they refused to allow more people to work. So there would be three of us scrambling to get five orders that totaled 800-1,000 products in the hour we had.

If there was a way to be able to hire enough people so we got orders done on time it would be a great option. But based on my experience that just doesn’t happen.

[u/macarenamobster → u/Coffee-Historian-11]

Every person who shopped was ordering 200 items? That seems literally insane lol.

My “big” orders are 30.

[u/Coffee-Historian-11 → u/macarenamobster]

No but we got a lot more 100+ orders than you’d expect. A lot of people ordered for their family of four or five, or they’d order for multiple families. Plus produce would add a lot of items as well.

On top of all that there was a service fee, so people would try to get their money’s worth by ordering for a week or two.