It’s no state secret that the closest grocery store to The Nerdery is a Food Lion.
It’s even less of a state secret that I absolutely loathe going into that store unless I absolutely have to and even then I’m seriously considering driving to somewhere where doing the shopping isn’t such a harrowing experience.
To be fair, they’ve remodeled it at least twice since I moved to this house and it looks like they might be fiddling with the interior again and the store itself is generally clean enough so that you’re not reminded of just how awful a rat-infested hole the average Winn-Dixie could be.
But there’s a general sense of malaise amongst the staff and lack of care in putting out the product at this location that one can’t help but think that upgrading the experience to ghetto would be a dramatic improvement.
Well, there was that one time where one employee whose bagging technique was best described as throwing items randomly into the plastic bags without caring if they survived the experience or who had actually paid for those items. When it was gently pointed out to him that his “style” of service wasn’t appreciated, he actually moved round the end of the checkout conveyor toward me and raised his fist as if he was going to assault me right in front of the store manager.
There aren’t many advantages to having a panoramic physique and the training in more than a few forms of hand-to-hand combat and certainly more than he’d ever know but this is one of those instances where it came in handy. I was able to get the lizard part of what passed for his brain to quickly rethink his course of action and reckon up his chances of successfully killing me in such a way that he ultimately chose to not follow through with the punch. I feel I rather graciously allowed him to remain on his feet and conscious so that his manager could take him to a bit more appropriate location to cool off and process the termination of employment.
But other than that one incident many years ago, the experience has been that the employees there feel they’re not paid enough to care about anything they ought to be doing. This comes as a huge disappointment to someone who has done the grocery runs at Food Lion for so many years that I remember when they were actually called Food Town. They had to change the name when they expanded their footprint into Virginia and Maryland where there were already grocery stores by that name (indeed, you can still see the Food Town logo on the advert boards of the NASCAR tracks in Bristol and Martinsville!).
Tom Smith has to be turning over in his grave at what Food Lion has become.
That’s why the last trip to the Food Lion at Battle Bridge was such a disappointment because a store that started out so awesome (thanks in no small part to the efforts of one of my neighbours in the cul-de-sac!) but has steadily been going downhill ever since he left.
That particular location was originally intended to be a Bloom location which was Food Lion’s relatively short-lived attempt to try for an “upscale” experience to compete with Harris-Teeter (and raise their prices to match HT’s astronomical asks!). It wasn’t really hard to tell if the store was originally a Bloom because they’re just so much nicer in terms of layout and there was a lot of care given to the customer service that reminded me of the way Food Lion used to be when Tom Smith was running things.
So much for my “go to” Food Lion when I want something that they’re the only one that stocks it but haven’t reached the level of desperation required to visit the nearest location.
The experience of that strip mall location starts before you even walk in the door when you’re navigating a fire lane that is absolutely chock-a-block full of people illegally parking in it and sitting there with their cars idling because they’re too lazy and feckless and just can’t be bothered to turn themselves 90 degrees and avail themselves of AMPLE PARKING mere meters away!
Raleigh PD could make an absolute fortune setting up a few rozzers to point these miscreants toward the car park where they can be issued rather pricey tickets for violating the fire lane regulations. There was precious little of the frontage of this strip mall that didn’t have someone parked up in the fire lane!
I grab a trolley from the car park that someone didn’t bother returning to where they belong and quickly go to get the few items I needed including one that was advertised with a big yellow sign indicating a two-for-one deal with the MVP loyalty card.
Score!
Or so I thought when I got to the checkout queue and encountered a cashier that I truly wondered if he’d gone out and smoked a blunt whilst on break. Everything he did was in slow motion and then he gets to the items on sale and the wrong pricing comes up on the screen.
When I point this out to him, he grabs one of the items and then heads off to the frozen section from whence it came. Mind you, what passed for alacrity and an appreciation of time being of the essence with him was such that Flash the Sloth from “Zootopia” could have outrun this character.
He eventually returns to the till and asks me if I’d put a coupon on their app or went to their little coupon kiosk near the front door.
I honestly didn’t realise that you apparently had to do this which explains why I’d been overcharged on those same items two days prior at my “favourite Food Lion” when I went through the self-checkout kiosk.
I’ll give the guy credit…he at least honoured the deal without too much fuss and let me go on my way to decide if I want their app on my phone at a later time. But the way he did it was rather comical and he ended up taking more off the bill than he should have but it ultimately ended up squaring things from that previous visit where I’d been overcharged so I figured I’d just leave it at that and head on home.
But this begs the question of why in the hell Food Lion would segregate the coupon deals in this way.
I can certainly understand them wanting to drive customers to adopt digital shopping carts so their purchasing is easily tracked (which the credit card companies already do with a lot of out-of-band data that’s transmitted to the card issuer/processors along with the card payment details).
The registers/kiosks ought to be intelligent enough to know to apply the coupon regardless of the MVP being a physical card that is scanned, or an app, or whatever.
The resulting confusion and potential for conflict and customer dissatisfaction at checkout can’t possibly be more valuable than whatever presumed benefits by forcing some deals to be digital-only will provide.
Or at least that’s what Tom Smith would likely say if he were still with us. You could be a complete screwup in every other facet of the grocery business but he’d often treat that as an opportunity for learning and growth.
What would get him to fire you quicker than anything else was to treat the customer like dirt and he wouldn’t think twice about it.
The young kids who seem to be running the place now might want to think about that especially now that Publix and Wegman’s are now building out their footprint in Raleigh.