I’d like to get in, get on with it, get it over with, and get out. Get it?
Hubert Hawkins – “The Court Jester” (Danny Kaye)
I leave the denizens of Wegman’s on Wake Forest Road to their own devices for a month and when I finally have some time to do the weekly shopping, I find that they’ve managed to completely change the layout of the heart of the store.
To say that I really hate what they’ve done with the place would be a grand understatement and that’s even considering one of their other really lousy idea of putting cameras on the self-checkout kiosks!
The one thing I’m absolutely sure of is that this had to be the brainchild of some genius in the marketing department.
A redesign this monumentally stupid could have only come from the folks in marketing who don’t have the first faintest clue about what they’re selling and to whom they’re selling it. Or they do know and they just don’t care about the vast majority of shoppers who see the shopping experience as a necessary chore that we want to be done with as quickly as possible and instead catering to those who find some perverse joy in spending hours wandering a grocery store’s aisles.
Let’s take the really big change first: most of the shelves containing staple grocery items have been shoved back toward the rear of the store and then for good measure have been completely jumbled up and moved about so that I have no bloody clue where the items I’m looking for are located.
What’s taken their place are shelves devoted to weird “organic” products priced much higher than usual and quite a bit of non-grocery items that you have to make your way through to get to the aisles and shelves you were likely interested in visiting in the first place!
I get that they want to try to maximise revenue by putting the high-priced items front and centre.
But that’s royally pisses off the majority of us who go into a grocery store to BUY GROCERIES rather than wander through aisles of stuff that we aren’t interested in, have never been interested in, and likely never will be interested in purchasing. Ever.
Eventually some of that stuff may be moved again to the area in the corner that is supposed to be a new chemist’s but for right now they’ve managed to clutter up the heart of the store which should be devoted to the core mission of the store which theoretically should be all about selling groceries and really makes me wonder what the powers-that-be thinks their mission really is!
The remodel has also made the trick of surviving Wegman’s with the least amount of damage to one’s wallet a bit more difficult. The secret was to generally go for the Wegman’s branded items as they’re significantly cheaper than their comparable brands and avoid the specialty areas round the perimeter of the store as much as possible where they make a killing on the stuff that I generally don’t want or need except in very rare instances.
Unless I’m wanting to find a decent bottle of Tokaji Aszu, you won’t find me in the quarter of the store that is devoted to beer and wine. Likewise, you’ll very rarely find me at their pizza kiosk or burger shack or their specialty cheese department.
With that strategy in mind, I had a very quick pattern where I could hit all of the shelves with the essential staple items I tend to shop for and then make a quick pass down the dairy section and the mighty Wall O’ Cheese to get past the deli to see if there was any meats worth buying before turning back for a run through the bakery to see if I’m really in the mood for a loaf of bread before hitting the veg and fruit section before finally ending up on the frozen items aisle.
On an average day, I could complete the course in 10-15 minutes from the starting line to finally turning up at the self-checkout till.
I’m sure I’ll figure out a way to optimise the el cheapo shopping path once I find where everything I actually cared about has moved but that’s probably going to take a while.
That brings us to the second big change which is the self-checkout queues. They used to have two aisles with three kiosks on each side where you could pull your trolley next to one and whilst it was facing the front of the store you could quickly scan the items with the hand-held scanning gun, do the checkout process, and then leave through the main entrance which was pretty conveniently to your right and not terribly far away.
Not any more!
They’ve now arranged the machines in two lines parallel with the front of the store (rather than perpendicular as they used to be) in what looks like a bullpen that has a serpentine cordoned queue leading into the bullpen past a somewhat bored looking employee who is supposed to be monitoring the area and detecting who is stealing/failing to properly scan the items and presumably doing something about it.
Once you’re done, you exit the bullpen significantly further from the main entrance.
I can understand that they probably have a vested interest in making it harder to exit the store quickly given the industry-wide problems with inventory shrink (stealing!) through the self-checkout queues.
Wegman’s is hardly alone in this trend. I noticed the ghetto Food Lion just up the street has also arranged their self-checkout kiosks in a similar sort of walled-in bullpen that’s right on top of the exit door.
The difference is that at ghetto Food Lion, the employee monitoring the self-checkout kiosks is stationed right at the point where you exit the bullpen to head to the door and seems to be in a better position to do something about the the crims nicking their products.
The Wegman’s employee is at the corner where you enter their bullpen and I don’t think they’re stopping a determined thief who is hell bent on leaving with their ill-gotten goods even with the additional distance to the exit that’s at the other corner diagonally from them and no path to cut the person off as they’re heading to the door.
But what I find rather insulting is that this is yet another slap in the face of those of us who are honest in our dealings just like the installation of the cameras on the self-checkout kiosks. Those who are inclined to steal aren’t going to be deterred by those cameras that are likely not actively monitored or by the hall monitor employee nor are they going to sweat a few extra meters to the door and potential freedom.
The cameras are pointless at best and frankly go straight to patently insulting when the customer is honestly scanning all of the items and so is it any wonder we might well resent the assumption on their part that we’re criminals until we prove otherwise?
Innocent until proved guilty. I seem to remember hearing that somewhere and thinking it was a rather good idea in how business should be conducted.
Just some food for thought for people who ought to know something about food.