gridlore | Fear and loathing at Safeway

Last night, after finishing my shift as a register monkey, my wife and I headed to our local Safeway supermarket for a weekly shopping trip. It was about 2030 when we arrived. We got our groceries quickly enough, and went to pay.

There were huge line at the three open registers. We found the shortest and got in it. The only signage over the register was a large handicapped symbol, indicating that the line was disabled-accesaable. Nothing else. We stood there for about ten minutes and the cashier slowly rang out a customer. By now, the lines for all the registers were insane. At that point, the cashier looked up and announced that his line was 15 items or less. Since when? No sign, and we had wasted a lot of time waiting for this register! And when you have that kind of line (and no one with a small basket in sight) you open up everything.

Grumbling, we moved to another line, and I just before I went to track down a manager, another lady came back to where we were waiting and told us that the manager wasn't going to open anymore registers, and that the first aisle was "supposed" to be Express, but the sign had been moved.

Eventually, they managed to find another cashier, and we got out of there, but that was the fourth or fifth bad experience we've had at that Safeway. I'm writing a letter to the store manager explaining why we are taking our business to Albertsons from now on.

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