Trading Hours Extension

Every January, Food Place carries out an extensive and vigorous review of every single store it operates. They look at how much money each store takes, how many customers they serve and how many items they sell. They then break this down into fifteen minute time slots for each day of the week to identify when the strongest trading times are for each store.

Somebody had a eureka moment when they looked at our store's trading patterns. They recognised that we take a higher than average amount of money in our first and last hours of trading and thought: 'Ooh, wouldn't it be a good idea if we opened that store for longer!"

So, from 18th February, Food Place will be trading for an extra two hours each morning, opening at 6am, and an extra hour in the evening, meaning we'll be closing at 11pm. An idea that is incredibly stupid in my opinion.

Yes, I know the old argument. If it was my business, I'd want to take as much money as I possibly could. But they must be stupid to think that anybody is going to come to Food Place at 6 o'clock in the morning. Large hypermarkets get custom in the middle of the night because people who rise from their beds obscenely early, or are coming off night-shifts, get the weekly food shop done and dusted when they know the stores will be quiet. Food Place just won't pull that sort of custom.

We're a 'top-up shop'. Being reasonably small in size, people don't generally come to us for all of their weekly shopping needs. Just their daily bits and bobs to keep them going until they go somewhere bigger to get the majority of the food in. And nobody does that at sparrow's cough!

I can almost understand the logic of opening until 11pm. There, I think we will get enough trade to justify being open. But, unfortunately, it's the later closing that's causing the riots amongst the staff. Nobody wants to work until that time of night - although it doesn't particularly bother me because I'm more of a night-owl than an early-bird. In order to trade, we need at least two people manning tills (you can't leave one person on their own for obvious security reasons), two people on the shop floor - which is actually already covered because we have a night-shift), one supervisor (to access the cash office) and one manager. Spread that across 6 days and it's going to be very difficult getting people to cover it. It's not so bad with the earlier mornings, because all of our morning checkout staff are prepared to do their share of 6am starts, and there's already fresh-foods staff working at that time.

I just don't see why, when they weigh the obstacles against the, extremely minimal if non-existent, benefits they actually want to go through with this. When the late Ellenfoot Food Place started opening until 11pm two years ago, within three weeks they had an armed till-raid and were forced to backtrack because the staff revolted. I can see the same thing happening with us.

Mrs Snot and her sodding boxes - again!
The customer from hell seems to be moving house once more - perhaps the neighbourhood she just moved into was too common for her on reflection. She telephoned us again this morning asking us to ensure that boxes were reserved. But she had specifications this time: they're not to be wet, they mustn't be broken down and they should be large enough to hold a 'substantial content'. For want of something better to do, I actually trotted off to the warehouse and sought these boxes for her. Naturally, I had to tape them back together to save her the strenuous effort of doing so herself. She hadn't been to collect them by the time I left, but I hope she was duly impressed by my efforts. Now there's a sign of how bored I was today: I actually went out of my way to please Mrs Snot - what was I thinking?!

On a further note...
The people dressed like lab-technicians who insist on pitching up in our store to peddle free samples of random crap need to be banned immediately. What do they think they're playing at? Handing customers little trays and cocktail sticks for them to leave in their baskets and trolleys, along with small morsels of food waste, for us to dispose of!

Mrs Snot: Round 300

Regular readers of this blog should be well acquainted with Food Place's resident moan-bag by now. If you haven't read about her before, try these posts: Clementines Nightmare and The Return of Mrs Snot. Put simply, this woman should be incredibly thankful that her only punishment for her bad behaviour at Food Place, thus far, has been a few blog posts written about her. My previous dealings with her have furnished me with plenty of information about her: I know her full name, address and telephone number. She needs to watch her back - one more rude, nasty comment and the shop-assistant will bite back.

There are no words that can accurately describe how much she does my head in. If it's not her condescending tone or lemon-sucking-facial-expression, it's the ridiculous things she complains about and the way she thinks the staff at Food Place are all out to rip her off. If I had a pound for every time she's threatened never to shop with us again, I'd be a very rich person. Sadly, it's all a big bluff. She's yet to disown us.

In fact, rather annoyingly, her visits seem to be becoming increasingly frequent; a state of affairs I can only suspect to be the result of her being banned from every other shop in town. None of the rest of them are stupid enough to put up with her.

Last Week's Incident
Don't you think it's unbelievably cheeky for somebody to telephone a shop and ask a favour of them if you're going to be rude about it? Cheekier still if you happen to have verbally abused several employees of the said shop on previous visits? Well, Mrs Snot apparently has no shame:

"Good morning Food Place, Andrew speaking, how can..."

"Yes, I want you to keep me some cardboard boxes. I shall be visiting your store at 1 o'clock this afternoon and I'll need them by then - can you tell me if this is possible?"

How dare you butt in when I haven't finished speaking! And what happened to 'hello', 'please' and 'thank you'? I already know who it is I'm speaking to, so I don't go for any fake politeness. I reply to her question in the same fashion she posed it:

"Well how many boxes will you need? Now isn't the best time because all the cardboard from last night's night shift has been crushed."

"For goodness sake! What sort of supermarket doesn't have boxes?"

"A one that recycles them. The best we can manage at the moment are the cardboard produce trays, but they aren't very big."

"Well when will there be more?"

"We get our next delivery at 5pm today..."

"So, if I come at 5pm I'll be able to trouble you to fulfill this extremely difficult request?"

Butting in again woman! And you can drop the sarcasm, because I've already had a skinful of you and am seriously tempted to slash your tyres as it is.

"No. The delivery arrives at 5pm. The stock isn't brought onto the shop floor until nightshift work it tonight. There won't be any empty boxes until after that."

"Well can you leave them a message that Mrs Jenkins [named and shamed at last] would like seven large boxes? I shall come in to collect them at 8am tomorrow morning."

"I'll be sure to leave a message."

"Good day." CLUNK!

I dutifully leave a message for nightshift. However, I know full well that they are incredibly busy people. They have a huge delivery to work, the entire shop to face-up, the warehouse stock to pull out and all the mess to tidy. I'm not overly optimistic they'll find time to lovingly set aside seven large boxes for a stroppy old bitch.

And surely I'm not the only retail worker who gets frustrated at this general expectation that we have cardboard boxes coming out of our ears. Yes, we receive a lot of them. But they're incredibly bulky. As soon as the stock is removed from them we break them down, cram them into a waste cage and they're quickly crushed and sent for recycling. We have a tiny warehouse and do not have room to reserve boxes for people. Besides, people generally see them lying there and crush them anyways. We have far more pressing matters to attend to.

Tip: if you go into a supermarket and ask for boxes, do so politely, take whatever is on offer, and don't moan that they've been broken down and will need taped back together. That way, everybody stays happy!

So, the next day Mrs Snot arrives for her seven large boxes. Thankfully, I'm too busy living it up as a student to be there to participate in this joyous event. But other staff members told me the scene that followed.

Mrs Snot wasn't amused that the boxes that had been left were all broken down. She was politely told that we don't have space to keep these things (they were bloomin' huge boxes) intact. This still wasn't good enough. She demanded to speak to a manager and proceeded to complain to them that, not only were her boxes not of the standard she expected, but 'every single member of your staff who played a part in handling this has been rude and incompetent'.

She's actually surprised? This is the woman who I don't think has ever uttered a single 'please' or 'thank you' in all the times I've encountered her. The woman who turns her nose up at you, and refuses to make eye contact when speaking to you. The woman who shouts at rotisserie staff because chickens aren't quite ready. The woman who was once overheard telling her daughter that shop workers are 'plebs'.

Who thinks it's high time we banned her?