Ken Larsen's web site - advice for grocery stores
To improve the grocery shopping experience, I suggest that grocery stores do what Home Depot and Lowes do: Use an aisle/bay numbering system to document locations throughout the store. Such a system could be used by regular shoppers to find what they want quicker. I find myself wasting too much time looking for things.
In 2019 a lady moved in with me. She's an excellent cook and is very eclectic in her tastes ... has a wide range of things that she buys at the store. To help her, I volunteered to do the shopping. My first few attempts proved to be very time consuming. I couldn't find most of the items and had to repeatedly ask clerks for help.
I addressed this problem by making a master list of everything she could possibly want and then creating a Microsoft Word document table to identify where each was in the store. Unfortunately, only eight of the aisles were numbered, so I had to introduce my own numbering system.
Here's a subset of my table:
|
|
2A1 |
Pasta |
Barilla Penne |
|
|
2A2 |
Marinara sauce |
Rao’s Homemade |
|
|
3A1 |
Honey |
HT Traders Orange Blossom |
|
|
3A1 |
Hazelnut cream |
|
|
|
3A1 |
Peanut butter |
|
|
|
3A3 |
Maple syrup |
Mrs. Butter-Worths |
|
|
3B2 |
Cereal
|
Strawberry granola |
|
|
4B2 |
Pancake mix |
(original) Bisquick Pancake & Baking |
|
|
4B2 |
Brownie Mix |
Dark chocolate |
|
|
4B3 |
Chopped walnuts |
|
Column 1 is for her to check an item that she wants.
Column 2 is its location in the store. The first character is the aisle number. The second character (A or B) identifies whether the item is on the left (A) or right (B) side of the aisle. The third character identifies how deep into the aisle the item is. 1 is near the front, 2 is in the middle, and 3 is in the rear.
Unfortunately, my local store (Harris-Teeter at University Place in Chapel Hill, NC) only numbers a few of its aisles. I wish they would number everything.
Here's a picture of what Home Depot does:
 |
Each section
of an aisle is numbered. This picture shows "bays" 6 and 8 on
aisle 6. The even numbered bays are on the left side;
the odd numbered bays are on the right side of each aisle.
Grocery stores should do the same. Harris-Teeter only numbers 8 of its aisles and has no bay numbering. |