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.

 

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