Bad Attitude

I am afraid this is one of those days when I wanted to turn my daily life bowl upside down and start over. Not only was I ungrateful, but I deemed the contents unacceptable.

 

I needed to do my weekly grocery shopping. With list in hand, I entered my usual store. Bakery, produce, meat all looked normal; but when I rounded the corner to get the apple juice, there were maybe 10 people in that aisle filling the “juice section” with loaves of bread, bagels, etc. Whoa. The bread was at the opposite end of the store previously. I couldn’t get through with my cart, and when I squeezed my cartless self down the aisle, there were no prices on any of the bread products. When I asked where the juice might be, I was told aisle 5 maybe. Well, it was aisle 2, the next aisle over. Everything went downhill from then on. The whole layout is being rearranged, and since they are only mid-way thru the process, it was chaos. The canned fruit now sat between shaving supplies and hair shampoo with no other food items in the whole aisle. Even the milk had been moved down two doors from its usual refrigerated case. The man in the meat department told me it would be another week before everything was in its new “final” position, and then they would have maps. Since I write out my shopping list in the order of the layout, it took me twice as long to find things. There were a few customers who laughed it off, but most of us traversed the aisles in a crabby mood. Why were they making these changes?

 

I saw a lady from my church in the meat aisle, and I told her to expect a bad experience. I just could not see any reason to rearrange everything. About 3 years ago they changed things because they did a major remodeling; that made sense. My acquaintance said she thinks they are trying to spruce things up before the new Meijers opens this spring. Ah. She may be right. Afraid of the competition. Hopefully, all of the disgruntled customers will learn the new layout and forget the horrible few weeks before there is another store to explore.

 

I never did find a few things, and since I needed to get home with the bread to make lunch so my husband could attend a meeting, I will buy them at Walmart when I go there tomorrow afternoon for some non-food items. I can’t imagine the changes in this store will be worth the aggravation; I may shop somewhere else next week. In the short term, they are losing some of my business. Have you  gone through this with your grocery stores? One of the employees off-handedly said they plan to do this every few years. Yikes!