Bloody Sainsbury's

It's about time I had a rant about Sainsbury's. We have one in our town, it's the only supermarket there is, and it is, by far, the worst run store I have ever had the misfortune of having to visit.

Quite often I feel like having a sandwich for lunch, perfectly normal thing to want to do. I really like Chicken and Bacon sandwiches, the Sainsbury's ones are really nice. They do two types, one without salad, and one with, for a little bit more. I preferred the one without salad (not exactly a fan of lettuce...) but the garage was the only one to ever have those (at our Sainsbury's, there's the main store, and a garage, with all your essentials, bread, milk etc etc, to save you having to go to the main store for small things). But then, when they re-designed the packaging, they seemed to stop the plain ones. Fine, I wasn't really very pleased with it but there was the alternative of the one with salad. That isn't my biggest gripe. My biggest gripe is the fact that they hardly ever put sandwiches out in the main store when they're actually wanted. Today, for example, at 12:30, and 14:00, the sandwich shelves were pretty much empty. A lot of the time they're just putting them out at 14:00. How many people are going to want to have lunch at that time?? Most people's lunches are between 12:00 and 14:00, I'm curious as to why they put out lunch time food when everyone has already gone elsewhere to get food. And they wonder why their sales are dropping?? Might help if the food is there when people are actually trying to buy it. But, I guess it's up to them if they want to drive customers away.

OK, you may think that last comment was a bit OTT for not putting sandwiches out but it isn't just that, they never have anything out. The fruit and veg section is always half empty. The fresh bread section is always pretty much empty. They seem to wait until a shelf is completely empty before restocking it, not making sure it's always full, which is how it should be done. I worked in a supermarket for a short time and the shelves were pretty much always full, unless we were truly out of stock. At this store, sometimes the new stock is on a crate at the end of the isle but nobody has been bothered to put it on the shelves.

I also swear they purposely sell out of the things I want. If they actually have bothered to put out sandwiches, they have everything apart from the one I want. When I want to go and get a bag of cookies, they have every type apart from the one I want.

You may think this is petty, and you're probably right, but if all you want to do is get something to eat and this is the sort of organisation they have, it begins to really piss you off. Having the odd day of bad organisation is fine, but only having the odd day of good organisation isn't right.

They also can't manage their tills for shit. They have a good 30 tills but the way they run them is appalling. Often, there's about 7 tills open, and they all have about 3 people queuing at each. They have signs up saying that if they see this sort of thing happening, they'll 'happily open another till for you'. Bullshit. So often I've stood there are the 'till managers' are just talking amongst themselves, or they see the queues, but just ignore them. They could quite easily call more people to the tills or, heaven forbid, man the till themselves, but they don't, they just make people wait around. At the shop I worked in, if the tills were getting too busy, they'd open another one, simple as.

Back before I realised that the store was run my a monkey, and when I was looking for a job, I applied for vacancies there. The first time I applied, I got turned down because they said I had no work experience. I explained to them that this was because I changed schools when we moved, so I ended up missing the school arranged work experience at both, but they said they wouldn't employ me because I lacked experience. Classic Catch-22; I needed experience to get a job, but I needed a job to get experience. So they were very helpful in getting me off the ground there. The next time I applied for a job there, they said that there wasn't a vacancy for it. Thing is, I'd seen it advertised, and, even worse, shortly after I was told that the job vacancy didn't exist, I heard that someone I knew had got an interview for the very job I'd applied for, which apparently didn't exist. They then ended up getting the job. That confused me a bit. The next time I applied for a job, I never even got a response from them. After this I just thought fuck 'em, so I applied to another supermarket, got an interview, and was hired there and then. It was only a temp job but still, I got this 'experience' that was expected of me. Plus, I got paid more per hour there, as a temp, than someone who had been working for over a year at Sainsbury's, which I thought was quite funny. I'm glad I didn't get a job though because it's run by a bunch of morons.

I could complain to management about the shit organisation but I know fuck all would be done about it so there isn't much point.

So, yeah, there concludes my moan about our local supermarket.

Don't shop at Sainsbury's.