Ask HN: Is your super market picking on you too?
I know this is gonna come off like I'm completely paranoid but I think my super market is picking on me. I think they are deliberately trying to annoy me by teasing me with all sorts of random stuff. It's like they don't like me, even though I've never done anything but pay them for their products, and it's like they are trying to get rid of me by annoying me so much I just won't come back. It's gonna sound ridiculous but try to bare with me and hear what I have to say.
The thing is they're always moving around the stuff I need, putting it in places I wouldn't think off when trying to find them. When I give up and want to ask staff for help, they first will hide from me even though when I don't need them they are always getting in the way. Then they act as if if they don't know what I'm speaking about or that they never sold the items I want to buy.
They put so many products in there I'm completely unable to choose and it's not even like I actually have a choice because the products are the same in different packages and brands. Like they have 9 different licorice but they're all soft salty salmiak.
They wear uniforms to confuse me. At first I can't tell if I've spoken with the person before and if I can save some time by not having to explain the whole situation. After a while it comes clear to me that it's the exact same person. Always smiling, pleasant and answering the questions in the same unhelpful way: "Try the fridge room, I'm sorry I can't help you further but that's not my area." That would've been great direction advice if only the fridge room wasn't over 9.000 square meters while the product I want is tiny. The staff loves to mess with me as well. When I've realized it's the same person as previously and I try to make some benefit from our history, they'll get all weird.
Then there's the labeling. They put them on the shelf but not near the products I want so I have to figure out what the item is called only to realize that knowing the name is not even enough to determine the price because I have to know which amount it is. And it's not like they just have a small and large version, they use illogical amounts and put the amount declaration on on the package in hard to discover places.
Sometimes they claim they are out of stock of the product I want. This is after I've spent long time searching for it because they fill up the shelfs with the products they do have in stock so I can't tell what happened to my product. Combining the moving my products around and filling up the shelfs and displacing labels makes it very hard for me to find my product. They even pretend not knowing if they discontinued selling the stuff I want. Sometimes they haven't had my stuff for a long time and the place they had it in last still has the label on the shelf but the products nearby has nothing to do with what I want.
And they are constantly coming up with new ways to pick on me. The newest approach is having this "buy more"-discount. They put large attention demanding labels on random products. They know I'm all for saving some pennies so they find the things I could be attracted to and write "Buy 2 for 9.99" while a single unit is priced 8.99. That might sound nice if it wasn't because they'd only put a single product of that kind in sight so I have to search the entire store for the second companion.
That's just the tip of the iceberg and I think you're getting what I'm saying. So what I want to know if they are picking on you too? Disclaimer: This is an attempt of providing a comic angle to poor customer experience in super markets, inspired by my schizophrenia. at no point in your rant did you make any sense at all, and for all those who read it, we are now that much dumber for doing so lol. Hehe. :) This is inspired by some of the thought trains I can have, having schizophrenia. My mind sometimes get hectic and chaotic waves of thoughts where in I somehow manage to make sense and meaning of it even though there actually is no meaning in it. Explaining this to people who doesn't have schizophrenia is very hard. I just wasted 2 minutes of my life. I want it back please. This is obviously an attempt at a smart or funny remark. :) But for arguments sake, lets take a serious approach to it:
How would it work, getting back those two minutes? Would it be adding two more minutes to your total life span? If so, how would that be justifiable because those two minutes you add, might be worse than the experience of reading this. If you wouldn't just add two more minutes to your total life span how would you do it? It's hard to convert time value... I can't pay you for your time because that doesn't mean it'll reimburse what "you spent".
I could perhaps waste 2 minutes of my life but that doesn't give them to you... Alright, being serious for a second. I really didn`t understand a lot of what you were talking about. I agree that the supermarket is not always the easiest place to navigate, sometimes the employees are not helpful, and yes, the products and prices can be confusing. But then I starting thinking about all the hungry people in Africa. Think about it. People are absolutely starving to death, and we get all our food delivered to a centralized location where we can browse an endless number of products and walk away with a mountain of food. And the prices are not bad. On average, we only spend about 10% of our income on food. That`s nothing! :)
I`m in...you must now waste 2 minutes of your life. I agree that this doesn`t get me back my 2 minutes, but it does give me something else, something I can`t quite put my finger on. Let me know what you did! Well, in that case we'll need a common ground of which we can say what wasting time is. ;)