Overhaul at Safeway

Safeway in Melbourne CBD has been going through a major overhaul the past few months. This has made my shopping experience there painfully arduous. The goods seem to be running around every other day. One day, the pasta would be in the middle section of the supermarket but it would be in some corner the next week. It's a pain in the arse searching for stuff.

Today I was there to purchase some female necessities amongst other things. Logically, I thought, it would be near where the shampoos, soaps, oral hygiene goods are. So I walked up and down the two relevant aisle for 5 minutes searching high and low for my stuff but it's all in vain. I saw an attendant walking past and quickly sought him out for help. He pointed towards the two aisle I was previously at and said, "search that two aisle. It should be there."

"It's not there. I've searched it," I replied with my voice trailing off, seeing that he has already walked away.

So I did another round of searching just in case I missed it before. It only reconfirmed my earlier results.

Frustrated, I walked away and decided to look at other aisle. Halfway, the same attendant spotted me and asked me if I manage to locate it.

"No! I told you it's not there," I replied in frustration.

"Okay, it might be in this aisle."

Finally he directed me to the right aisle.

Safeway has also implemented this new self-serve check out system. It sounds great in theory. But practically, I'm not too sure whether it's a cost-saving system. Every time I'm there, without fail, something goes wrong and the buzzer goes off. I have to wait for the assistant to attend to me and do his magic. The detection system is very sensitive. The buzzer goes off when it thinks something wasn't weight properly (even when it has been), the buzzer goes off when it thinks something wasn't bagged (assuming that someone was trying to steal it), the buzzer goes off when something that shouldn't be but is on the bagging table. The assistants that come running to the frustrated customers look like they have been deprived of pleasures for ages. I don't blame them. I would be too as the "wait for assistance" buzzer goes off every 30 seconds from one of the self-checkout counters.

Anyway, there's a moral to this story: Always re-check the price of your scanned goods. Today the buzzer went off when my semi-sundried tomatoes were scanned. The assistant came, looked at the price tag on the container, said "okay", authorised the transaction and placed it into my bag. I picked up the container, checked the price, looked at the screen and without a word, passed it back to him. He grabbed the item and without a word, rescanned the item. The system overcharged me by 200% for the tomatoes. Because the assistant probably couldn't be bothered as it was an overcharged and non an undercharge, he probably hoped it went unnoticed.

In my last shopping trip there, an item was also wrongly priced. That time, undercharged. I wonder whether its a glitch in the new system or was there such unnoticed glitches in the old non-self-serviced system. Perhaps, I've lost lots of money to safeway the past few years without me knowing. I wouldn't know would I.