Regular readers already know that I have a bit of an obsession with Whole Foods Market. Without exaggeration, I am there usually four to five times per week. It helps that it’s five minutes from my house and on my route home from the office.
I love Whole Foods, and could never stay mad at it, but recently it has gotten on my nerves. For the past couple weeks my local store has been completely re-arranging all the aisles and I can’t help but wonder why.
I never found the layout of the market to be confusing or inconvenient. The fact is, even it was inconvenient, regular shoppers learn where everything is after a few trips. I suppose there is some kind of marketing research into shopping habits and how the human brain works that determines exactly where every food item should be, but once you set up a store, you really should commit to it. Besides, it must be an incredible amount of work for the staff. I’m sure they are doing most of the work during the off hours, which means the store is probably doling out a whole lot of overtime pay. I just don’t get it.
Further, as near as I can tell (and the massive project is not yet complete), the store is just being flipped around. The freezer section seriously just moved the contents from one side of the aisle to the other. Could this possibly be of any use? I couldn’t see any drastic changes in the organization of products. It was simply a matter of moving the ice cream to the left and the front pizzas to the right (or vice verse if you’re approaching from the other direction). The rest of the aisles appear to be moving from one end of the store to another, with very little reorganization within the aisles themselves.
The irony of this all is that whenever I head to the checkout at my market, the cashiers have the habit of asking if I found everything that I was looking for. Since this big inventory shuffling started, no one has asked me that question. I think they’re afraid of the answer.
Clacked by Bob Degon
on Jan 29, 2010 @ 12:00 EST5EDT
I hear ya. They futzed with my grocery store a few months ago – what should have been a 15-minute trip took me 45 minutes as I tried to figure out where the heck everything had moved to. It annoyed me mightily.