December 15, 2005
An Afternoon at Kroger
subtitle: "All I wanted was a ham, honestly"
Just to illustrate the point that nothing in life is ever as easy as you think it's going to be, I'll tell you the story of our trip to Kroger the other day. Kroger, for those of you out there who are not midwesterners, is a large grocery chain. It's QFC, for you West Coasties.
Anyway, I've mentioned before that my grocery-shopping process involves lengthy research beforehand in order to determine which stores have the best prices during any given week. I usually go to a minimum of two stores to do the week's shopping, and I have my shopping list, complete with sale prices, in hand.
So we get to Kroger, "we" being me, my brother-in-law, and the two kids, and head for the ham section. The weekly ad circular had listed a particular variety of semi-boneless ham at $.97/lb, which is quite the deal, even for around here.
The first problem was that the ham display was really confusing. I mean, really, really confusing. It was so messed up that I can only assume that it was done deliberately to entice shoppers with a low sale price and then get them to accidentally grab a non-sale ham and pay for it without noticing. I find that stores do this quite a bit. They'll have some killer sale on, I don't know, whole chickens, but only one particular brand of whole chicken, and that brand is shoved back behind the other, expensive, non-sale brand of chicken where you can't find it even with a flashlight, and you wind up piling like sixteen non-sale chickens into your cart while trying to move them out of the way so you can find the sale chickens, and people are looking at you like you are some kind of crazy chicken collecting person.
I hate it when stores do this.
Anyway, the freezer bin with the hams in it did have some of the sale hams, but also had about six other varieties of ham, most of which were not on sale. After some digging, we found a good sale ham, but I noticed it wasn't marked with the sale price. I was pretty sure the sale price from the circular was accurate, because there was a huge sign hanging right over our heads that also had the circular sale price marked on it, and the brand name of the ham we just picked up. I shrugged and made a mental note to ask the cashier about it before checkout.
Cut to the end of our shopping trip. I'm unloading our stuff onto the conveyor belt, and I pleasantly ask the cashier if she could please make sure that the ham we're buying is really $.97/lb, because it isn't marked that way, but the ad in the meat department said that's what the price should be. She tried scanning it in just to see if it would scan correctly.
It did not. She voided it, and then thought she'd try again, this time after having first run my Kroger card. Still no dice.
I should mention at this point that in general, I won't hold up an entire grocery line full of people for insignificant savings. I mean, I like to pinch pennies as much if not more than the next person, but I'm not going to throw a fit at the register over 50 cents or whatever. But in this case, the ham was ringing up about $25 more than the sale price should have been, so I felt justified in making a little bit of a scene about it.
The cashier called someone in the meat department. Mr. Meat confirmed that the sale price was supposed to be $.97 for that brand of ham. By now, a supervisor had wandered into the area to see what the hell the holdup was. She suggested calling the meat department. The cashier said she already did, and Mr. Meat said that the sale price was accurate, so what was she supposed to do? The supervisor said, well, maybe you need to take it back to the meat department and have them re-tag it. At this point, the guy two spots behind me in line literally threw up his hands in disgust and switched lanes.
The cashier thought about it for a minute and then paged Mr. Meat to come to the register. He came sprinting down the aisle in a jaunty fashion about a minute later and re-confirmed what he had already confirmed, namely that the sale price was accurate and the ham was improperly tagged. He suggested re-ringing it with the Kroger card. The cashier said she already did that.
At some point during all of this, the supervisor went to go supervise something else, and the cashier had the brilliant idea to just manually calculate what the sale price of the ham should be, and subtract that off as a coupon. So she rang in a $20-some dollar credit, the price finally rang up accurately, and I was about to pay, with not a small measure of relief.
Just as I was about to swipe my card, the supervisor materialized and told the cashier she didn't ring it in properly. The supervisor then took over the cash register and rang in the ham at the correct price, which was great, except she didn't void out the previous ham that the cashier had already rung in at the correct price. We told her of her mistake, and then she voided off the ham, except she didn't actually void it off, she just voided off $.15 of it. "Nope, still wrong," I said.
The guy behind us in line, who had been waiting patiently throughout this entire process, seemed to be enjoying himself. I almost asked him if he wanted some popcorn and perhaps a lawn chair.
The supervisor then finally got a vague hint of what might have been a clue, and voided off everything she'd done, taking us back to the correct price that the cashier had correctly rung in, at which point I finally paid. I felt like there should have been some sort of applause, or medal ceremony, or at least a 9.6 from the Ukrainian judge. By the time we left, we had a total of six, count 'em, six Kroger employees huddled around our cash register, trying to figure out what the problem is.
The moral of the story is: Always mark the sale prices on your grocery list, and don't be afraid to stand fast until you get a good price on your ham.
Posted at December 15, 2005 4:38 PM
Posted by: Sarah at December 15, 2005 5:30 PM
The Cashier Olympics. Or maybe the Price Savers' Endurance Trials. By any name, you persevered and saved a bundle of the green and foldy stuff. Congrats!