Which Materials Are Utilized In The Construction Of Walmart Supercenters?

As a Grocery store shelf stocker, I can confirm what everyone in the comments is saying about the pallets not being stacked in any organized fashion, but I can also speak on the slow moving items point. It seems every time we stop carrying an item because it doesn’t sell well, a handful of people will start complaining to us (because we, as shelf stockers, control what the store sells) that it was their FAVORITE brand and they can’t get it at the other stores in our area. There was this 1 brand of almond butter that wasn’t even shelf stable so it had to be refrigerated, I was rotating it one day and realized that all of it had expired a few days prior. So I pulled them from the shelf and my boss looked up their sales in our system. WE HAD SOLD EXACTLY 1 JAR IN THE LAST YEAR! We discontinued it, and you know what, we still had SEVERAL people come in complaining to us that we stopped carrying it, FOR WEEKS! WE ONLY SOLD 1 JAR IN AN ENTIRE YEAR, and people, that didn’t even buy the product, were mad at us!?

I work in a distribution centre. There are 2 things to understand about how pallets are organised, because it’s not by their location on the shelves at the store. 1. They’re organised by weight. The heavy stuff goes on the bottom, the light stuff goes on the top. This makes the pallet more stable. Putting the heavy things on top may also crush some of the lighter things, for example you would not put lots of pasta sauce on top of crisps (chips for you Americans). The heavier things will therefore be located at the front of the picking aisle, and it’s a 1 way system. 2. By shape/size. There are certain patterns to how products will fit together. It makes your job much harder and slower if you try to play a game of tetris, much easier and faster if you already know where everything is going. Typically, you will spilt the pallet into zones (⅓, ⅛, etc) and after enough time you’ll be familiar with all the products enough to know in which of these zones they fit. This is the part that takes longest for a picker to learn, so many of the newer pickers mess this up and create weird looking pallets. I also used to work in a supermarket, and we used to change the location of our stock fairly frequently, probably more than you’d expect. On night shift, we would change product locations (mostly either end of aisle or season products), do stock counts and make sure the store is in a clean and acceptable state in addition to our main responsibility of stocking products. The spots for the products change enough to where the distribution centre can’t really be expected to update to product placement on the pallets to that degree.

You can barely imagine the old days before computers and bar codes, where the local grocer had to do inventory and logistics by hand. He had to either mentally or pencil and paper, keep track of every item in the whole store. What an unbelievable job that must have been. Everything had to be priced by hand, too. The checkout girls and women were masters of memory and logistical intelligence. They pretty much had to be.

I used to be an assistant manager at…. One of Kroger’s competitors that used to operate in Canada. Listening to you go through something that has become so natural to me, Thank you. I’ve been having a crisis of confidence on my skills and having you recognize how truly complex retail is restored my faith in myself.

As a store associate of a large retailer, this article was extremely well made. I have to planograms every 2 weeks, while we get truck drop-offs every week. We have to deal with unexpected recalls for name-brand products, as well as even store brand, which could take hours to get through. I find it quite interesting to think that our store brand packaging was made by another company or one that is owned by my company and the contents inside were from another company. Our pallets (or totes) are usually curated on a store-by-store basis, as our company individually decides what the store layout is. Everything in the totes are grouped together by aisle, making it easier to unload products onto shelves and such.

I use to work at Walmart and people would always complain about the shelf’s being empty and one thing people don’t realize is how much stuff is actually being bought. We could over stock the whole meat section Saturday morning and by 4pm it’s all gone and there’s only so much we could actually fit in the store. Same for milk and water and eggs. It’s not that we are doing a terrible job keep the selves stocked. It’s that there’s only so much we could fit in the store each day

I used to work in beverage sales and one of the biggest things that mess up automatic stock is cashier laziness. A lot of brands have multiple same priced flavors and they will just scan one for all flavors and you end up with big variances in the system and now most major grocery stores use an automatic reorder that they just hand us when we arrive

10:50 I work at a Grocery Store and I wish they did that, however most of the pallets are organized in different categories (etc. canned goods, paper products, condiments, household goods, pet product). It is really annoying because sometimes one pallet will have products that belong on multiple aisles sometimes on the other side of the store.

I work at Target. The way that we handle certain products is a little different. We do have the automated system that you are talking about. It keeps track of inventory through sales and we also take in account for damages/expires. Nabisco, Coke, Pepsi, Frito Lay and some other vendors handle their own product. They make their own orders, they handle their own inventory. They have their own delivery trucks, they have their own factories and what not. Hope this helps! Love the articles Edit: spelling/grammar

The last store I worked at had a $10,000 loss (wholesale cost) for the quarter on the bulk nut isle alone. People will get $15-30 bags of things, walk around snacking on them, decide they don’t want them after they’ve filled up on them and throw the bag on the shelf somewhere. That bag and whatever is inside is now garbage. Honestly, I think if people think it’s ok to do that, then stores should think it’s ok to put the content of the bags back into the bins they originally came from. It kills me that some things are grown for months, shipped half way around the world, just for greedy a-holes to think it’s ok to get a free snack and then are absolutely wasteful about it. If you think only a couple people a day do it, guess again. Night crews can find dozens of bags hidden around stores when they’re working. $10,000 a quarter. $40,000 a year. The store lost more than I made yearly because of self entitled twats stuffing their fat fucking faces. And again, that was wholesale loss. The loss for from the profits could’ve went into keeping the stores in good condition, paying employees better, and overall, just doing more for their communities. Besides… Didn’t your momma ever tell you to pay for something before eating it?

Here in Brazil in the early 2000s goverment tried a program to take food for very poor people but it was so hard and complicated that many people in the rural areas recieved things too late or it proved to be too expensive for the goverment. They gave up and to this day poor people get money to go buy groceries instead!

When I worked as a shelf stocker at Giant Food, we had to manually update the inventory counts for each product as we put it on the shelf. I’d scan each product in the shipment and count how many units are physically on the shelf plus how many I’m adding, then update the count in the fancy scanner. That way everything eventually gets updated over time and the store can calculate what’s getting lost or stolen.

One thing to note about slow moving inventory is that it usually has a higher profit margin for said store. While you may only sell 5 jars of expensive salsa compared to 10 jars of a cheaper, common brand. The store stands to make more money on the 5. Also not taking into account, that suppliers offer deals to stores/distribution centres for ordering large quantities of product at a time. Something along the lines of every 10 cases of oreos you order, you get 1 case free.

Here in Australia we have 2 big supermarket chains, Coles and Woolworths (no relation to any of the foreign companies of the same name). And unlike the way this article describes things in the US, neither chain really follows the “we need to carry niche items because otherwise someone will go elsewhere for that niche item and buy all their things there” model and have in fact been axing many brands and products over the last decade or more (and pushing their more profitable private label products instead). Thankfully there are smaller independent supermarkets that can be good for finding the things the majors don’t carry. (although in cases where the manufacturer has discontinued the product completely you are out of luck no matter what)

I’m relatively young but I remember when the produce section was seasonal– March would roll around and it was such a treat to smell & see the fresh strawberries; Peaches, nectarines & apricots were only available for a few months and arrived at the store ripe, or a few days before; apples were always in stock, but just a couple varieties year-round (one red, one green)- only Fall brought a wide variety. I think of this most every time I’m at the store, but most people seem both oblivious to and completely expecting of it. It boggles the mind to try and comprehend the logistics- not to mentionmany hours, fuel, etc., just so we can have an ear of corn in Nevada in January.

I worked at a Fred Meyer and we tried our best to make sure perishables got back on the shelf asap if a customer decided they didn’t want it, but when they didn’t, we had a “no restock” cart up at the desk so we could keep track of *some of the items that couldn’t go back Other things that would go in the no restock cart were damaged products, mouldy fruit, etc

My mother grew up malnourished and got a job as soon as she could. During the war she experienced ration cards. She married after the war and moved from Ft Worth to Washington, DC area. This was the big time for her… a fancy job and fancy clothes, and nice home. There was the Grand Union grocer and Safeway, and green stamps saved in a book. They used paper bags and did not accept credit cards, and would cash your payroll check. Goodness, how times have changed. But don’t you think that materialistic pursuit sometimes gets out of hand?

I just started to read “The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket” by Benjamin Lorr which goes in depth on this topic and complements this article well. However, the book shows more of the dark side of these logistics to workers, truckers, and product makers that are trying to break-in to the industry.

Things that aren’t always true (From someone who works at a grocery store) -Distribution centers are often licensed out to 3rd parties like C&S -Pallets definitely aren’t organized by where things are in the aisle -In fact, a lot of the time we break up pallets before bringing them out of the back room -Not all stores stock at night Things that you missed that I would have liked to see mentioned: -There are some types of products, like drinks, bread, coffee, and snacks (Including Oreos), that are not stocked by store employees. They are stocked directly by people hired by the manufacturer. -Getting rid of expired things is a chore just by itself, and there are ways that has been made easier/automated

I was a little surprised when your introduction claimed that such supermarkets were everywhere world-wide. My wife is from China, and one of the essays she wrote for a pre-college English Writing class (a “compare and contrast” essay) was the Western Supermarket vs the Asian Wet Market. She was completely unfamiliar with the supermarket and marveled at the huge number of products, and showed an outsider’s perspective of how novel some of its features are. When I visited China in 2007, the only “grocery store” I saw was a small boutique-style store, much smaller than a supermarket. I asked her about it just now, and she said that supermarkets only started to appear in China around the year 2000. So I guess they are everywhere now, but it’s very recent. Even so, they still co-exist with traditional street markets. Most of the population there is familiar with shopping in traditional markets. Note that they are different from the neighborhood grocery store you described: They were huge expansive sprawling districts where you would walk for miles and miles seeing nothing but small stalls and tiny storefronts. They have become a lot smaller, but still go on for many blocks.

Well run distribution centers and stores that communicate with them have pallets that correspond with where items are in the store. But I can tell you for my store in a small Wisconsin town. That is no longer the case. Usually things were grouped by 2/3 isles per pallet. Now it can be upwards of like 6-8 isles per pallet. It takes so much longer to break them down then it used to.

The niche product thing reminded me about this couple that comes to the store I work at once…every two-ish months and just buys a shitload of seltzer water. I’m talking over a hundred bottles. They never get anything else, but they only get it from our store because we’re the only one that has it in the flavors they like. I don’t even blame them it’s pretty good