Kroger: Bad News

Kroger (or K Rodger as one friend called it for a year before I figured it out) is not doing well. Oh yes, the stock has been up some since July (when all grocery stocks went up because of timely hurricanes--untimely for those who experienced them, but good for business nonetheless), but it is still going down.

Why will Kroger join Albertsons and Randalls flopping around on the deck of the grocery shopping vessel hoping by some grace of God that it will flop into the money ocean, but instead die a slow, painful oxygen-deprived death? Bad products? Maybe, the produce at Randalls sucketh. High prices? Yes. Albertsons and Randalls especially seem to take perverse pleasure in picking needful products and adding a dollar just for fun. How about those stupid shopping tags you have to scan in order to get the "member" price which is just what the product should be priced at anyway? Yes, yes and more yeses. Those things irritate the daylights out of me. They are coercive and invasive. How about union workers verses market-driven wage earners? Very possibly maybe, but not for reasons that you might think. What about the shopping experience itself? Alberston's: ho hum. Randalls: patrician and byzantine. Kroger's: good, but flat.

The traditional grocers have been troubled for some time now thanks to price, efficiency and supply chain pressure by Wal-Mart. But that's not why these other stores will go out of business. For ten bucks, I'd rather not shop in a store that barely contains chaos, sports dead-head checkers or worse, a computer scanner that is never right. Nope, sad to say, Kroger's, my personal grocer for the last eight years just lost a customer to H.E.B.--not Wal-Mart. I finally gave in...

Kroger's has something, one thing, that kept me coming back especially for the last three years: Hugslie Land. A woman there, Sharie we'll call her, is fantastic. A former Montessori teacher, she runs the child-care area awesome. Activities for the season, decorations, cleanliness and child-centeredness while I mosey around the store to shop and linger just a little too long in the magazine isle. At any moment, I can look up to the monitor and wonder of wonders monitor my kids.

That whole wonderful experience (shopping kids-free) kept me loyal and outweighed the slow, miserable checkers, the apathetic baggers and the unresponsive responses to food item requests. Let's see, I ask for a high-end organic cheese where their margin has to be at least 35% and they can't seem to find a way to get the product on the shelves because the department manager has no control--it has to go through the buyer, don't you know. And then, and then, after years, I have to scan my Kroger Card in order to get prices I should get anyway!

So, last week, because it was on the way home, of course, and because only one mini-Clouthier accompanied me, I slunk into the HEB Central Market. It was busy. The entry into the store is an annoying snaking curve through the produce department--certainly not customer centered but no question bottom-line centered. When I get pooped out of the end, hello! A charismatic chef sits four feet up on a pedastal wielding knives like a Ginsu salesman, chopping away at what will be dinner tonight for all of us if we buy the conveniently placed ingredients within reach. Take a hard right and you see the deli stacked ten deep of people willing to pay the $8.50 a pound for lunch meat. I pass the chatty chef and go straight (around the back of the store for health, remember people).

I need chicken. Ho, what is this? The chicken is exactly half price for the free-range stuff that the fam must eat. The organic chicken costs about what the free-range stuff costs at Kroger's. Uh oh. This might be worth enduring the snake for. Then more organic product: every thing I usually buy in huge quantities and better prices. Organic yogurt exactly 50% less than at Kroger's. Uh oh, again.

The lanes, alas, are narrow. The store is lit weird--softer, more home-like lighting that's nice but casts shadows on everything making it difficult to see. But then, eggs! Cheap, organic eggs.

A bottleneck near the wine and flowers appropriately enough, is the last obstacle one must maneuver his cart through to struggle to the myriad check out lanes slumped, fatigued from consumer battle. And then a thing happens that hasn't happened at Kroger in years, the checker smiles! An open lane too!

"Come on down, ma'am", she encourages as she scrub, scrub, scrubs her assembly-line. She walks around the lane, grabs my basket, and puts my stuff on the lane herself!

Magically, a cheerful young man efficiently and logically loads my bags. My socially-conscious side appreciates Kroger's for hiring mentally challenged baggers. It's great that they have jobs, but that self-satisfaction evaporates 549 bags later at home. A whole acres of plastic trees were killed to bag each item in my over-stuffed basket individually. That's just wrong and almost cancels out the goodness.

While HEB buzzed energetically, Kroger goes through the motions. It's got to be, in part, unionization. At my bi-weekly jaunts to Krogers, I can't even count the number of times I've heard the checkers yelling to each other about their breaks, their hours and "when they get off". In fact, more than a couple times I've found myself encouraging them to buck up, quittin' time is coming soon.

THEY ARE CHECKERS, for heavens sake! What is so all-fired difficult with moving your arm back and forth and scanning? They don't even have to engage their frontal lobes to calculate change anymore.

The week before Thanksgiving, the checker was gloating about her 40 hour week. "I'm working Thanksgiving.. all day untl four," said she.

"Do you get overtime?" I ask.

"Holiday pay AND overtime," she grins.

"What's that," I say, "like $30 an hour?"

"Yup!" She enthusiastically says, "Maybe more!"

Thirty bucks an hour to wear a surly look, move slow and act put upon. Quite the gig.

Kroger feels more like walking into the DMV or Post Office. Entitlement hangs rank in the air.
Push my break back five minutes to help with the heavy load of customers? I should think not! My break is at 4:05 by-gum and at 4:05 I take my break even if the Archangel Gabriel needs fabric softener for a laundry emergency.

It isn't any one thing, but put together, Kroger has lost its appeal. That's too bad too. It's store design and produce seem great. I like the butcher there. And then there's Shari.

But it's over. The lack of a genuine smile just might have been the proverbial straw. Can management change that?