I finally caved and had to ask.
Put the need by a luxury item.
I despise this continuous trend of making stores less convenient and more confusing in order to force people to spend more time looking for things.
Same thing with making the signage over the aisles on opposite ends different. One end might be cake mixes, cooking implements, canned fruits, the other end flour, spices, sauces. Needs a trip past both ends to find cake sprinkles unless you randomly happen down the aisle and spot them
I had a though recently. It would be neato to have some open source, crowdsourced world database of item locations, where you add this sort of information.
Tagged search of a store, where certain items are. What’s stores in a city sell X item. That sort of thing.
Call it “WorldDB”, bake it into OpenStreetMap.
No idea what the legality would be, but I would LOVE it.
May write a post about it at some point, as I am no programmer.
The problem is that stores regularly change the locations of items so everything would be constantly wrong.
Well of COURSE the butter is in the Beer & Wine aisle. I mean where ELSE would you expect to find butter? In the DAIRY section? It is to laugh.
“I can’t believe it’s not Budweiser”
Butter beer. Somebody like Harry Potter
If looked at in a certain way butter is a chilled beverage.
Guess I’m built different, I noticed the butter immediately but took 2 minutes to figure out what the problem was before I saw the sign
I wish grocery stores (especially those you can also order from online) had a page where you could pick the store (if there are multiple) and then search for the thing you need and it had a number label that would be associated with the section it is in. This weird example from op would be: beer 10, butter 10, wine 10 etc without it being confusing because it isn’t a category anymore and you only need to look in that section instead of looking like a lost kid running around in the whole store. Also filling up that big sign with just a number would be a lot easier to read from far away.
They can keep the categories if they stick to them, like meat, bread, snacks and so on so ppl who do not care about the number system can still kinda guess like today…
Some stores do just that. I know I’ve done it for Target, Walmart, Home Depot, and Lowe’s.
Home Depot has their interiors mapped out on Google Maps.
It’s fantastic. Since they did that I’m pretty sure I’ve never spent more then ten minutes in one unless I wanted to.
I get mileage outta this one in particular too. Still sometimes get turned around and bamboozled, overall I’ve kinda learned to treat the info as more like…the Platonic ideal of a perfectly modeled store, lol. The many changes and failures and surprises just make me even more grateful that any of that info is in there and works well. Really convenient.
Yes, I think other types of stores are better at it. But the stores that are only groceries, are there any that use that?
Bloom did it 15ish years ago. They even had an electronic kiosk where you could look up your item. (I’m not sure if Bloom the grocery store still exists.)
I’ve seen other places have a rotating list on the cart handle, which listed where common items would be.
I saw it a bit late, they actually have a number assigned to the sign. Do they use a number system already? Who is it for?
I think it’s just so an employee can say “that’s in aisle 7” without having to walk you there.
The store’s app will list the aisle number, of the specified store, if you pull up a product. However the app is a cluttered mess that commonly has issues loading, so asking an employee is just faster anyways.
I used to live a couple blocks from a Safeway that decided to put the canned beans and canned chili in the wine aisle, with no sign to direct you there. Is throwing random shit in the wine aisle just a Safeway tradition?
I like a buttery Chardonnay
At least you know it’s somewhere in the fridge section, yah?
But I’m sure everyone has done that while looking for something and it is not cool.
Problem is, there were like 8 different refrigerated sections. Milks and juices. Dairy, including cheeses and yogurts (which is where I was fully expecting it to be and which I went back to multiple times). Meats. Desserts and puddings. Salsas, dips and such. And several others. I think I just walked by the alcohol aisle repeatedly thinking, “Well, I know it’s not down that one”.
And where was it?
shop smart! shop S-Mart!
Omg, lol, beer and wine
They prob do that because butter is a loss-leader
Man I hate safeway so much
So does everyone that works at Safeway
TIL people actually look at what the aisle sign
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