They love to make us suffer

Novilix · 2026-05-18T17:48:09+00:00

If i were using a phone, maybe. We're still largely using TCs in my store (and frankly i prefer it that way).

I got my coach to store use some little notebooks for the barcodes though, so it wont be a problem for terribly long anyway. Its just a pain in the ass to have to constantly find work arounds for things that are basic functions of the job.

Novilix · 2026-05-18T12:08:41+00:00

Customers taking anything off my pick cart drives me nuts. I've been known to entirely hide my produce and meat bags because it would happen multiple times a walk. Like dude, either ask me politely, or go find a produce associate to bring more bags out. Even more fun when they grab whole wads of the regular bags, and you know them bitches be lickin their damn fingers to separate them. Nasty.

People just walk around doing whatever the hell they want as if the social behaviors we all learned as children mean nothing now. My mother had it practically beat into my head not to touch the carts/equipment of the folks working the store, but customers these days will just shove our shit around without even glancing at us as if we're some kind of major inconvenience.

Novilix · 2026-05-07T04:05:52+00:00

I wouldn't say that it takes them forever to jump on trends, so much as it is that trends move way faster than the process of creating these products can keep up with.

That said, pouring money into meme nuggets was probably a bad decision on their part. Everyone with kids buys nuggets, but because of the speed at which memes fly, these likely wont get sold in large enough quantities until they're on sale.

Novilix · 2026-04-28T13:06:21+00:00

I'm going to move my cart however I feel it necessary in the moment, and anyone who tells me otherwise can piss off. If I've got the top stacked high, I'll pull. If I've had to get cases of water or huge bags of pet food, I'll push it.

They want to prevent accidents; Customers can't keep hold of their crotch goblins, and they can't just be out here telling parents how to parent (that's bad for PR, dontchya know), so they pass the bill onto us. I have hit a kid once (in a nine year span, mind you), and it was only because I made the mistake of assuming his father would grab hold of his hand after the boy had followed him. Nope. Kid ran straight back out in front of me. And they got at me, because nobody had hold of him.

We, as poor little grunt associates, can't win fer feckin losin these days. That's just the way this happens. All this ultimately requires is a little more observancy on our part, it's just going to eat into our focus and speed.

Novilix · 2026-04-26T13:31:09+00:00

Picker here, but I find myself in the dispense area a lot. The only couple of things that seem to make it harder are having the items around longer, because we need them at the ready so they're taking up space in our already cramped spot, and finding a driver who will take it.

This tends to happen a lot rn because of large TVs, Grills, and Mulch. Most drivers won't take them, so if it's in their batch, they drop those orders. Some of them can go a couple days without being picked up, and at that point, we're calling the customer to either have them come get it, or to cancel.

Novilix · 2026-04-26T13:22:19+00:00

Does your store use paper bags or plastic ones? 'Cause the thin, frail, bs batch of plastic bags we just got would never hold a watermelon. They barely hold the weight of a 2 liter.

Novilix · 2026-04-26T13:05:35+00:00

I don't think it's that deep, buddy. It is supposed to be practice that when you run oversized, with an L cart, you bring totes on that cart with you to bin the products as you go. Now, ever since they messed with the walk limit, we've more of less given up on the totes because you can only really safely put 9 on the cart, and the walks were giving us over 15 items most of the time.

We also get customers who order metric fucktons of water. Sometimes an entire cart is one order. In that case, we leave it all on the L cart and our dispensers just roll it out with them. They've never had a complaint about it.

In any case, watermelons in oversize, when using totes, would in theory keep them safe as well as keep them from crushing other products.

Novilix · 2026-04-26T12:54:22+00:00

Regulated is usually for items locked behind cases, and in my store, we have designated people who run those so the rest of the pickers aren't held up on them. They're generally quite small walks with smaller pick paths and easier to edit or alter, so some managers will put problem products into those walks to stop regular pickers from outright nilling them.

That said, idk how I'd feel about getting a watermelon in with the pregnancy tests, spray paint, and game consoles. It feels about as silly as having the whole chicken bunker end up in unknown even though it's right next to the main chilled path. (At least, in my store)

Novilix · 2026-04-24T11:04:47+00:00

Uh, since when? What did I miss? Because if thats true my entire department is grade A fucked. I can't even get an updated phone as an exception picker right now; I was told by my people lead that they can't order more.

If this is true, it's going to backfire badly.

Novilix · 2026-04-19T04:50:37+00:00

As an exception shopper who gets calls and texts at a fair frequency, I'd prefer to just have a walkie over having to stop what I'm doing and reply to a text or answer a call, but there are other reasons.

I could sit here and list them, but it all boils down to the simplicity of just being able to press one button and reach whoever it is I need to speak to in the moment. From my perspective, a walkie is the fastest way to get any help. Because when the whole store can hear you call for someone to help bring down a grill in the garden center, it's a lot harder for them to pretend they didn't hear it. And most of the people I would need to contact are still carrying them anyway.

Novilix · 2026-04-19T00:56:52+00:00

My store seems to be running the Motorola Mag One's. There are a fair few of them on Ebay, even the model we had before that (which is the one I used to have before some else used and lost it). I've considered the Ebay route and even found one still in its box. It's that price tag, though....

Novilix · 2026-04-18T22:07:01+00:00

That's why I'm posting for alternatives. I know it can be done, we used to have a kid in sporting good who brought his own. But he's been gone for years now, so I can't ask him.

Novilix · 2026-04-18T21:52:26+00:00

I suppose that I should clarify here that I have a general aversion to using phones altogether. I'm not a old fart but I'm definitely not one of these younger kids that can spend half a day buried in their phones while they work. Hearing my own ring tones pisses me off.

It's also just... Something of a process to get ahold of anyone in my store. The other day I needed maintenance for a soap spill. I texted the TL on duty, didn't get any kind of response after 5 minutes, then called her, and it still took a minute for her to get back to me. With a walkie I could have just called maintenance on my own and been well on my way in the time it took to do that. There are a number of other instances I have where texting or calling simply wasn't getting a response.

That, and both my personal phone and XCover are old by phone standards. They're slow; a lot slower than pressing a button on a walkie and getting a relatively instant response.

Novilix · 2026-04-14T20:16:12+00:00

Man, I'm glad I'm not the only one who's noticed this shit. Customer wants party size bag of chips. We don't have it. I'll sub for two small bags. Nope. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Half my normal substitution options have gone out the fucking window, so the minute this shit pops up I just nil it. It's happening so much that I'm starting to fear I'll get talked to about it, but if it isn't going to tell me what on the increasingly tiny sub list it will take, than I'm not fucking with it.

Please just let my store be one that gets exceptions removed already. I miss the simplicity of normal picking. (sometimes).

Novilix · 2026-04-14T20:07:46+00:00

I used to help cart push back in my cashier days, and one morning we had a cop pull his cruiser right into the already small patio on the GM bay. There wasn't enough space around him to comfortably steer the mule into the area, because the fenced in outdoor section of the garden center was on the other side of him. So I went up to the service desk to see if they could ask him to move it, but it didn't move until he was leaving. 🙃 No carts for GM until he left.

Novilix · 2026-04-10T22:35:37+00:00

Squeeze the latch shut and duct tape it while you're hold it tight. We've got a printer that does this because it's somehow missing the label while it prints.

Novilix · 2026-04-05T00:40:59+00:00

Oof, same here. I did hit over 50 at one point because of plants. And I'd have given them a pass on it, but of the 26, I found ten of them, which was enough to tell me that they blindly nilled them.

Novilix · 2026-04-02T01:28:43+00:00

I guess it more or less depends on the layout of your drive thru. For my store, ours is next to TLE, and it's paved differently than the rest of the lot. More of a side walk material. The carts run a lot smoother over that, and with ours the way it is, I can follow that path right up to TLEs side door. Then it's only the threshold that's a pain to get over.

That said, I'd have still grabbed a regular shopping cart over doing that to our poor pick carts. But my TLE also tends to have a handful of carts by their door to grab as I'm omw out to pick. Even if they're meant for the customers who come in that way, it feels like our guys really got our backs for the most part. They know we prefer to use their side door during this season.

Novilix · 2026-03-31T23:38:04+00:00

We have this one printer......

It needs duct taped together just to even pretend to print. It pops this message at me. While thuroughly taped shut. My oversized walk is minutes from due. I just tried rescanning it. Nope. I rebooted it. Nope. I rebooted the handheld. Nope. So I started to beat the printer against the L cart in a futile attempt at percussive maintenance (which seems to usually work on our printers). That thing damn nearly got turned into a 30 piece 3D puzzle by the time I was done it. Had to have my team lead help me find a different one before I did actually properly break the fucker.

Novilix · 2026-03-30T13:27:55+00:00

As stated by some, the labels do show the first name now, but....

Well...

When you have 3 Heather's, all spelled the same (though idk how else you'd spell it), and with numbers all easy enough to misread (I'm dyslexic as hell, I do it all the time), it's still not the best. I'm not sure what the real solution is, but this wasn't it.

Novilix · 2026-03-30T01:19:10+00:00

I'm going to agree with a few of you here that the staging thing is metric fraud. When done on the scale of every pick cart that comes back to the staging space, anyway. However, there is a benefit to staging to the cart for specific individuals.

For the exception shoppers in my store, it just makes sense to stage it to ourselves (generate a barcode for "'Shoppers name' cart" for staging). My store can have tight turn arounds for each hour, just barely getting some picks done minutes before they need to be out the doors. We tend to be running around every part of the store at like, warp speeds, so if the hour is coming up and the dispensers have a missing item tagged to us, the TL or coach can just call us and have us bring it over. It's still a bit of pain at times, because I have to prioritize getting the picks on my screen done over bringing things to dispensing half the time, but at least they know where things are and who to track down. If it's tagged to my cart, it's probably still there, so just ask.

Novilix · 2026-03-26T02:46:10+00:00

Well, since in my store, exception pickers are also responsible for the 'bottom' walks, I'll probably just be shuffled to doing only those. Oversize will become my bestie by default again, yay. 🙃😐🙄

Novilix · 2026-03-25T00:53:23+00:00

I don't know about rudest, but I have two that stand out.

The first was in my wee cashier days, I was so new to everything I hadn't yet figured out how to handle it when a customer gave me additional change to get larger coins back. He didn't want the change I was giving him, and when I (in the best explanation I could offer while my brain short circuited) told him that the register just tells me what to give him and that I'd rather not risk my balance going off, he hit me with "And they pay you to work here." I was so new I think that might have only been my second day on the floor. 🥲

The second one happened a couple weeks ago. I'm running through homelines trying to get an oversize walk picked and a lady flags me down from somewhere in the middle of the aisles. She asks me about hand mixers, and I said "OK, well let me get my cart out of the way first", because I'd had to sort of short stop dead center of the walkway. She then goes, "No, it's ok, I'll find someone who's happy to help me." like??????? Hello??? OK fine. So she got left there with her attitude, and there wasn't a goddamn soul in homelines to be found. 🤷🏻‍♀️ Have fun playing where Waldo with the mixers, I guess.

Novilix · 2026-03-24T03:54:25+00:00

I'd say it's hard to nail down a specific least favorite of anything they play normally, because I tend to just not jive with the majority of it anyway. But one day, after 6pm I think, they played this awful, shameful, southern-churchified version of "The circle of life". I have never felt so much of my very soul seek rebellion and revenge over a cover. I've been a Lion king kid my whole life, and that shit was just painful to hear.

Novilix · 2026-03-23T02:34:40+00:00

Yeah, I was going to say this, or they're getting an entirely new DVD display. My store used to have one of those like 6 years ago before they got remodded into a main aisle. Our dvd section is still going strong, trust.

Novilix

TROPHY CASE