in my market(s) the answer is NO.
one must buy a very super hard non-ripe avocado
take it home
age it (kabillions of ideas about that…)
we have a weekly BLD meal plan. so I try to buy the hard green do-hickies early in the week. at some point they go soft and the breakfast plan becomes is immediately altered to ‘have an avocado toast thing’
an omelette with ham/cheese/pimento/onion/bacon/mushroom . . . and et.al. . . . is not difficult to replace with a ‘avocado-on-buttered-toast’ entree . . .
I used to believe that leaving the pit in half an avocado (or in your guac) slowed browning. But when I mentioned that here once, I was disabused of the idea.
I still leave the pit in the remaining fruit, since it minimizes the surface exposed to the air.
Okay, here’s what I think is a new one: prices higher in the app than in the store.
I use the ShopRite app to plan my shopping list. Overlooking that today, everything was labeled “Other” rather than its correct aisle, and hence the whole list was in random order, I noticed that in the store, their brand of cage-free large brown eggs is $3.49 a dozen. On the app, it’s $3.79 a dozen. A tub of unsalted butter is $2.49 in the store; on the app it’s $2.69.
This difference in price has just started showing up. (I think things on sale may be the same price in both places, but I’m not sure.)
Two more peeves: the tags for the sale price and the tags showing how much you save, are almost identical, leading one to think that, e.g., $1.29 is the price of something, rather than the savings. And the inconsistency in unit pricing. I saw two bottles of the same brand body wash, one with “per pint” unit pricing, and the other with “per quart”.
The good news is that NJ recently fined Walmart $1.64 million for doing this.
A related complaint is when they rearrange the store and don’t change the signs over the aisles. For that matter, ShopRite rearranged well over a year ago, and still has no aisle label for “pasta”.
I also think that if a store moves, e.g., the vegetarian burgers to a different location, they should put up a sign in the old section saying where they were moved to. But that’s just my obsessive personality.
the Giant used to be open 24 hrs - they stopped that, which isn’t a real big deal.
but, they also got rid of most of the full time employees - and as a result there’s a lot of empty spots on the shelves, produce is really spotty, boxes of mushroom a week past their use by date - and no fresh ones . . . “inventory” has really suffered with the absence of people who knew what they were doing . . .
now they offer ‘we’ll shop for you’ - the pickers have very large carts with multiple orders on them.
yesterday between the pickers and their carts + the restocking carts lined up down the middle of the aisle + those dang pesky customers . . . you could not get into the dairy aisle. cheese, eggs, yogurt on one side, bread on the other - no way to get at any of it…
A related issue that I’ve experienced at Walmart: Some items that have their normal locations at certain aisles/bays get shifted to end caps, often far from similar.
The “normal” locations are the only ones associates can look up.
Once, after a known item couldn’t be located, I was told it must’ve been moved to an end cap. Only the “end cap manager” would know, and he was AWOL. Rather than walk the entire store like Diogenes, I declared defeat and left.
They completely revamped our local Wegmans, and I swear everything is somewhere else now. We still routinely walk past the pet aisle, which is now aisle 5 or 6, but used to be aisle 13. It’s a f’n nightmare trying to find stuff now, but then that place has gone downhill bigly since it first opened 20 years ago.
What’s going on is: The placement is deliberately assigned to cause shoppers to walk past as many potential impulse buys as stats and AI can anticipate. If you have patience, you can fill out your list, but you’ll likely be walking and looking a lot.
This is different from the usual switcheroo in the produce section, though. The entire store was restructured, with several stations being gone or combined.
It’s a shadow of its former self, and we only shop there for specific items. With Trader Joe’s, Aldi, GIANT, and a plethora of Asian grocers, we don’t feel the need to go there much.
I think the basic supermarket layout is universal in the U.S. & CA since the 60’s? which is to put milk & bread farthest away from the entrance & produce at the beginning.
