DO IT YOURSELF SHOPPING WHILE PLAYING HIDE AND SEEK WITH PICK N PAY

 Dear Readers,

Gareth Ackerman

          Did my well intended good deed turn out to be just the opposite? When I saw Fabi Rameez standing around the only scale in Pick n Pay in the Longbeach Mall in Cape Town I got talking to her. Her primary job it seemed was to weigh and price loose fruit and vegetables for customers. So I was surprised when she told me she had to stand all day. If tellers were able to do the job sitting down I felt it must be very hard for Rameez, who had been with Pick n Pay for 17 years and had been doing this particular job for seven, to have to stand all day, so I set out to get her something to sit on.

          As I got nowhere initially I emailed the Chairman Gareth Ackerman via his PA Vivian Ford, but he did what the heads of major companies usually do when I email them. He passed the buck back down the line and Vivian assured me he had seen my email. The rare, really top notch chief executives, I have contacted, deal with the problem themselves and email me accordingly. Here's the perfect example from a C.E.0. in a million Norbert Sasse.

https://dearjon-letter.blogspot.com/2023/03/the-huge-international-company.html

          The buck was passed to Jarett van Vuuren, Divisional Head of Coastal for Pick n Pay. He replied:  “Our staff working in our fresh areas don’t only stand at the scale, they also assist in making labels, rotating stocks, and filling up the sectors when there are not customers at the scale. All our service areas operate in a very similar manner and hence we don’t give chairs to these areas. From time to time should one of our employees have an injury or a disability we do allow this. I am not aware that the current staff in Longbeach have any injuries and hence we will not be placing a chair in that section.”

          A few weeks later, when I was in that Pick n Pay doing my normal shopping there was no sign of Fabi and I had to hunt around for a shop assistant to weigh my purchase. One of the managers told me that Fabi had been given “voluntary early retirement.” So that is what I got her it seems instead of a chair, but I haven’t been able to contact her to find out just how “voluntary” her departure was.

The deserted scale

           After that when I went shopping there I often had to hunt around the store to find somebody to operate the scale for me. And on one occasion when I could not find anybody I took my purchase with all the other stuff I had bought to a teller and she sent somebody to go and weigh the loose vegetables I had bought.

          The comedy became a real joke a month or so later when I found a baffled lady in front of the deserted scale with two aubergines on it. She hadn’t a clue how to weight them so I told her to take them to a teller. “I’ve just done that,” she replied. “And they told me to go and weight them myself.” I then hunted around the store until I found a shop assistant to help her.

          I couldn’t resist visiting the management’s office where I told the guy who was there what had happened and he just looked at the ceiling and pulled a face as if he was thinking: ‘Oh hell I knew that was going to happen one of these days.’ 

          My biggest gripe about shopping at this Pick n Pay is the way the stock keeps getting moved around and I assume this is the norm at all their stores. For instance if I find a particular type of bread in a particular place this week the chances are it will still be somewhere in the bread section the following week, but I will have to hunt for it all over again because it will be in a different place. This applies to just about everything else in my experience.

            When I asked somebody in the manager’s office what the thinking was behind moving things to different places all the time he looked blankly at me and mumbled something about stock having to be moved around.

          Then it doesn’t help when an entire shelf doesn’t have a single price on it. On another occasion this is the experienced I had when I bought a box of cooked pork ribs. These are pricey items so when I saw the price on the front of the shelf was very reasonable I took a box which didn’t have the price on it. Shortly afterwards the manager of that section pointed out to me that these ribs that I had picked up actually cost a good bit more than the price on the side of the shelf .

       After a visit to the manager’s office and some haggling I eventually got it at the price that was on the side of the shelf.

          For a bit of fun on one occasion I went to the manager’s office and asked if somebody could help me shop. And as I was obviously the doddering 90 year that I am they sent somebody with me. It turned out that he had almost as much trouble finding things as I do.

          It’s far from good service to have a scale that is unmanned a lot of the time with the situation having been made a lot worse since they got rid of Fabi.  Why doesn’t Pick n Pay follow Woolworth’s good example by having loose fruit and vegetables weighted at the tills?

Regards,

Jon.

P.S. One of Pick n Pay’s Longbeach managers told me that 16 staff members had left there in recent months because of early retirement or for some other reason. Another manager put the figure at 26.