A bright, cheery supermarket full of exciting and interesting products along with the staples, now…read morebeautifully organized and much more inviting after a stunning remodel that opened up tremendous space in front. I learned this when I had to start shopping here again, after a three-year personal boycott, because I lost my car and could no longer get to Safeway. Why the boycott? Because of a thing that happened to my husband and left an awful taste in my mouth:
While shopping at Fuller's in 2022, Christopher poured himself a fountain drink and, on his way to the register, took a sip. It tasted weird. Standing in line, he checked twice more, and it tasted strangely like ammonia. When he asked the cashier's permission not to buy it, the young man said, "Sure!" and relieved him of the poisonous-tasting beverage.
That was the normal part. Two weeks later, when Chris was leaving Fuller's with some purchases, a very young security guard (maybe 18) stopped him in the parking lot and showed him three surveillance photos, printed on three separate pages: one for each of the three sips Chris had taken from his unsavory drink. He asked Christopher to come back inside, under threat of calling police.
After leading my husband back into the store and upstairs, followed by another employee to keep him from bolting, the guard admonished him for having assumed, two weeks earlier, that his cashier had the authority to let him leave without paying for his drink. The correct procedure, he said, would have been for Chris to buy the drink before taking Sip One; then, if he found it displeasing, he could return it for a refund--presumably from the same cashier who'd abused his authority by allowing Chris to avoid the purchase entirely.
Because of my husband's ill-placed faith in the right of that cashier to act efficiently instead of insanely (as in the guard's scenario), releasing him from obligation to buy an inferior product, Chris had to sign a form acknowledging that he was banned for stealing from Fuller's Shop'n Kart--not for one or two years, but ninety-nine.
I've waited three years to write this review, partly because I feel sick and exhausted to think about it and partly because it sounds so outrageous that I don't see how anyone will believe it. Instead, I've avoided shopping here until it recently became impossible. Now that I'm forced to return, I spend every shopping trip feeling torn between, on the one hand, loving the store and the many wonderful things it carries, and, on the other, hating myself for supporting a business that will continue exacting revenge over three unpaid sips of a foul beverage for several decades after my husband is dead.
