This Vons STINKS! Okay, no, the place does not emit a malodorous scent, but if it did that would be the final fitting indignity this place seems to want to perpetrate against its customers. In every other way, this place is about as bad a grocery store as I've ever encountered. Indeed, there is nothing at all "super" about this supermarket. I've been shopping here for about two years after moving to this part of the SFV in 2014 and I can avow without undue hyperbole that the store in general, and the customer service in particular, are at the sort of nadir below which they cannot sink since they have found the bottom.
Some of what ails this place is beyond anything the day-to-day workers can fix. Weird and somewhat shady pricing tactics and the way they are displayed mean that if one is not focused like a surgical laser on the fine print on most every "sale" item, one ends up with, for instance, more of something than is needed or desired only to find out later that the discount on the "sale" tag applied even if only one of that thing were purchased. Yet other times the apparent "buy-two" discount is exactly that! Caveat emptor, but who wants to work that hard?
The real problem with this place is the employees. And I suspect that what ails them is the result of shoddy training and employee development. They are each and all friendly enough. But friendly only goes so far. What most of us want from the workers at a place like Vons is knowledgeable and efficient service. Courtesy and salutations ought to ACCOMPANY such service, not function IN LIEU of it.
This is like so much of what is alleged to be "customer service" nowadays. You call a credit card company to complain about a bogus over-charge or fee, and rather than actually doing something to help you, the phone rep spends the next 10 minutes saying, "I'm sorry for the inconvenience, sir," as though that makes anything okay. I'd rather have them NOT TELL ME they are sorry and just fix the damned problem!
At this Vons, employees generally work with little urgency at a pace best described as indolent. Box/bag workers often bag with one hand, as though their other were non-functional. Many wear their uniform apparel in the most slovenly way. Checkers happily chat back and forth among themselves, yet I am seldom spoken to beyond "hello." Rarely am I asked if I found everything I needed on a specific visit. Lines move at a pace so slow I often think they are about to go backward. (Some of this, alas, is due to customers who seem, somehow, not to know how to use the POS terminal at each register; folks for whom swiping their Vons card is an complex and puzzling process.)
A case in point was a visit on Sunday this week (10/9).
I grabbed a few items and stood on line while the woman in front of me chatted with the cashier/checker, who seemed done scanning her items, for two minutes. Finally she realized she had neither swiped her Vons cars nor any sort of payment card. That the checker never offered a polite hint to her to do these things is beyond me - though I guess to him the time of the other people on line was less a concern than his chat with this specific customer.
When I was finally able to check out, the checker was so unattentive to his job, he removed the little bar behind my items and started ringing up the items of the person behind me during MY transaction, unaware that they were not the items I was attempting to buy.
After getting that corrected, I had a question for the checker. The question was why one of my cards, new to me, sometimes required me to sign for the purchase and other times did not. Was this a Vons issue or something, perhaps, I'd need to take up with the card issuer? So I asked. His response?
"I-oh-know" (in a casual, offhand way).
"Is there anyone you could ask to help me find out?" I inquired.
"Well, my manager is at the register next to this. You could ask her," he replied.
"I wonder," I asked, "if you'd mind asking her?"
"Well, you could do it! She's right there," he said.
(The manager got me an answer, BTW).
When I worked in retail many years ago, I was taught to help customers find answers, and since he had just been chatting with the gal who is his boss, I was floored that this utterly insouciant young man could not muster sufficient wherewithal to simply lean over and ask her on my behalf.
And NO, this is NOT an isolated case. It is emblematic of the sloppy appearance, disinterested demeanor and almost contemptuous ennui that permeates this store.
In short: NOBODY CARES at this store. They'll say they do, and if I were to speak to a manager about my experiences there I'd likely be on the receiving end of a string of platitudes about "making our customers happy" and "service being our #1 goal" but they would just be words, the mantra read verbatim off a mission statement, the marching orders of 21st century retail - the empty rhetoric of a service economy big on promise but devoid of any service. read more