{"id":4971,"date":"2011-09-23T11:28:00","date_gmt":"2011-09-23T11:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lbpost.com\/articles\/life\/new-fresh-easy-not-yet-mature\/"},"modified":"2011-09-23T11:28:00","modified_gmt":"2011-09-23T11:28:00","slug":"new-fresh-easy-not-yet-mature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/hi-lo\/new-fresh-easy-not-yet-mature","title":{"rendered":"New Fresh & Easy Not Yet Mature?"},"content":{"rendered":"

10:05am | <\/strong>I’m just back from my first shopping trip to the just-opened Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market on 5th Street just west of Long Beach Boulevard.<\/p>\n

I’ll be giving them a little time to iron out the kinks before I go back.<\/p>\n

While the Fresh & Easy at 7th Street and Nebraska Avenue \u2014 of which I’ve written appreciatively<\/a> \u2014 is not very far from my downtown home, we all like minimizing our many commutes, so I was eager to check out this new, closer store. Parking is a little funky \u2014 it’s crowded, and there’s a whole row of spots that have no lines demarcating one space from another \u2014 but no big deal.<\/p>\n

I don’t know whether it’s true that if you’ve seen one Fresh & Easy. you’ve seen them all, but certainly everything was quite familiar, so I quickly picked up my desired foodstuffs and made my way to the self-checkout.<\/p>\n

And here is where the misadventure began.<\/p>\n

Fresh & Easy makes a selection of pre-made salads, regularly priced $3.99 but on this night clearly labeled in the refrigerated display case as two for $7. I scanned my groceries and my $5 coupon, but as I got ready to pay I noticed that my Greek Salad and Farmer’s Market Salad did not ring up at the discounted price. I got the attention of an employee. She puzzled over the issue. She walked the salads to the nearby display to confirm the price, continued to stare at my register’s display screen, then called a manager on a two-way radio. <\/p>\n

A second employee came \u2014 apparently not the manager \u2014 and looked at the screen. A third employee came and picked up the salads. “Are you sure these are on sale?” he asked.<\/p>\n

Trying to control my annoyance, I pointed to the display, no more than five meters away: “They’re right there. You can see pricetags.” Unsatisfied, he walked my salads over and read the entire row of identical “2 for $7” cards, then walked back and sighed. Finally the manager made his way over and was briefed by Employee #1.<\/p>\n

Much of what happened next was the manager punching various codes (“4004” was a favorite) onto the checkout screen. He took my salads to the display. He poked the screen some more. He went and got two more salads \u2014 which rang up sans discount \u2014 and added them to my virtual cart. He removed the $5 coupon discount. “Can you go get my binder?” he asked Employee #2.<\/p>\n

By this time I had been at the register longer than I had been shopping, with confused fellow shoppers queuing up behind me. (Other self-checkout registers were open, but none had green lights indicating this.) “Can you just give me a dollar and figure this out later?” I asked. “This is taking a long time.” “Sure,” the manager said, “no problem,” then did no such thing. Employee #2 had brought the binder, the manager looked at some stuff, wrote some stuff, entered more data onscreen. He removed the salads he had added; he restored the coupon; and, a full 10 minutes gone by, he subtracted a dollar from my original total and let me buy my groceries.<\/p>\n

This all stemmed from a Fresh & Easy overcharge, and while that kind of thing happens in the computer age1<\/sup>, you’d like to think that the staff is trained to deal with company error as quickly as possible so as to minimize customer inconvenience. But the manager never so much as apologized for the delay. <\/p>\n

I’ve been overcharged over on 7th Street; it’s never gone like this.<\/p>\n

Even if they’re no Trader Joe’s, Fresh & Easy is a fine chain. And if you live downtown, the new 5th Street location is tough to beat.<\/p>\n

Maybe this was an isolated incident. And I’m sure the young, young, young staff at Fresh & Easy mean perfectly well. But maybe right now it’s worth driving the extra mile or so until this newborn gets through its growing pains.<\/p>\n

\n

1 <\/sup>I always liked the old Ralphs policy that dealt with this kind of thing: if the shelf price was different than the scanned price, you got the item free. That provided the company with a lot more incentive to get it right. There seems to be something eminently fair about this, since it really not be incumbent on the customer to make sure a store isn’t overcharging you \u2014 and since overcharges obviously do happen and go unnoticed.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m just back from my first shopping trip to the just-opened Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market on 5th Street just west of Long Beach Boulevard. I’ll be giving them a little time to iron out the kinks before I go back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"newspack_sponsor_sponsorship_scope":"","newspack_sponsor_native_byline_display":"inherit","newspack_sponsor_native_category_display":"inherit","newspack_sponsor_underwriter_style":"inherit","newspack_sponsor_underwriter_placement":"inherit","inline_featured_image":false,"newspack_ads_suppress_ads":false,"newspack_popups_has_disabled_popups":"","_EventAllDay":false,"_EventTimezone":"","_EventStartDate":"","_EventEndDate":"","_EventStartDateUTC":"","_EventEndDateUTC":"","_EventShowMap":false,"_EventShowMapLink":false,"_EventURL":"","_EventCost":"","_EventCostDescription":"","_EventCurrencySymbol":"","_EventCurrencyCode":"","_EventCurrencyPosition":"","_EventDateTimeSeparator":"","_EventTimeRangeSeparator":"","_EventOrganizerID":[],"_EventVenueID":[],"_OrganizerEmail":"","_OrganizerPhone":"","_OrganizerWebsite":"","_VenueAddress":"","_VenueCity":"","_VenueCountry":"","_VenueProvince":"","_VenueState":"","_VenueZip":"","_VenuePhone":"","_VenueURL":"","_VenueStateProvince":"","_VenueLat":"","_VenueLng":"","_VenueShowMap":false,"_VenueShowMapLink":false,"_":"","_author_alias":"","cap-aim":"","cap-description":"","cap-display_name":"","cap-first_name":"","cap-jabber":"","cap-last_name":"","cap-linked_account":"","cap-newspack_employer":"","cap-newspack_job_title":"","cap-newspack_phone_number":"","cap-newspack_role":"","cap-user_email":"","cap-user_login":"","cap-website":"","cap-yahooim":"","newspack_article_summary":"","newspack_email_html":"","newspack_email_type":"","newspack_featured_image_position":"","newspack_hide_page_title":"","newspack_hide_updated_date":false,"newspack_post_subtitle":"","newspack_show_share_buttons":"","newspack_sponsor_byline_prefix":"","newspack_sponsor_disclaimer_override":"","newspack_sponsor_flag_override":"","newspack_sponsor_only_direct":"","newspack_sponsor_url":"","newspack_article_summary_title":"Overview:","newspack_show_updated_date":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"newspack_spnsrs_tax":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-4971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hi-lo","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4971\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4971"},{"taxonomy":"newspack_spnsrs_tax","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/newspack_spnsrs_tax?post=4971"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=4971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}