Supermarkets are thinking about cutting nights, how will they restock the shelves during day?

[Deleted User]

I don't know if you've ever seen just how busy a Tesco Extra or a large Sainsbury's store is when the store is closed and being restocked, it's absolute chaos. Every aisle has between 4 and 8 cages of stock, some aisles have 20... there's cardboard and plastic recycling cages everywhere, empty cages stacked up everywhere, electric pallet trucks driving around with cages of beer and soda on them. 

Then there's fresh and produce cages strewn about the place where the slightest accidental bump from a customers trolly and an entire stack of dollies would fall over.

It's insane there is absolutely no way a large supermarket could do this stuff during the day when the store is filled with customers, the elderly and children!

Restocking starts at 10pm and continues nonstop throughout the night until 6am - 7am and sometimes even this isn't enough time to completely finish. So I can only imagine the insanity of trying to complete an operation like this during the day haha.

What are your thoughts? I think if they do cut nights and try to do this during the day, either they'll realise it's impossible and give back the nights, or customers (or a child) will be severely injured and the supermarket will be sued for a large amount of money. 

They'll need to hand out high vis vests and hard hats to customers because when 40 colleagues are in full swing restocking a supermarket with 200 cages of stock, it's basically a construction site at this point. 

Flugelhorn

I have shopped in large supermarkets where they always stocked during the day (they opened long hours but chose to stock in daytime) - they just carried on with cages and trolleys everywhere and really didn't care about blocking the aisles. 

[Deleted User]

Flugelhorn said:

I have shopped in large supermarkets where they always stocked during the day (they opened long hours but chose to stock in daytime) - they just carried on with cages and trolleys everywhere and really didn't care about blocking the aisles. 

The guys stocking during the day are doing the absolute bare minimum, mostly filling empty gaps. 

Imagine this, but 3x more and down every single aisle, with more cages filling up the main middle walking space.



And don't forget the electric pallet trucks, 100+ empty cages stacked up. It gets so busy that even colleagues argue over space... Yeah good luck with an additional 500 customers (with trollies)

la531983

Can the OP post a link citing where supermarkets are considering this?

I agree though, Ive been in my local Tesco at midnight and the aisles look worse than that picture, and cages everywhere else along the middle aisle too.

[Deleted User]

Don't mind me, just restocking the shelves 🤣

strawb_shortcake

I imagine it may push more people to online shopping. I find the aisles usually packed with employees doing the home shopping orders often just talking amongst themselves.

Clive_Woody

I've worked night crew at a supermarket and we were flat out all night working to fill the shelves ready for opening...and this was with no customers getting in the way. There will be a lot of empty shelves and lost sales if they cancel night-crew. I did work at a small supermarket that didn't do nights and we had to take everything out on small trolleys (no pallets on the shop floor) and that was interesting to keep up, but generally end of the day when the store got quiet we could blitz through shelf stacking.

pseudodox

Well these days they expect us customers to be unpaid checkout staff, so perhaps as we enter the store where night shelf stacking has stopped we will be handed a trolley full of boxes and asked to go stack one of the shelves on our way round!

Should get interesting if they do a regular "let's move everything around to confuse the customer" routine.  We'll need to spend even longer searching for items and tripping over goods left in the aisles.  

born_again

Local M&S does all shelf stocking 1st thing in the morning. As they have a delivery restriction of none after 19:00. It's a pain, but everybody manages.

p00hsticks

I gave up shopping at our local Tesco during the day because you couldn't navigate the aisles and get to the shelves due to all the staff picking online delivery orders ....

lincroft1710

Lidl stock their shelves during the day, especially during the 2 hours after opening. But the shelf stackers often have to stop what they're doing and go and man the tills