Saturday, July 01, 2006
Odd
The Wal-Mart in Raynham recently stopped carrying Cain’s mayonnaise. Just… stopped. It seems to have coincided with a change of store managers and modest subsequent reorganization of what went where. (When I worked at a big convenience store chain they called it “programming,” which I always thought was funny terminology.)
Since that’s at least as popular as any other mayo available in the region, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. I have to wonder if they got in a spat, didn’t get a sufficiently low price, didn’t fit with Wal-Mart’s IT systems, or what. I keep forgetting to confirm whether they still carry other Cain’s products, and whether Cain’s is also out at the Plymouth store. If they do, or it isn’t, all the stranger. If they don’t, then probably one of those reasons.
Speaking of oddities, I long meant to blog about left-sided Wal-Mart entrances.
From the time I was a kid, I learned the “walk to the right, just like you’d drive” rule of pedestrian traffic. If people tried harder to do that in stores, even when they are “the only one in the store,” things would flow more smoothly.
I noticed a long time ago that the entrance to Wal-Mart in Raynham was left-handed and felt completely unnatural. You see a lot of people simply using the right side anyway, which causes traffic jams when people coming in the opposite direction try to comply with the signs and go through the left door. Then I noticed it at Target in Taunton too! Except there it’s more appropriate to the layout of the store. Left feeds you directly up the main left aisle of the store, with the checkout area to the right. At the Wal-Mart left is adjacent to the checkout and right feeds up a main aisle that’s the demarcation between grocery and the rest of the store.
To my great relief, I see the new Plymouth Wal-Mart is correctly designed, and it’s not a chain policy to be backward. Just one more way in which the Plymouth store is superior. But the Raynham store is still on my way home from the office rather than off in the other direction…