Unfiltered Story #312626

I work in a smaller/mid-size grocery store, where approximately 95% of the products are privately store-branded (unlike some store-brand labels that come up with cutesy names to hide that they’re store brand, not major label).

Because all employees in the store do everything (stock, register, etc), rotating throughout the store during our day, we all get to know our products well. I had been working for the company about 2-3 years when this happened, so I felt very confident about knowing our products.

A woman came up to me looking for a particular frozen product. She was absolutely insistent she had gotten it in our store before – “just last week”, in fact, and it wasn’t the first time she’d bought it, either! But she couldn’t remember the name of the product. She described it to me, and I told her it didn’t sound like anything we carried. She insisted, so I spent several minutes with her in the frozen aisle trying to find the product for her (ahem, prove the product didn’t exist in our store) because she was SO insistent that it was our product.

Finally, I said, “I think I need to go look this up in our computer, maybe it’s just out of stock or a seasonal item, so that might be why I’m not familiar with it.” Always willing to give customers a little bit of the benefit of the doubt, you know?

She gets this look on her face (light bulb!) and goes, “Oh, you know what? I think I have the package label in my purse.” She digs around in her purse for a bit and then fishes out an empty product bag and hands it to me; the label clearly reads “365”.

I say, “Ma’am, this is the private label brand at Whole Foods, down the street.”

She gets a frustrated look on her face and goes, “Are you SURE? I am CERTAIN I bought this here.”