Grocery folks - how did Thanksgiving rush go?

[bean]

What the title says.

My store normally runs a little over 100k on Wednesdays - we projected 275k and beat it by a hair.

We had 21 cashiers from open until about 7pm - 19 registers, plus 2 "hoppers" (a cashier who logs into registers to give the regular cashier a break - our registers have 2 drawers each, so the hopper can carry their own till between registers).

I wound up being a hopper for a few hours, but I rang $11,300 and saw 160ish customers. Most of that was in the first 3 hours until I started hopping.

Today we were much, much slower - I only rang $5,500, but once again saw about 160 customers (I was on express today). The store closed at 4pm today - I drove by on my way home from my parents house tonight and saw something I've never seen... all of the lights were actually off (normally there's people in the building 24/7 - except on Thanksgiving and Christmas).

And yes, my drawer balanced to the penny both days. If I didn't have to hop yesterday I'm sure I would have broken $14k, but moving between registers and watching to see when people left/came back (they time how long you're gone) took up a bit of time.

[Iced Coffee Man]

It was quite relaxed over here

[ViolaPlayer]

We did about 91k on Wednesday with 6 regular registers and 4 SCOTs. That's busy as all get out. But our lines kept moving and no one complained to me about them taking too long. Yay!

What's scarier? We did 35k on Thanksgiving Day. And we were only open 6am to 4pm, not our usual midnight. And the orders weren't all last minute express size orders either.

I think the economy is so nasty and so many people are living paycheck to paycheck. A lot of folks who get paid on Fridays via direct deposit see those deposits on Thursday. I think that may be a part of why we did so much that morning.

[smileyeagle1021]

not a grocery worker, but tuesday (our thanksgiving related busy day) was 10% higher occupancy than expected and wednesday was 5% higher occupancy than expected That said, I avoided grocery stores like the plague on Wednesday

[Bella_Vixen]

I was actually scheduled to work in deli, and asked to come in 2 hours early to bag til the high school kids could come in, but deli didn't need me.

Wednesday was hell...ish. I bagged for most of 6 hours, was on register for about 20 minutes. Yes, you read that right. I also put together my store's pantry bags*. Then I stocked nuts and Christmas candy for an hour and a half.

Actually, after 6 it really died down.

*My store puts together bags of foodstuffs that customers can buy as a donation to one of the local food pantries. Pretty nice.

Not really sure about Thursday. I got the impression it was pretty steady. I felt bad for actually going in to buy a few things, thereby perpetuating the problem.

[mattm04]

We had every register (except 2 one broken, 1 had a display built in fornt o it) open from 10 am - 7 pm almost non stop. So about 17 registers open. We did 4 bails of cardboard Tues/ and 6 Wed. Normally we do two maybe 3. After 6 PM the steady stream of customers died down to a a normal busy day. We had two or three people on cart duty most of the time, even then we ran out a few times.

[Becks]

Not as busy as I am used to*.





*In NJ, I worked at a HUGE grocery store. Day before Thanksgiving (the store is closed on Thanksgiving itself) anywhere between 15-24 registers would be open, and it would be nonstop.

Here, four registers (at the most), some free time... Meh. I had expectations.

[anyanka2]

My store in Michigan was significantly under last year's sales, mostly due to the crappy economy, but management was blaming the new super walmart - their favorite reason why sales are down in any circumstance. Even that wasn't as busy as usual - my mother got in and out in less than a half hour Tuesday night there. All 4 lanes were busy with someone occasionally opening on the service counter. Sales of turkeys were down because the meat department ordered based upon last year's sales around Labor Day, so the fresh ones were marked down to .99/lb on Friday. It was more like a busy day than one of our busiest days of the year. All but two people got scheduled, including people like myself who normally have Wednesdays off.

I think people were just spending less on their Thanksgiving meals this year due to their uncertainty about what's going on with the economy. I don't expect sales to pick up any more over the rest of the holiday season.

[bean]

Well, on the day before thanksgiving I rang $11,300.

Today I rang $10,500. What the hell? It didn't even seem that busy, just steady for the first 5 hours, then dead. I wound up bagging for an hour because we were short a bagger and it was slow enough for me to do so.

Good thing it's slow, one of our most used registers is down - hard drive crashed. Times like that I wish we didn't use PC-based registers - our registers are Pentium 4 based machines running Windows XP Embedded (with NCR developed interfaces/software). NCR won't be out until Monday to fix it. Sad thing is, our registers have the capability to boot over the network, we chose to go with hard drive based registers instead (for speed reasons I think).

[bean]

And here we go with the Christmas rush. I rang almost $14k this past Saturday, another cashier hit $19,000.

I don't have another day off until Christmas day, wish me luck. We just fired a bunch of people too, so we're pretty shorthanded.

[bean]

Holy shit!

We projected $220k today, putting this at the second busiest day of the year, behind the day before Thanksgiving.

We did $296k. Talk about blowing projections out of the water! I rang for about 3 1/2 hours, then wound up helping other departments that were even more short handed.

We closed at 7, didn't get the last customers out of the store until about 7:35. I got to be the one to turn the lights off, it was weird seeing the place go dark. We only turn the lights off twice a year - when we close on Thanksgiving (close at 4, no truck that night, so no point to keeping it lit up), and on Christmas Eve (no truck that night, closed on Christmas).

It was a fucking madhouse, to put it mildly. I've never seen it so crowded.

New schedule came out today, I'm kinda pissed that they didn't schedule me for new years - I wanted the holiday pay damnit - but it means I can stay out late on new years eve.