[variousstuff]

One of the two Publix locations that I regularly visit is having the full-store-layout-redo tonight. This is to bring them up to the layout that corporate has decreed shall be company standard for stores of that square footage and type.

(For those of you who are sorta-local, it's the Highway 5/Cosby Station store in Douglasville, GA that is being reset. After the reset, it's going to closely resemble the 2-or-3-yr-old-store at Liberty Rd/Mirror Lake in Villa Rica, GA)

I know several of the staffers at both of those stores, and today was a series of double-takes for all of us as I kept running into people I knew from the other store ("I see you got roped into this reset, too *snicker*" "Hi! So, you shop here too?"). They're boxing up everything on the shelves, hauling huge trains of crates back and forth into the back ... when the store closes tonight a crew of 250+ comes in dismantle shelving, rearrange, reassemble, and then haul all those boxes back out and restock and relabel. Then the regular staff comes in at 4am to start cleaning up ... when opening time comes around they are going to be one tired bunch of puppies!

Then the poor customer service folks get to deal with a passle of confused customers! They've already got signage ready to put out front, copies of a map with the store layout to hand out (and put into carts) ... one guy was joking about hiring me & other regular customers from the Villa Rica store to do the customer-pointing since we were familiar with the new layout because all of the loaner employees would be sent back or sleeping off the all-nighter by then. I told him I'm out of work, sure thing! When do you want me to show up, and what's the dress code/preferred colors? *grin*

Lots of chaos and noise today. I didn't buy several items on the discount-get-list simply because they'd already boxed 'em up. I'll hit it again tomorrow

On the plus side, the Clearance carts were just packed with interesting things. Instead of the usual "25 of this item" there were all sorts of neat onesie-twosies including lots that had been previously discontinued and long-gone from the Clearance carts. Per the store guys, that's because as they are going through the shelves packing up product, they're finding things that were mis-shelved, or slipped back behind something else, mistaken identity, etc. Unless it's expired/perishable, they're just slapping a discount price on it and putting it into the cart. I picked up a number of small "organizer" type items ... Rubbermaid icemaker bucket (the 6" deep, 6" wide 12" longish thing you put under the ice maker, makes a great organizer for deep utility drawer, things in envelopes such as cocoa or spice packets, etc) for $1.00 ... shelf-splitters for $1.50 and $2.50 ... normally I'd never look at that stuff twice, even on sale, but with the cabinetry changes in my house I'm in the market for it. Also some McCormick Dill Seed for $1.80 (80c after $1 coupon)