My husband and I have shopped at The Fresh Grocer on occasion and while we have been impressed with the selection and variety of items, we have been totally appalled by the complete lack of customer service displayed by the checkout clerks.
The first time we shopped at The Fresh Grocer, the clerk ringing up our groceries was absorbed in a gossip session with another employee. She paused in her conversation only long enough to rudely order my husband to begin bagging the groceries. (At the checkstands on either side of the one we were using, there were courtesy clerks doing the bagging.)
At every other grocery store I've ever visited — other than discount places such as Aldi and Save-A-Lot — there is someone there who will bag your groceries for you. Even if no one is present as your order is rung up, usually the clerk will start bagging once s/he has finished scanning everything or s/he will page someone to come bag the groceries.
This same clerk also improperly validated our parking, so that when we tried to leave the garage, we had to pay $4.00 in parking even though we had fulfilled the requirement of parking for less than two hours and purchasing more than the minimum $10.00 worth of groceries.
Our initial thought was that these incidents were flukes, but upon subsequent visits we encountered similar bad behavior on the part of other checkout clerks. One clerk was so inattentive that she failed to notice when she knocked a bottle of dish soap on the floor after scanning it. When I called it to her attention, she gave me a dirty look. She was also "busy" sharing some personal photos with a courtesy clerk and chatting while she scanned our items. I've heard of multitasking, but this is ridiculous.
We had another experience where a clerk almost forgot to validate our parking until I reminded her that she hadn't yet done it. Her response was to whine, "I'm just really tired."
This grocery store is relatively new and located in an area of Philadelphia where there has heretofore been something of a dearth of "upscale" grocery stores. The Fresh Grocer certainly has the most variety of items (including vegetarian and ethnic specialty items my husband and I enjoy eating) as well as an excellent deli and bakery. However, the complete and utter lack of customer service has turned us off from ever shopping there again.
We wrote a letter to the management and never received a response. Because The Fresh Grocer is clearly filling a previously empty niche in the market (it's a popular place and usually quite busy) I can only assume that management feels they can get away with losing a couple of customers since there appear to be plenty to go around.
I hope anyone who has had a similar experience at The Fresh Grocer will not hesitate to a) write to management and b) stop shopping there. The management needs to learn that their employees are rude and unprofessional, and they must take steps to correct this problem before they can earn back our business.
Jeanne
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
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