Safeway Deli at Tennant Station
I take clients grocery shopping at least twice a week. This is in addition to my personal grocery shopping. But it’s all done at the same place: Safeway in the Tennant Station shopping center (Tennant & Monterey).
Overall, this is a pretty good grocery store. They have a wide selection, prices comparable to other grocery stores, and a well trained staff. In addition to traditional grocery items they also have a florist (with whom I’ve never done business), and a full delicatessen. We’re at the deli often enough that we know all the workers by name and they all know us by sight. Aside from various deli staples (potato, fruit, or macaroni salads, etc) we frequently purchase some of their hot foods (chicken wings, corn dogs, onion rings, etc) and almost always get fresh made deli sandwiches.
I’ll be discussing the excellent customer service in this Safeway’s produce section in a future post, but today I want to ask a simple question: what the hell’s going on with the Safeway Deli?!? As I wrote above, I’ve been visiting the deli in the Tennant Station Safeway a few times a week for a couple of years now. The staff is generally competent and seldom surly with a couple of real standout workers (Juliann, recently put in charge of the opening shift, is one of the best customer service oriented workers I’ve encountered in years). They do occasionally get new deli workers, though most don’t seem to stick around very long. But it’s not the service that is my concern today.
Over the last month or so there has been less and less on display in the large, cooled, deli cases. One of the joys of going to a deli (as opposed to gathering the ingredients throughout the grocery store itself) is seeing all the wonderful goodies out on display. First one case, then two, and now all three have been emptied over the last several weeks. I had thought that the problem was just that they were short staffed and didn’t have time to reconstruct the displays before we arrived. However, it turns out that the cases are simply broken.
Safeway is the tenth largest retailer in the United States and had a net revenue of almost $200 million dollars in 2007. But they can’t seem to fix (or replace) broken deli coolers?!? What, exactly, is going on here?
Tags: deli, grocery store, Morgan Hill, Safeway, Tennant Station
