Tuesday 7 December 2004

Infernal retail categorisation.

It seemed simple enough: buy some maple syrup. (I love maple syrup. And it is The Best Thing to have on Weetabix.) I was in Tesco's already, so how hard could it be?

Ha.

The first place I looked was with the sugar. No maple syrup there. Well, fair enough. Maybe they've put it with the treacle and golden syrup, which inexplicably aren't with the sugar. (Why isn't golden syrup with the sugar? It is sugar.) So I manage to find the syrup and treacle, which are with the jam, of course, but there's no maple syrup there. Hmm.

"How about Home Baking?" suggests Vic. Good plan. So off we trek to Home Baking, only to discover that that's where the sugar is: I've already looked there. Damn.

So I check the Organic section (well, it comes out of trees, right? You don't get much more organic than that); the condiments, but they're all savoury; and the chutneys and pickles — on the grounds that (a) they're all bits of plants in jars, and (b) we're getting desperate. No maple syrup.

We were going to just give up, when I had a sudden stroke of recollection. I followed my hunch, and found it: maple syrup! Oh, joy!

It was with the frozen geese. Of course.

3 comments:

Stephen West said...

I hear you, brother. For a while I thought that if I shopped at the same store, I would get to know it and be able to avoid the aimless wandering around the (deserted-of-staff) aisles. But then they started rearranging; sometimes moving things a few feet, sometimes moving entire departments to different aisles. And how about products that you buy week in and week out that suddenly disappear? Forever? Did the manufacturer miss a kickback instalment?

In fact, could this be the reason for the rearrangements too? ("We've received a better offer for the middle shelf in Sugar. You'll have to reduce your price or it's the frozen geese for you!")

Squander Two said...

> "We've received a better offer for the middle shelf in Sugar. You'll have to reduce your price or it's the frozen geese for you!" <

That makes an alarming amount of sense.

Have you ever heard of supermarket art? One of my flatmates at university was really into it. The idea is to take an object from one part of the store and place it in a different bit of the store in an "artistic" sort of a way. It's actually rather fun, and can be very striking. When you see a lone lime sitting amongst the dishwasher tablets, that's supermarket art. Or possibly just laziness. It's a fine line.

David said...

I will never understand why, in most supermarkets, pickled onions are in the frozen food section.

I searched for gravy granules for an hour in sainsburys the other week. They were in the ice-cream section. Usually the first place I'd have looked.