How many employees does a typical supermarket have? Weekly sales?

[bean]

I realize this is rather ambiguous - for the sake of argument, lets say it's a large supermarket in a large city.

A lot of people seem shocked when I tell them how many employees my store has, even people who've worked in the grocery industry before. My stepdad was a manager for Safeway for several years, and when I told him how may we had, his jaw dropped and he asked me to repeat myself.

My store: close to 60,000 square feet (large, but there's several competitors nearby with larger stores). Our employee count: About 275, the majority being full time. Generally we don't even hire part time, the part timers we do have either started out full time or got hired before we quit hiring part time.

We typically run about $1 million a week in sales, and we're known for being extremely customer service oriented - there's always at least 5 people in every department except for cheese (they run 2 per shift), some as many as 15 at a time.

My store was the largest in the country at one time - there's a handful that are larger, but I think that number is less than 15. (within the company, obviously)

So.. I know the number of employees is pretty high for a grocery store, but I have no clue what most stores do in weekly sales.

This is where you click "Post Reply".

[Becks]

I don't know offhand the total number of employees at my store. I'll have to check out the points list and get back to you on that.

We usually pull in a few million in weekly sales. Some days, we pull in over a million, but that's usually the days before Thanksgiving and Christmas.

[bean]

After some thinking, I'm not quite sure what my store qualifies as.

Wikipedia says a supermarket often has a lot of stuff outside of food. We have 2 full aisles dedicated to "Whole Body" - basically supplements, vitamins, and health. Body care, basically. Ranging from a tiny section of razor blades and toothpastes to stuff like exotic shampoos and weird herbal supplements I've never heard of. Every now and then a couple of t-shirts pop up for sale in Whole Body as well.

Outside of that, we have 1 aisle that's split between cleaning supplies, infant needs (baby food and diapers), cheap(er) personal care (store brand soap, shampoo, tampons, etc), and pet care. We also have a ridiculous amount of open space in the store that has displays that get rotated in/out weekly. We don't sell some stuff you expect in most places - no batteries, no cameras, no film, no cigarettes, very few housewares, very small selection of candy, small selection of magazines, some cookbooks and healthy living books. It's all about the food! We do have a "cooking classroom", but we haven't offered cooking classes in the year I've been there (I'm told they shut it down about 2 years ago - now it's mostly used for meetings or the demo people use it to heat stuff up since it has what would be a very nice home kitchen in it).

Grocery has 8 aisles (counting frozen), Whole Body has 2, beer has 1. It's a small store by "supermarket" standards - but it has more to offer than a regular grocery store. We definitely don't have a lot of what you would find in something like Safeway or Albertsons, even though the store is about the same size as a lot of grocery stores around here. Maybe a little smaller, but with much much larger full service departments (seafood, meat, deli, etc).

edit: we have a ridiculous amount of flex space in the store filled with displays from every dept. Our produce dept is about 2x bigger than the average produce dept in most stores around here. The meat dept has a display case that's easily 100 feet long. Same with seafood. Basically any full service dept has a retarded amount of counter/display to work with. It's a pretty unique company though. (Whole Foods, if you haven't figured that out from my previous posts....)

[Slayergrrl]

The whole foods near us has to order a police detail from us 2 to 3 times a week. The store is pretty big and they are always busy... I love shopping there when its not that busy

[Banrion]

I realize this is rather ambiguous - for the sake of argument, lets say it's a large supermarket in a large city.

A lot of people seem shocked when I tell them how many employees my store has, even people who've worked in the grocery industry before. My stepdad was a manager for Safeway for several years, and when I told him how may we had, his jaw dropped and he asked me to repeat myself.

I have never worked grocery, but that does not seem unreasonable to me. I know the movie theatre I worked in for 5 years usually had 100-120 people in employ at any given time. Is your store open 24 hours? If so, then that is 3 full shifts that must be covered. Full timers still get 2 days a week off, so for the sake of statistics, you only have 5/7ths of your staff available at any given time. That is 200. 200/3 leaves you with 66 people per shift. In my mind, large grocery store is going to have at least 10-15 cashiers on alone. Then there are the stock people, and the prep people that alot of customers don't necessarily see or pay attention to. This also leaves you with 1 employee per 1000 sq feet of store (roughly, I am rounding for ease). That is alot of store to be responsible for.

[Byronthebanker]

Back when I was a grocer, the stores I worked in ranged from 200K to 600K a week in sales - but there were some in our company in the million dollar range. (Figures didn't include pharmacy sales) Employees - total store just under about 180 for a 400K a week store. I do remember that my department I managed was 101 employees - mostly part time (cashiers, baggers, office staff, demonstrators, and store trainer).

[SS-Cashier]

I don't know about total sales, but in an 8 hour shift I usually "sell" around $120K, Saturdays are double that, easily....I work in a large notsosuperstore in a small city with lots of competition...

~Edit~ Forgot to mention how many employees..we have around 350. We have alot of departments though: I think 18

[daleduke17]

Out of the three grocery stores I worked at, I think the most employees employed at one time was about 70. Outside of the front end (baggers, cashiers, office) which had about thirty people, the rest of the departments had MAYBE 5 people total. There were some nights when there would only be a handful of people in the store (1-UT, 2-Cash, 1-ofc, 1-Gro*) and that would be on any given night after about 6pm.

*-grocery would be lucky to have that on hand.

[bean]

Is your store open 24 hours? If so, then that is 3 full shifts that must be covered. Full timers still get 2 days a week off, so for the sake of statistics, you only have 5/7ths of your staff available at any given time.

Not 24 hours (open from 8am to 10pm). There's only 4 true "overnight" people - myself and 3 others. 1 comes in at 10:30pm, the rest at midnight, scheduled for 8 hours (7 1/2 of work, 30 minute paid break) - also with 2 days off a week. In reality, whoever comes in at 10:30 usually stays until 7, sometimes 8, if we have a big truck (like last night). I always volunteer to stay late too - not to brown nose, more because I like overtime. With that said, meat starts coming in at 2:30 am, produce at 4, seafood at 4, deli/prepared foods at 5.

Most depts run 3 shifts - open, mid, close. Grocery runs 4 (open, mid, close, overnight), though they only have 1-3 (depending on the day) mids scheduled.

The biggest department is deli/prepared foods, I believe they have about 55 people. Grocery is 31 21 (just re-read my schedule), I think frontend is about 40 (frontend is the only one with any p/t people - the rest are f/t). Concierge is the smallest with 4 or 5, specialty/cheese is the 2nd smallest with about 10.

The whole foods near us has to order a police detail from us 2 to 3 times a week. The store is pretty big and they are always busy... I love shopping there when its not that busy

Which store? I can probably find out how much they average per week on the company intranet (there's an obscene amount of information available on it). We hire off duty cops to do our security after dark, but they leave when the last of the closing shift leaves (at which point we actually lock the doors instead of just turning them off). I do know my store is consistently in the top 10 company-wide in sales. And I love shopping there too, but I still go to the Kroger across the street from my store for household stuff and cheap(er) beer. I usually go there when I get off at WFM, so I get some odd looks walking in there with a Whole Foods shirt/hat. (we don't have to wear a WFM shirt or hat at all even on the clock, but hey, free clothes, and most of my shirts aren't acceptable at work.. band shirts make up 90% of my clothing)

[DGoddessChardonnay]

The Kitty varies on the number of store employees depending on the size/location of individual stores.

My store, for example, is one of the smaller ones as far as square footage goes. We have a small Produce Department, but we have a long aisle and a half for Frozen Food.

Our market has a good amount of display space along the back of the store, including fresh meats/packaged lunchmeats and frozen items.

Deli/Bakery is kinda small, compared to the department at my old store . . . it's almost half the size of the one back at the Gate . . .but they carry a good amount of product.

Sales are kinda average for a Kitty store . . . anywhere from $180-$190 a week, depending on what week of the month. First two weeks of the month usually we see more in sales, as we have quite a few who come in that use EBT and/or receive government checks.

Staffing is bare bones pretty much. We have 3 in our Market (that's the Market Manager, a f/t cutter and another f/t employee who is supposed to work 20 hours in Market and 20 in Produce, but it hasn't worked out that way so far.)

Produce department: just Produce Manager (Beavis) and a part-timer who can't work past noon during the week.

Frozen Food: Butt-Head IS the entire FF department.

HBC - if you guess your resident DGoddess, you get a cookie. I have NO help, nor am I supposed to unless I'm on vacation and I have a backup to cover ordering/stocking (which I've started training a part-time cashier on this week.)

Deli-Bakery - We have a Deli Manager, and 3 others (one is full-time, the other 2 are part time.)

Dairy Department: Just the Dairy Manager. That's it.

Front End- there's the CSSM, 1 full time ACM (Assistant Customer Service Manager) and 2 part timers. Cashiers are all part-time - I'd say right now we have approximately 12 on the schedule.

And our DSD Girl, full-time Scanning Analyst, one Grocery Manager (Big Val, who is currently out on med leave as she's due to have knee surgery soon), 3 part time stockers, an Ass Manager (Opie) and the Store Manager (we'll refer to him as PDiddy.)

Throw in a 3 part time baggers/cart retrievers and that's all bodies accounted for. The Kitty just isn't big on having full time help, except for Department Managers. Mostly what we're hiring now is front end help, and they turn over constantly. Just about weekly, we'll have one quit (except for a few weeks ago when CSM was on vacation and we had 6 quit, including a part-time office person.)

But then I suspect the biggest reason for the high amount of front end turnover has to do with the CSM, as she can be pretty bullish with those who don't kiss her behind.

[bean]

We don't really have much in the way of prepackaged lunch meats. I think we carry 2 brands of them, Applegate Farms and Diestel, both of them taking up a small section of one of the self service meat dept coolers. In the deli (part of prepared foods), the majority of meats are from the same companies (some stuff like prosciutto and soprasatta are from different companies), but they cost a lot less overall even though you have to get someone to slice them for you.

We only have 1 full aisle for frozen, though there's 4 freezers in the middle of the aisle. And not much there outside of ice cream and waffles appeals to me there. Most of my frozen dinners come from Kroger.

Like I said, the deli is part of prepared foods in my store. Prepared foods is HUGE, though they do catering, a ton of prepack items, complete meals to go, along with individual dishes. They also have a large chef's case, a small bistro (burgers etc), sandwiches, fresh pizza, and soon (2 weeks) crepes and smoothies, in addition to running 2 salad bars (1 huge one, 1 fairly small) and a hot bar (6 soups plus 10 hot wells). An outside company (Kikka) runs the "Noodle Bar" and handles the sushi. I worked in prepared foods from Dec 06 to Oct 07.

The bakery is fairly large, though there's very little prepackaged breads available. In your typical grocery store, you see like 20 or 30 brands of bread, we have exactly 1 (private label). Some of it comes from the "bakehouse" (next city over), some of it is cooked in-house (usually with pre-mixed dough though).

We do have only 1 guy who works nothing but frozen, and he mostly works opening shifts. He does all the buying for frozen as well. Same goes for our bulk area. When they're gone, floaters answer customer questions. Dairy has 4 people - one of them usually comes in at 2am

Staffing wise - actually the majority of the employees (aside from frontend) work behind the scenes. With grocery you can usually find a couple of people out on the floor (fronting shelves from about noon to close is seriously enough work for 2-3 people, doing absolutely nothing else), the rest are working backstock or making orders, one might be freezing his ass off in the dairy cooler. Most of the deli/prepared foods employees work in the kitchen. I think meat, seafood, and frontend are the only ones that don't have any real back-of-house staff - but meat's mgr comes in at 2:30 and they start cutting steaks/meats at 3:00 (am).

I need to find out how many people actually work on frontend one of these days. They definitely have the highest turnover, but it's still remarkably low for retail. Cashiers turn over a lot faster than baggers, the baggers usually stick around awhile (a handful of them have become cashiers in the year I've been there). They're very, very anal about your drawer being right on the penny, if it's off more than a few times you get demoted to bagger for a few months. Even if it's off by more than a few cents just once, you get demoted to bagger for a couple of days (though you do keep your cashier rate of pay - baggers start at $10/hour, cashiers at $10.25, frontend supervisors start at $11.25, frontend asst mgr $15-17, frontend mgr $22-26).

[DerangedHermit]

I can't possibly imagine how many employees my store has considering it's a Super Stop and Shop AND a Peapod warehouse.

[Becks]

As best as I can figure, well over 400 people, not counting store managers, HR, payroll, etc.