We all knew this was going to happen, but did anyone listen...?

[Dreamstalker]

Starting at about 6PM, the store lost pressure in the cooling system so we lost any and all refrigeration/frozen. It started with Dairy (noticed by a customer), then Meat, then Deli, then Frozen. JJ working the deli was ripshit when she found out...not that it had happened, but that she wasn't notified by a manager (I gave her the heads-up after finding out that Meat was down). Plastic sheeting over anything cold, shades down in produce/Meat/Dairy, Frozen barricaded completely with employees standing guard in all those sections, strong odor of coolant throughout the store and pissy SCs demanding to know why they couldn't buy milk or raw meat (because potential liability, if you get sick the only thing that matters is that it was sold knowing refrigeration had failed).

When I left we had two freezer trucks and a shit-ton of dry ice on the way. I told J to tell the night crew chief "we were right".

A few of the freezers had been acting up/failing on a regular basis starting in June, and night crew had been trying to warn D and Shithead for awhile...hell, I'd been trying to convince SH for four years that the entire system needed replaced. They've been slapping band-aids on the problem and it finally failed in a big way. We'd had sections go out, but never all at once.

Most of our sales on weekends are perishables anyway, so J said we might as well have closed the store completely to get it fixed.

[Food Lady]

SCs demanding to know why they couldn't buy milk or raw meat (because potential liability, if you get sick the only thing that matters is that it was sold knowing refrigeration had failed).

You can't explain this to our sucktomers, either. I forget the actual statistic, but the number of people who cause themselves food-borne illness in their own homes is estimated. The general public is woefully ignorant on the subject.

[eltf177]

So what are the chances management actually learns a lesson from all this now that earlier warnings were ignored?

[Dreamstalker]

Slim to none, I'd say. All they (and Shithead) focuses on is sales figures...I'd like to get a peek at the actual cost of a full replacement vs. assorted losses over the years from failures like this.

Yes, we lost god knows how much business because of it, but how is that anyone's fault (besides the ass who won't budget money for repairs)? I suspect also that Corp is waiting on the town's decision for the site...but by doing so, they impact everyone there (customers, employees, etc)....of course it's not their problem

[EricKei]

Yes, we lost god knows how much business because of it, but how is that anyone's fault...?

We all know what SH's answer to that question will be... I'm sure the mantra in the upcoming week or two is that you all need to SELL more product this week to make up for YOUR lackluster sales over the weekend >_>

[Dreamstalker]

Probably...his mantra for any loss of sales for any reason (besides "I'm gonna get fired") is to sell more. How? It's not like handselling a book or other widget, food is food and it's just weird to expound on the virtues of pasta brands. I'll recommend something if I've personally tried it and a customer is buying something similar, but that's it.

At the time this happened, J had the idea to discount affected product for as long as the cases would keep temperature; the more we sell, the less we have to worry about (and that would mitigate some of the sales losses). That idea of course was shot down...in some way I see why, but I also routinely see customers wait until their perishable items are dripping condensation before they actually come to a register so if they do get sick, there's no way to tell what actually caused it.

Today everything was up and running, although I'm going to avoid buying anything from the affected cases until at least tomorrow. A lot of people came up and handed me dairy items that were "leaking"...items were perfectly fine, it was just condensation from being brought from 12+ hours in a refrigerated truck to the (slightly) warmer case.

[Android Kaeli]

Sounds like my direct manager, who saw no damn reason to have one of the ovens replaced a few months ago despite the fact that it went belly-up and wasn't even remotely fixable. She thought, and still thinks, that slapping band aids on the ovens is a better cost-effective measure then, say, replacing the damn things even after the oven guys have repeatedly told her the fixes will only delay the problem further. The oven guys are getting paid more to fix the damn things then they should be and we could've probably gotten both replaced had said manager stopped to think for more then two seconds.

I completely understand that these ovens aren't cheap, the ones we have are around $90,000 per oven and that's on the cheap side. But having the bakery department know more about the oven guys then they should because they see them up to ten times a week, should be a red flag.