Why would anyone review a grocery store? I mean, when you need a loaf of bread, ice cream, a few apples, a bottle of wine, some floss sticks and a two-pack of AAA batteries, where else the hell are you going to go if your local grocer got only two stars on Yelp? Well, this is East Sacramento, which is surrounded on all sides by grocery stores - Compton's to the north, Safeway to the west, Corti Brothers to the south and another Safeway and Save Mart over the H St. Bridge to the east. East Sac also boasts some serious neighborhood social media frenzies and I'm sure I'm hardly the first to cast a list of grievances about this place out to the online ether. Save Mart on Folsom Bl. is the closest grocery store to my residence, but it often is the furthest from my mind when prowling for the items on that list. It hasn't always been that way, but they've really worked hard over the last few years to make it so.
When stepping through the doors, a magical vortex takes you out of East Sac and drops you into retail environs you'd expect more from a feed store in Willows. Much of the staff has service manners which are colloquial at best. One of the omnipresent checkers saw my short-haired daughter uniformed for a soccer game and called her a "tom boy". Sure, I've used the expression before, but that was back in the 80's when I didn't have two daughters, or a clue. My, "Nah, she's just an athlete," rebuttal was countered with, "Yeah, a 'tom boy'!" Sigh. Clerks can often be found sitting on the curb in front of the store smoking on their breaks and in the summertime can be witnessed ashing their butts out in the vast grill upon which they are barbecueing up nicotine and arsenic smoked delights for the deli.
They have a fairly new trove of self-checkout stations in the store. Being a supporter of labor, I try to steer clear of such job-usurping robotics. What used to be the work of four to eight employees scanning, greeting, tabulating and bagging is now the sole purview of one overseer whose primary function, I surmise, is to constantly accuse me of sneaking unexpected items into the bagging area. One night, I stood in the sole human-based checkout line behind a woman pushing a cart filled with Fancy Feast - no joke, she had about 200 cans of cat food in her cart (which per some clerical/bean counting protocol have to be scanned in individually). A courtesy clerk, from behind a wall of haphazardly stacked cans, insisted, "The self-checkout is open over there!" Now, I'm sure that's what they tell the kid to say, but does he realize he will always be bagging? Until Tom Boy McGuffin over there retires out medical with carpal tunnel syndrome, there are not going to be any new jobs for checkers. Whether this is part of the bag-boy's lament when he and his compadre fill the front entryway with cigarette smoke, I don't know.
This is a fairly decent part of town, the store is always busy, but oddly there hasn't been an upgrade on much of the flooring, lighting or refrigeration in forever. The store looks old and run down inside. For a good stretch, I swore off returning. But when the 11pm urge for sugared dairy fat hits, there isn't a more convenient supply post and I keep getting sucked in. I will give credit where it's due, however, and tell you they have the best commercially packaged tortilla chips known - La Fortaleza. They are available elsewhere, but not readily, and Save Mart always keeps them in stock. They also kicked down a discount on a volume purchase of doughnuts and doughnut holes for a recent school function and, in the negotiation and procurement of those pastries, demonstrated how helpful and generous at least some of them can be.
The two star review is a mashup of a complex set of emotions and circumstances. I want to give it 2 1/2 stars, to perfectly represent my ambivalence, but Yelp only deals in integers. They are weird, they lack conventional customer service tactics, but they are close and they are there. A shining endorsement. read more