There's an expression that a friend of mine uses when something is uncategorically awful, like a 5 PM meeting on a Friday, or asking the guy you're dating if he's shut down his Tindr profile yet.
That expression is "woof."
And it applies to this particular Stop & Shop PERFECTLY.
This place is just woof.
It smells like stale fried chicken on a good day.
It's got beige floors that could be dirty, could be old, or could just be beige speckled with gross.
It's got florescent lights, and somehow the ceilings are low, despite the fact that it looks so giant and box-like from the outside.
When you walk in the double doors in front, you're assaulted by a spurt of hot, smelly air from the heating system above you. It's also highly likely that someone is smoking a cigarette beside the front door.
The employees are either surly, somewhat incompetent, or a combination of both. They do not smile. They avoid eye contact. They have not the slightest clue on how to pack reusable bags, and take it personally if you try to help them... then they put your tomatoes in the same bag as your pasta boxes, so they get bruised and cut, and when you open them up the next day, they're moldy from the damage.
Prices are not good. It's not expensive, exactly, but it's not cheap. They create pricing gambits that make me angry, for example, they were selling ten oranges for ten dollars last winter. Each orange was oversized, so they were about a pound per orange, but they looked yellow and awful, and something about that pricing structure made me infinitely less interested in them than if they'd simply been 99 cents a pound. Who the F wants to spend $10 on oranges?
All the shopping carts at this location are huge, they must have a thousand gigantic carts and like three of the little double decker ones, so regardless of how much you need to buy, you're never in and out. You're trapped between aisles as other people sloooooowly roll creaky, gigantic carts and debate Frosted Flakes vs. Frosted Mini Wheats. Dog help you if you go in the evenings or on the weekend, where the front of the store is so cramped that the queues to check out are so deep you can't roll your gigantic cart through to line up.
Stop & Shop has the most asinine self-checkout interface in the history of self-checkout. I self-check everywhere, but especially here, because I would rather struggle with their incredibly slow, cumbersome and annoying interface than try to explain to an employee that you need to create a stable platform of boxed goods at the bottom of a reusable bag, and then stack produce ON TOP of that. Or in a separate bag entirely.
Their self-check is so sensitive that you have to add things to the belt JUST SO. If you get annoyed and throw something, the whole f-ing thing has a seizure, red lights flash, and now some employee is over your shoulder keying in their code for the fifth time.
Their self-check talks to you incessantly, and you can't turn the damn voice off, so you're stuck listening to this annoying voice. If I wanted to interface with people who annoy me, I would have let your employees ring me out!
Their self-check, unlike self-check at literally EVERY OTHER PLACE, doesn't have a sign that says ten items or fewer, so if you have made the mistake of coming here on a weekend to grab the one thing that you need, good f-ing luck to you. You will be stuck in the self-check line behind people who are struggling to use the worst self-check interface in the history of mankind as they purchase nine thousand items. You will then wait as they use eighteen thousand plastic bags to pack up their purchases, and you will be forced to stand there and think about how all those plastic bags are going to live on this planet for literally ever, just so these people can drag home their frozen dinners one time.
Yes, standing in line at this store, with the bad smells, bad lighting, bad pricing, terrible service, you will watch the people around you and start to think negative things about the world that we all share together. You may begin to draw comparisons mentally to the Superdome during Hurricane Katrina. You may wish that you lived in a more progressive nation, where people thought about the larger world around them, and did minor things to take care of it, like planning ahead and leaving a few bags in their car so their great great great great grandkids won't have to figure out what to do with the plastic bags they're using now to carry home processed food in plastic packaging.
Woof.
Needless to say, I avoid this Stop & Shop unless I truly feel I'm in a bind and have no other options. I sincerely wish that you and I both will be able to avoid it indefinitely! read more