What Took Them So Long?

Hi Everyone:

The grocery store that my family uses a lot is called ShopRite. My background search on ShopRite revealed some interesting facts. ShopRite began in 1951 as a cooperative. By 1961 it had lost half of its locations when a retail owner took his locations out of the cooperative and started Pathmark. Presently, ShopRite has approximately 278 locations in 6 states: CT, NY, NJ, PA, DE and MD. Another fact that I discovered is that ShopRite is the largest employer in New Jersey with approximatey 162 locations. And finally, ShopRite is the largest retailer-owned cooperative in the US.

So it would appear that ShopRite is a survivor and knows how to run a business. But I question that. Why? For years my local ShopRite used open top floor freezers for all of their frozen food products. Additionally, they used open front refrigerating units for all their dairy and refrigerated products. Where we live, we used to have numerous power outages throughout the year. The 3 or 4 times that I was actually in the store when the power went out, the routine was always the same. Employees quickly placed layers of cardboard over the exposed frozen products to try to keep them frozen. At the same time, another group of employees were also quickly taping pastic over the front of the refrigerated products.

About 4 or 5 years ago, my ShopRite installed upright freezers with doors. I did wonder why it took them so long to have freezers with doors. To me that was a no brainer and should have been there a long time ago. Fast forward to about 2 to 3 months ago, in the year 2011. My ShopRite finally installed doors on the pre-existing open front refrigerators. I walked up to one of the people installing the doors and I asked him how come ShopRite decided to install the doors now? He told me that ShopRite had done a 6 month study in a New Jersy location and found out that having doors on the refrigerated units saves electricity and helps to keep the products cold when the power goes out. Well duh!!!! I can't believe that they had to do a study to make that determination.

It is pretty obvious that you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that having doors on freezers and refrigerators will save electricity and help keep products cold during a power outage. ShopRite seemed to be lacking common sense on this issue due to the length of time it took them to figure out doors work. Go figure.

Til next week.

Peter