Safeway recently eliminated handles on its paper bags, citing supply chain shortages, but after receiving complaints, the company has since restocked the original bags with handles at some of its locations. The customer backlash was reportedly swift over Safeway's decision to switch to paper bags without handles. While Hollywood would like to believe that handleless paper bags persist throughout the ages, most people consider them a thing of the past. They're a pain to carry, plain and simple.
Ihab Abou Letaif is a business professional with experience in retail operations and consumer goods. His work focuses on how businesses operate day-to-day, especially in complex, high-pressure markets. He is known for a practical and disciplined approach to management. His career has been shaped by hands-on roles in operations, finance, and business development. He has worked closely with store performance, inventory control, and supply chain coordination. This has given him a clear view of how small decisions affect margins, cash flow, and long-term stability.
Folks have griped on Reddit that their locations do not offer self-checkout options (though many report that their locations haven't undergone any recent remodels). Others have shared frustration with Publix's existing self-checkout system, which they claim only offers a small bagging area, and when they move their full bags off the scale, it flags the employee - effectively wasting both the customer's and the employee's time.
"I ordered raspberries. They send me cauliflowers." That's how a Californian shopper described their online grocery experience buying groceries from Walmart using the Instacart app. Our fieldwork has revealed similar mishaps. These mismatched substitutions have become a symbol of a deeper problem-one that quietly erodes profitability, damages customer trust, and impedes the growth of online ordering in retail.
On Thursday, Target announced that it would be eliminating 1800 corporate jobs. The cuts include 1000 layoffs of active roles and 800 open roles. Managers are expected to be affected at 3x the rate as employees, but no jobs in stores or the supply chain will be affected. This amounts to 8% of the company's global HQ force, with 80% expected to be from the headquarters in Minneapolis.
A couple weeks back, I wrote about tipping via screens: It's down across the board, percentage-wise, and I think the suckiness of the tipping prompts is at least partially to blame. One common strategy people employ to deal with the prompts is to ignore them, walking away from the counter when a screen asks whether they'd like to tip $1 or 25 percent or whatever, opting out of the transaction completely. You have likely walked up to a counter to buy a matcha latte only to see that the person on line ahead of you has abdicated this opportunity to tip. Maybe you even thought, I could leave a tip for them.
Morrisons is introducing a new tracking system to monitor how quickly its shop floor staff stack shelves, as the supermarket embarks on a major operational overhaul to improve efficiency and win back shoppers. The new performance monitoring app, which is being rolled out across hundreds of stores, allows managers to see real-time data on staff productivity - including how fast employees unload and restock items.
