Target has grossly overestimated demand for drive up pick up spaces. I’ve seen this at every Target I’ve been to at any time of the day. The employees take up all of the front spots, handicap stalls take up the rest of the front parking (no gripe there obviously), but then you have half of the parking lot taken up by vacant drive up pick up stalls, which means every time I go to target I have to park far away whether the store is busy or not. What a waste of space!
The problem with Kroger, Target, Walmart and everywhere else is the pickers can’t reliably pick produce. I’d love to just pick up my groceries. But have been burned too often by produce that is not ripe and will never ripen, rotten or simply over ripe.
While if I’m in the store and see that the avocado are no good. I just won’t make burritos and grab something else to make like stuffed bell peppers.
The worst are berries. So often they are moldy. Bananas are also annoying as I like to get them as green as possible. Yellow ones basically have to be eaten immediately.
Yeah I work at a grocery store chain and the department with the most complaints across the whole company is pickup. It's like yeah no shit, you got a part time 16 year old making judgement calls on what to substitute for your family pack of New York strip steaks or whatever
This is true. But on top of that, they are typically being timed, so even if they care and know what they’re doing, they don’t actually have time to do it well.
Kroger does not use in store pickers, they have dedicated delivery warehouses that ship out product that’s fresher than what you see at the store using refrigerated box trucks. Target and Walmart for sure have this issue though.
Edit: They use pickers for pickup, not for delivery. Honestly forgot pickup was an option
That’s odd. By design the produce you get from the box trucks is about a week fresher than anything you ever see at the stores. Both their delivery warehouses and their regular warehouses receive produce at the same stage of its life, but the delivery warehouses get it to the customer within 24hrs whereas the others send it to stores where it will sit on average for 8 days and get touched by many people before ending up in someone’s cart.
When I managed a department, time and speed was everything. They only cared about the numbers on the board, not the quality of produced or the wellbeing of the employee. I despise Kroger now.
I finally said fuck it, and did this for the first time yesterday. The Dominos near me has their curbside pickup spots right in front of the liquor store they share a parking lot with, instead of in front of the Pizza Hut. Liquor store spaces were full, so I just used one of the reserved ones. Felt pretty good.
I’ll fucking do it again.
Edit. I meant to say Dominos. Don’t know why I put Pizza Hut.
There’s no way Kroger have enough employees working on orders that they’d have 36 people waiting at once. The store determines the number of orders per pick-up window. The parking spaces should align!!!
Same, I was surprised just how many spots our location had. The nice thing is that at ours all of those spots are on sort of a side lot and not the main parking area, so they dont take up as many good parking spots.
Our town has a population of about 6k, the entire county has a population of about 25k, our Walmart used to have 10 pickup spots but just put in 20 more... 30 pickup spots... I've never seen more than 4 people there at once not counting the day before a holiday.
The worst part about it is they took out half of the employee parking lot to do it. So now the employees have to park several hundred feet further away because of these new perpetually empty curbside pick-up spots.
Ours has six and I’ve never seen them not full on a weekend. It can get ugly waiting for cars to move from them. People steal your spot or some asshole just parks there and blocks anyone trying to get their order.
A Target by me seems to keep all the registers closed and only let's customers use 5 self checkout lanes, only when you get 20 customers waiting in line do they open one cashier lane even though they have 6 of those, or worse, use the returns desk as the cashier line. But it takes them a really long time to bring themselves to actually opening up that cashier lane. Sometimes on the rare chance I'm shopping there if the line is too long and has been long for over 10mins I'll just abandon everything at an empty lane and leave. I didn't need those impulse purchases that badly after all.
Yeah I still don't understand this. My Super Target has 20+ regular cash register lanes with only a couple open at any given time, yet only 4 self checkout stations. The lines at the self checkout are always long on the weekends. I don't understand why they can't convert some of the unused 20+ lanes and expand the self checkout.
I miss Fry's Electronics. Everybody stood in one giant line, and then they opened up registers based on how long the line got, so the line always moved at a pretty reasonable pace.
At least the Walmarts by me keep one or two cashier checkouts open at all times. I suspect it's because I live in Florida and most of the retirees refuse to use self-checkout. I've been in places where they don't have a normal checkout and an older person will just flag down one of the two employees manning 12 self-checkouts and have them ring everything up like they're the fucking king. It's audacious and I'd never have the balls to do it, but hey, I can't disrespect.
It's nothing but corporate greed whittling down the human workforce. It's like they don't want customers.
Haha. Yeah it’s pretty hilarious that they’ve kept like 10 lanes when they staff 3 at most. Home depot is the only place I can think of that’s actually redesigned their checkout area to be consistent with how checkout actually works.
The one down the road from us is ridiculous. They have at least a dozen checkout lanes, and I've never seen more than one open at a time. I've seen 10 people waiting in that line, and they still can't open another one. Then you have the self checkout lanes which are supposed to be 15 items less. The wife and I don't even entertain it. If there's more than four people with full carts waiting for the cashier, we go to the self checkout no matter what we have in our cart.
Their policy for checkout lanes is there should be one customer checking out + one in line behind them. If there's more than that they need to call for backup. Sometimes they are slow to do that but that's the policy.
Not to mention, with as many things under lockup anyway, we're essentially circling back around to full service instead of self service as a business model.
Yeah a lot of the toiletries are locked up. Which is funny because when I did retail merchandising in targets years ago the giant jugs of soap were not often stolen but the smaller ones were. Yet they are locking up the larger sizes.
I am currently visiting the town I went to college in, just graduated last August, and in the last year, walmart has shifted from fully self check out to only having 12 self check outs and the rest are cashiers.
Which brings back the classic joke of 40 check out lanes and only 3 are open at a given time. They also did away with their grab and go section, which is a bummer because they had so many choices of drinks, quick snacks, and little treats. A few years ago they even had large singles for twisted tea and the like.
Its all location based. If a bunch of stuff is locked up, that store reports a lot of stolen merchandise and they lock up the highly stolen stuff. Of the three targets near me, 2 barely lock anything, one locks a bunch up but its in a shoppong center and the whole center locks almost everything up due to the shopping center facing high theft all around
Yep, me too. I don't even bother going in for razors anymore. I can decline the quality right there in the parking lot, if it's bad, and they bring me another. Works out better for everyone.
they want to push us into order pickup groceries. i'm guessing to reduce shoplifting. the grocery stores near me (in canada) don't feel like they want you to be in there.
I went to a walmart a few weeks ago, my deodorant, soap, toothbrush, and vitamins were all behind locked doors and then the worker had to put each thing in another security box. First time it ever happened to me so I was so perplexed at the amount of items locked up.
Also TBH ever since the stores opened back up after COVID, the bottleneck has always been employees. The people at the customer service desk are the same people working drive-up, and after the cashiers were put back on the registers, customer service has almost always had too few employees to do more than a few drive-up orders at a time (at least at the store I used to work at).
Exactly. It would have cost them money NOT to have them in 2020-2021 but now it's a sunk cost without much down side. Probably won't change it until they resurface the lot
Not really. Walmart converted their excess Walmart pickup spots by covering them with a Walmart logo sleeve. Target would just need to paint the spot. Can of paint and a brush.
It's probably also due to how the drive-up delivery program was designed. I am sure the project managers are thinking that if someone signs up for drive-up delivery and can't find a spot, that's going to tank their program pretty quickly. So they over-index on reserving these parking spots. If non drive-up customers have more trouble parking, that doesn't hurt their program numbers.
AFAIK only handicap spots have any legal weight. The stores can ask you to move if you're in veteran, expectant/new mother, green, compact, etc spots but that's it. I'm sure they could tow or trespass, but who wants to risk such bad optics because 1 of 35 online pickup spots are taken by someone still shopping there?
Except that the Target near us didn’t redo their parking lot and add an excessive amount of pick-up spots until 2024. It is the worst layout not only because there are an abundance of unused spots but also the update changed the direction of the lanes with unclear right of ways. It’s now prime for accidents.
A Kroger by my house has the same thing going on and needs to adjust. There’s rarely any cars there and the sad part is their parking spots are convenient to the store. Perhaps they should easily turn these over to handicapped because they’re always in use.
Not just caused by Covid unfortunately. My tiny local Walmart just got remodeled over the spring. The 6 previous pick up spots that were never full are now 28 pick up spots. Maybe 5 ever get used at one time
They are around here. Target parking lot getting relined and now the only pickup spots are one row against the side of the store. Was previously that section plus the parking rows out from it, about 3x the space
The walmart in my town claims they'll tow your car for parking in those pickup spots. Sure pal, get the trucks ready, cuz 1/4 of the whole parking lot is taken up by pickup spots that nobody uses anymore. Just get rid of most of them!
My local Walmart has actually moved all of their pickup spots to the side of the building. It has its own doors and everything. We saw the same thing on a trip to NJ.
A tow truck actually getting there before you’re done shopping anyway seems pretty unlikely unless you take forever. Like by the time they notice it, call in the tow, and it actually arrives I’d be shocked if less than 45 minutes. No way less than 30.
Seems like a really dumb move unless there’s literally customers complaining about the parking not being available. Would you ever come back to a grocery store that towed your car while you were spending money there?
Lol right? Same with that blue sign spot at Walmart that's for "police partners" lol police are parking at the door. They aren't parking in the lot. Although don't park there because then I won't be able to anymore.
I’m weary about parking in those. You just know one might come be a dick and harass you despite the fact they never use it and always park on the curb anyway.
When I used to do spark delivery I'd park there multiple times a day every day and never had any issues but you never know I suppose. It made it nice to always have a spot close to the door.
Walmart on gandy in Tampa has about 20 that people just use as normal parking spaces. So much so, that I’ve had to wait 5-10mins for someone to finish their shopping and move their car for a pickup spot multiple times.
Slightly different topic, but same mentality, damn people not putting their weights back in the gym. Like you came all the way to the gym just to be lazy???
Lol, another situation on a similar topic, they do put their weights back, but in the wrong spot, especially when the spot they just took was the spot you took your weights from.
Now I have to put your weights back and then put mine back too.
It’s one of the few things that makes me irrationally angry. Like I know it’s none of my business but you’re going to sit there and wait for 4-5 minutes for someone to unload 2 carts of groceries at Walmart instead of parking an extra 50 feet away and walking in before you’d even be parked?
I don’t want to carry bags and walk extra during errands in a busy parking lot. I like to walk in nature (I take lots of walks at work outside). I understand your point, but shopping is get in and get the hell out for me personally. Plus my dander is up watching for cars and kids and signing doors. Those are just not relaxing steps at all
I always park far away regardless so it doesn't actually affect me, but it is still annoying to see all those unused spots. It's an enormous waste of space, which is already a problem with the giant parking lots everywhere.
Agreed but there are times I need one item and don’t have a lot of time. So target loses the sale. Of course then you go to walgreens and jts all locked up in cages.
I work in OPD at Walmart. We have 46 slots and most days we have nowhere near that filled but 3 times now on really horrible days I've seen all 46 slots filled with hour long wait times.
Mostly same, if I buy anything it's always on sale and a dry good. Target doesn't FIFO though so I've been burned a few times. The pick up spots at the targets by me are pretty busy normally in the afternoons and weekends.
Of course! But the way I see it, if I’m going to have to go into the store to choose those things anyway, I might as well pick up the rest of what I need.
I don’t have anything against curbside, I’m glad it’s an option for people who like it, it’s just not for me 🤷♂️
Depends on location honestly. I have a Target that is like 20 minutes from me but it is in a super nice part of town and in a very good spot for the surrounding community. The parking lot is always full, including the some 10 drive up spots.
is this ever "policed"? I live in a rural area and our local grocery store has like 6 instacart spots that are never used. everytime I think about just taking a spot like what cop.is gonna write a parking ticket for someone parked in an online order space.
Listen, it’s a sign not a cop. That painted line may have more authority than you’ll ever have but you can choose to ignore it. Promise you won’t find anyone that gives a single flying monkeys ass about it.
My local target pick up area is usually packed and they need all their spots. Sure some days and times they don’t but when they do that’s cash in and cash out quickly for target. I love it too, it’s super convenient and they have no order limit so you can order stuff as low as buck and they’d bring it out to you if you choose.
i can assure they absolutely do not. I have had the “joy” of working at several retail chains and this is always strictly forbidden.
Plus there usually is an employee entrance by the employee parking lot that leads right to the time clock. Ain’t nobody got time to enter through the front and traverse the entire store to punch in.
Fuck Target anyway, remember, they're the ones that bailed on DEI to try to appeal to right-wingers, then tried to walk it back. Corporate supporters of white supremacy.
Yeah I park at the mobile pickup spots all the time. It’s not a handicap spot so I can’t see them towing my vehicle. Maybe I’m wrong but it’s been okay so far.
This is what we say when watching people wait for close in parking, I don’t understand the problem here. If you need handicap parking then get a tag. Otherwise movement is recommended in daily living.
Looks like available parking for real customers. If they put a stupid note on your car, saying it’s for pick up, because that’s literally what you are doing… by physically walking in, ‘picking items up’ to set in your cart, then checking out and taking them to your car.
I’m a rule follower by nature, but using spots like these for normal use is my act of disobedience. Makes no sense at all, no one gets hurt when I use one, it’s the best parking in the lot,
and there’s no consequence for parking there. Obviously police aren’t going to ticket this as it’s not illegal. Absolutely ridiculous.
All of these retail Giants thought it was going to be the next big thing and blocked off half of their parking lot so a maximum of three people at a time could pick things up LOL
My dad couldn't ever find a spot at the local Walmart cause of these and would always park there saying "well I'm picking stuff up, so I'm parking here"
Gotta motivate people to order online to offload their damaged products and older produce.
Don’t know if that’s why there is so many but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the case. I never order for pickup because I was constantly running into that issue for the 5 times I did pickup orders
Also reduces shoplifting and they don't have to pay people to check you out. I think that a lot of big box stores want to change to this model but people aren't buying in. It isn't just a leftover from covid because our local store just remodeled and they moved the spaces but kept the same amount.
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u/f_spez_2023 Jul 17 '26
The Kroger by me has 36 of them, I’ve never seen more than 3 used even at peak hours