The Magical Back Room

Several times each day a customer will not be able to find and item and they will ask if we have it in the back. I suppose there are grocery stores that keep a complete inventory of all their products in the back room, or at least they did in the old days when stores carried one kind of coffee, three kinds of cereal and two types of canned vegetable.
I guess people still carry this image in their heads of a well organized back room full of shelves where all the items in the front of the store are reproduced and ready to restock at a moment's notice. The customer can't find a bottle of 200 count asprin (or soy sauce, bread crumbs, humus, cat food, paper clips, baby wipes,etc.) and alerts a friendly courtesy clerk who runs to the back of the store and retrieves a bottle of asprin from the proper shelf and delivers it promptly to the waiting shopper's eager hands.
Think about it...
Are you thinking about it?

Most modern markets do not have a huge warehouse in the back of the store. Deliveries are made each night after most of the customers and employees have gone home. Huge pallets of product are stacked in the receiving area where the night crew pulls them out onto the sales floor and restocks the shelves all night long.
When you show up at the store in the morning just about everything that is available for purchase is already on the shelves. The produce, meat and dairy departments have moved everything into their areas and will be working them to the shelves as the day goes on, but everything else is on the shelves and ready to buy. If you can't find a jar of seedless strawberry jam on the shelf, there is not any in the back room.

Here is what is in the back room-

Stacks of cardboard boxes that will be put into the bailer almost immediately. Another thing-WE DO NOT HAVE A HUGE SUPPLY OF EMPTY BOXES FOR CUSTOMERS. IF YOU NEED BOXES TO PUT STUFF IN WHEN YOU ARE MOVING, GO TO A STORE THAT SELLS PACKING BOXES!

Piles of cans and bottles that have been counted and stored by a courtesy clerk.

Crates full of products that are expired or have been recalled or discontinued. You can not buy this stuff. It is going away. We can not sell it to you.

Trash from the departments waiting to go into the compactor.

Soda and beer. Yes, this is the one time where we might have something in the back room that is not on the shelf. Go ahead and ask. However, most of this stuff is overstock and there is still plenty on the sales floor. They just had to put the excess somewhere for awhile.

Floor jacks and sixwheelers used to move products throughout the store.

That's about it. If you still can't believe that there is not a complete other store hidden behind those doors to the back room, just take a quick look. No one will mind if you stick your head back there and get an education about real life. Just don't go back there with twenty or so cans of whipped cream and have a party. More on THAT incident another time.
Peace!