Bad surprise for the employees of the Géant Casino in Fréjus (Var) when they arrived at their workplace on Sunday, May 2.
The day before, more than a hundred shopping carts were left abandoned in the aisles of the supermarket.
The reason ?
Faced with the long wait at the store's automatic checkouts, some impatient customers abandoned their trolleys with their shopping inside.
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9 fresh produce caddies discarded
Although it was a public holiday, the supermarket had kept its self-service doors open. The absence of cashiers due to Labor Day contrasted with the influx of customers this Saturday, who had to settle for a few automatic checkouts to pay for their purchases. Thus, each customer had to scan, weigh, store and pay by card, via the Casino Max application or by cash at the quick checkout for their groceries, which created long queues when paying. Exasperated by the wait, some customers gave up their shopping, leaving behind 168 shopping carts scattered in the aisles of the supermarket.
When they arrived the next day, the employees had to take care of the storage and replenishment of the shelves.
If the day before, some customers had taken the trouble to put away part of their shopping before leaving, the equivalent of 9 trolleys filled with fresh and frozen products still had to be thrown in the trash, as the daily reports. Var-matin, who shared videos illustrating the scale of the phenomenon.
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Contacted by Le Figaro, the communication of the Casino brands would like to recall the rigor to be respected when the cold chain is broken. She argues that this break prevents the supermarket from distributing its fresh and frozen products, even for free. It also wishes to highlight its upstream communication to prevent the risk of frequentation in stores on May 1st.
"Our customers were given a lot of information before the opening, stating that Saturday was a big day, that the store was self-service and that our staff were not working that day
," she said. declared. To put it into perspective, she also adds that about 2,300 customers
"went through checkout without difficulty"
this Saturday.
But a situation that could have been anticipated, believes the union of the store, which deplores its opening on a public holiday as well as the use of automatic terminals. “
Even if it had to open, it would have been necessary to put in the means to open in good conditions, like more security agents, at least to regulate flows
, regrets Jean-Luc Farfal, union representative of CFDT Group at Casino.
It would also have been necessary to ensure that there were enough people on the hot-line to answer when there was a problem in the automatic kiosks. This explains why there were so many queues at the checkouts
”. For its part, the communication of the Casino brands says it is thinking about new solutions to prevent this situation from happening again.