Slow service delivery at ShopRite Surulere

One of the reasons why I don't really like going to the Surulere Shoprite location at Adeniran Ogunsanya street in Lagos most of the time is because of the slow customer service.

The best time to go to Shoprite Surulere and avoid long queues are actually on Weekdays and during working hours. Saturdays and Sundays after church are among the most busy days. After working hours on weekdays are also not ideal for people who don't want to spend too much time on a queue.

I love Shoprite for one thing and this is because they offer you the ability to buy most of your home needs at one market. You can buy things like frozen food, meat, drinks, snacks, food, bakeries, detergent, stationery and so on at just one mall. However, one problem they seem to have is their slow service delivery speed.

Actually Surulere's Shoprite mall is pretty big and spacious enough and so, there really is no people congestion for now but the only place where there is a problem is at the checking out spots. I noticed that when they initially opened their store for business, they were only a few cashiers receiving people but as their customer base grew, they sort of doubled their cashier points which required them to also employ more staff. However, what I've noticed that even with their large number of cashiers(about 10), they still are not enough to offer customers a quicker service. Don't be amazed if you have to wait in line for about 30 minutes just to pay your bill at the checkout.

The worst place where one can experience the slowest service at Surulere Shoprite is at the Food section, Yes, there is a food section at Shoprite where one can buy things like roasted chicken, beef, fish, rice, beef in stew, bread, cakes and so on. I love buying food at the Food section because it's well priced and tastes pretty good but one reason why I don't enjoy going there more often is because they don't have enough dedicated staff to attend to customers. At times, there'd be about 20 customers on the queue and yet only one Shoprite staff attending to all of them. At times, they even abandon customers on line and go back to the kitchen. It's the worst customer service section at the Shoprite store.

What is the cause of slow service delivery at Shoprite? Well, I've noticed that these has a lot of reasons such as:

- Inefficient POS service: Cash payments are much faster than POS payments based on what I know. The POS network at times just goes off or is too slow to respond and this keeps people waiting on the line. At times the customer is asked to first go to the ATM to make a withdrawal while other people wait. I think there should be separate queues for people paying cash and those paying with their cards.

- Fewer cashiers: Compared to the number of customers checking out on busy days and times, the cashiers at times are just not enough. I guess it can be hard for Shoprite management to add more cashiers given the limited space for expansion.

- Too many people: Yes, this is another issue. At times the traffic at the mall is just too much and as I said this is more visible during the weekends and after working hours on weekdays. I think there is very little that Shoprite can do to stop this and it's only the customers that can simply choose a better time for shopping in order to avoid receiving a bad service.

- Slow personnel staff: This is basically when the Shoprite cashier in charge of attending to customers tends to do things that makes the checkout process slower for customers. They do things like gisting with another staff, too much fraternizing with the current customer, leaving their desk unattended, being generally slow and so on despite the fact that there are many people waiting on the queue.

Things Shoprite customers do as a result of the slow service delivery
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As a result of the slow service which many Shoprite customers tend to experience at the checking out process, some of them have resorted to doing certain things like:

- Avoiding shopping on weekends
- Avoiding shopping during busy weekday evenings
- Abandoning their carts for another time e.g. 1 hr, 4 hrs, 24 hrs
- Going to alternative stores