Raley's announces new Truckee store

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storewanderer
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Re: Raley's announces new Truckee store

Post by storewanderer »

Revisiting where this store is at. The bar on the second floor is closed due to COVID. At this point, it has significantly less traffic than the Truckee Safeway has (which seems to have re-claimed a lot of its traffic, if it ever lost any in the first place to this Raleys- I'm thinking it may be more impacted by the Grocery Outlet that opened across the road from it).

Raley's is now running a weekly ad just for this "O-N-E" location. The ad is interesting- it has some Organic produce, then it has some standard items like Barilla Pasta and Classico Pasta Sauce. They also still run whatever ad items they carry that appear in the regular Raley's ad, but they do not have the regular Raley's ad physically in this store.

Reviews for this place seem to be either a love it or hate it sort of thing; https://www.yelp.com/biz/raleys-one-mar ... =date_desc
Similar trend on Google Maps reviews.

However as of my last visit to this store I have some pretty serious concerns.

One of the soap dispensers in the restroom was empty (luckily they have two and the other did have soap), trash can overflowing. The staircase going up to the restroom was filthy. There were no more than 10-12 customers in the store while I was there and multiple available staff just talking up front.

One of the ad items was french bread .99 - they don't even bother to put a sale sign up in the bakery for the french bread. Just a sign that says 1.98 which is the regular price in front of an empty basket. Also they had no french bread.

The produce area is a mess. They have some compostable bags but mostly just standard plastic produce bags now. Organic and non-organic produce is mixed around the displays and it is not really clear what is what unless you look closely at stickers. A number of items are very wrinkled (I'll pass on saying if they were rotten or just very very ripe) on the center island displays especially oddball items like mango that must not sell well. The potatoes are all under refrigeration (this is not the recommended way to store potatoes) and the russet potatoes have a shelf tag on them and someone took a black marker to black out the price and write 169lb on the bottom of the tag with a ball point pen. In one case I saw organic and non-organic apples mixed together in the same exact bin and when I brought it to their attention to figure out the pricing on each, the response was one of confusion and complete lack of knowledge (that means all of the Organic ones are contaminated by touching the non-Organic ones, so you may as well not even bother to separate them...).

The meat department which previously had all meat labeled as "natural" seems to be a mix now of the "natural" beef and the standard Raleys USDA Choice Beef based on how it was tagged. They had tagged scale tags for london broil (still 8.19/lb), chuck roast, and a few others all as standard meat and not the "natural." They had a bunch of packages of 85/15 natural ground beef labeled as "patties" (meaning higher price) but these were not patties it was just the clump of beef. So maybe the beef is all just still natural but they don't know how to tag it, and don't know the difference between normal ground beef and patties? Also was looking at some pork chops and the bone in center cut chops at 3.99/lb (not sure if that was a sale or regular as this place is terrible about putting sale signs up) but then if you want thin cut the cost jumps to 6.49/lb - what? Normally that is a .50/lb price difference at any other Raleys. Or maybe that is just another tagging error at this place.

I did notice they already did a reset to the cough/cold area. They brought in a few SKUs of Halls Cough Drops on the very bottom rows and also brought in a couple SKUs of Chloraseptic sore throat spray. Still no NyQuill, Day Quill, or usual pain relief medicines which is really terrible merchandising in the middle of a ski area.

When I paid, and I didn't have that many items, I was overcharged on 2 items and undercharged on 2 items due to scan errors (not cashier error). The undercharges were dimes in my favor but the overcharges were dollars in their favor. This store also seems to have some pretty serious issues with its scan accuracy. I can't even remember the last time I was overcharged on anything at Raleys... and I shop them frequently in Reno area, and now this?

This store has some serious problems. This is unusual for Raleys. They better get their act together in the next couple weeks before the ski areas open up and bring a lot more people to the area.

Safeway continues to run a far superior store in Truckee.
storewanderer
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Re: Raley's announces new Truckee store

Post by storewanderer »

Went into this store tonight. The store was very busy. It snowed 3 days ago and parts of the parking lot within parking spaces are still full of chunks of frozen snow/ice (Safeway actually cleared its whole lot... other than some piles of snow in corners of the lot). The building doors face South and the asphalt to walk into the store which was cleared of any standing snow/ice, was still slippery (they need to do something about this).

Walked into the store and saw 5 people standing up around produce and bakery in the store dressed up and singing Christmas carols......... they all had fabric masks on, okay, but... is this really safe right now? Singing is a risky activity especially do be doing it right by a bunch of fresh food some of which (produce) is directly exposed/not packaged. Needless to say I did not stick around.
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