Between the annual stress brought on by the holiday season and the uniquely 2020 experience of panicked pandemic shoppers, winter trips to H-E-B may be a particularly bleak experience.
This weekend, an enterprising San Antonio H-E-B employee took to Reddit to give others the lowdown on how to make grocery shopping as painless as possible now that the holidays are here.
According to u/shotgun72, a member of the overnight stocking crew, the best times to shop are either very early or very late.
“Early you only have to fight your mom, other people’s moms, some dads, lots of grandparents,” the stocker said in the post. “This is noob level combat. Most are polite and sorry about being in the way. Super late is the odd balls and people who just got off work & are too tired for bullshit.”
The H-E-B worker also let us in on some inside baseball: if you make a list using the grocery chain’s website or app with your neighborhood store selected, the items will populate in the order of the aisles, and the list will also show the aisle number. This strategy may help to save woefully lost shoppers the employee often sees.
“So many of your fathers/sons/husbands are just drifting the store with handwritten lists like lost puppies. I’ve seen a few in so desperate for direction the Jehovah’s Witnesses were able to recruit them,” the poster quipped.
Also, the app and website can sometimes be of more use than the employees working at the store: “If you ask curbside or stocking crew where something is, don’t be surprised if we don’t know. It’s a big fucking store.”
That doesn’t mean employees won’t be able to help you, though.
“If an employee asks you if you need a help finding something then you do, or at least you look more pathetic than everyone else and you should take the assist,” u/shotgun72 offers as parting wisdom.
So many restaurants, so little time. Find out the latest San Antonio dining news with our Flavor Friday Newsletter.
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This article appears in Nov 7-17, 2020.
