Kroger — Local services in Blue Ash

Huge Kosher section, but no lox. Go figure. Quite a complicated Kroger for someone who has clients all over town, and shops at multiple Kroger location. The only location that is worse is the one at Beechmont and 5 Mile. Heard people crowing about what a wonderful store it is. I was looking for specific things for a client. I had her on the phone. I said I was looking for plastic spoons, and that I had just found the paper towels. She said, "You would think that the plastic spoons would be somewhere near the paper towels." I said, "Yes, Emily, you would think that. But in this store, they probably have an entire aisle devoted to paper towels." If you've got all the time in the world, and your thing is to browse in a grocery store the size of a small town, get lost, find 40 kinds of shampoo, etc. But I digress. At Blue Ash, my main complaint was that employees didn't know where things were when I asked them. 100% of the time they were wrong. At other stores... Woodlawn, Finneytown... they have walked me to the item. Which is of course the high standard of customer service. The main problem with Kroger is that there is no central management. Yes, there is a large building full of people making great money downtown. But experience will tell you that each store is its own monarchy, and that as long as the numbers look good, the Store Manager is good. Nobody from Downtown goes to the stores (except in the middle of the day on sunny days to stand around and chat out front of the store and smoke, or stand around in the produce area). So each store is a new experience. You know that I finally found (after asking three employees who had no idea) refrigerated pickles laying on their side in the dairy section of the Kroger in Norwood. Usually it is an in aisle refrigerated display. Did you know that Kroger pays Pharmacy Techs (a very complicated and important job that involves learning a complex [proprietary Kroger] computer system in addition to knowing the names and dosages of all the drugs, being able to count them out accurately, calculate whether controlled substances are being filled too soon, figuring out what error messages mean when prescriptions won't go through insurance, being able to input new insurance data accurately, being able to operate a cash register correctly and give correct change)... pays them the same as any other cashier. And you wonder why you see a different person every time you go to the pharmacy, or why your order is wrong, or why you have been given bad...

Avoid this location at all costs unless you don't value your time.

Last two trips: A Saturday around 5:30 pm. Two checkout lanes open, backed up with about 5 people waiting at each. All self-checkout lanes (9 small, 2 conveyor) backed up with people stretching into the aisles. I had a fairly full cart, so to be polite to others I went to a cashier lane. It took 17 minutes to go from getting into line to putting my groceries onto the belt. These were the slowest cashiers I have ever seen. Usually they scan faster than I can bag stuff, but in this case I was waiting for each item to come down the belt. Luckily I didn't have anything like ice cream that would melt in line.

Today (Monday) at 9:00 pm. 1 cashier lane , 3 small self checkouts, and the 2 conveyor self checkouts were open. Somehow it's not possible to run all 9 of the small self checkouts at night when one person does it during the day? The self checkout lines were pretty long and only one person was waiting at the cashier lane, so with ~30+ items I got in line there. After they emptied out their full cart and I have half of mine on the belt, the cashier says 'oh I'm closing'. Gee thanks for the heads up, I'm glad I wasted the time waiting in line and emptying my cart when you could have told me that earlier. So with zero cashier lanes open, I had to wait for a conveyor self checkout lane, and there's a consistent 5+ person line for the small self checkouts. Luckily there was only a few minutes to wait there, but it's pretty ridiculous they can't even staff enough to keep one lane open to help out older people or people who have a lot of items and are slower at scanning/bagging.

I've gone to Kroger almost exclusively for groceries since I moved to Cincinnati ~15 years ago, and had good experiences at them all up until I moved near this location several years ago. The service quality has steadily declined since 2019/2020 and is now just a complete embarrassment. If I was in Kroger management, I would be ashamed to have such poor service in the region where my company has its headquarters, but I suppose the bonuses for cutting costs are too enticing to care. At least there's plenty of other options nearby (Meijer, Trader Joe's, IGA, Aldi,...

if I could give this zero stars I would . I made a pick up order early in the day today and scheduled it for four to five p.m. pick up . I received one text telling me that there was a delay with no estimated time . When I check the app at 4:45 it said my order is ready so I arrived and checked in. After 35 minutes, I reached out to the live chat option with no resolution. I tried that twice. I then called the customer service line and spoke with somebody who managed to contact the manager, who then came out and spoke to my son. The only explanation I received is they were behind it would be another hour and they would give me five dollars off of my 300 order. I proceeded to wait a full 60 minutes as people around me were coming and going and six other people were waiting to pick up the groceries going through the similar situation. My son finally went into the store to find a manager the same generic response was provided again and again. The manager did agree to give us $50 off due to the inconvenience however, I must spend it in the store again with Kroger;. I am so disgusted at the poor customer service. I suggested to the team that if they did not have sufficient staff to fill orders, they should have turned off the option in the app. The manager explained to me That the manager of Clicklist refused to turn it off when they were alerted to several call offs for staff. Horrible customer service horrible customer experience highly do not recommend...