This was an interesting supermarket in Žabljak, it had a slightly strange layout where the bulk of items were in the upstairs rear part of the building and the only way to them was for customers to try and fight their way to them through queueing customers. The prices were a little higher than usual, likely the reality of being in a tourist town, but they weren’t unreasonable.
My purchases lined up ready for payment. This was odd, the supermarket hadn’t got any dividers between customers and so there were numerous errors in the short time that I was there where people were charged for other people’s purchases. They also had a policy where loose fruit had to be scanned and labelled upstairs and customers were repeatedly dispatched upstairs with their fruit, like contestants who had misunderstood the opening round of a particularly low budget game show. Anyone paying by card then had to walk back along the queue to reach a card machine which appeared to have been placed in the least logical location available.
Service was a little confrontational, Jonathan tried to pay with a note (admittedly a €50) and the response was “we are not a bank” which felt a slightly sub-optimal way to speak to a customer, whether he was annoying or not. A simpler “do you have anything smaller” would have perhaps been a little kinder. I think it’s fair to say that the staff members here seemed worn out and the policies of the supermarket were perhaps driving them to distraction. There were long queues, no self-service tills and a supermarket layout that made little sense. The system appeared to rely on every customer already knowing rules which were explained only after they had broken them.
However, it meant that I could create a little blog post out of it, so there are always positives.