Metropol

Within 15 miles of my house, I have a Tesco, two Tesco Expresses, two Morrisonses, one Sainsbury's, two Sainsbury's Locals, eight Co-operatives/Somerfields...

yet, no ASDAs for over 35 miles.

my local total garage closes for 5 minutes at 11:55 for some strange reason. i've been caught out twice by this.

i'd been to the pub and when i drove my car to the pump the cashier told me through the pa system that the garage was closed at opened again at mid-night.

didn't look like a shift change, there were at at least two employees walking around in the shop doing stuff.

weird.

Perhaps it is to allow the tills to process and update stuff? When I worked for a certain now-bust booze retailer the till would always poll between midnight and 1am to send / receive data to head office and would apparently lock you out of the system until it was done.

The Sainsburys Petrol Station in Cambridge closes for around 1 hour at midnight on Saturday I believe.

I worked for a well known catalogue shop and the system polled every night when the store closed. While this happened the entire AURA system (the store back office including tills) were unavailable. Took around 30 minutes I think though time could be longer or shorter depending on the amount of file changes. I never worked out how they worked around this for the stores that trialled 24 hour opening at Christmas. Presumably by running the shutdown at an ungodly hour that no sane person would be shopping at.

The tills (certainly at my popular supermarket) go off at about 2310 until approx 2330 every night to update. Self scan normally only takes about 5 maybe 10 minutes.

Always ends in a fairly large queue however.

I went again last night out of curiosity after a long day in London, got to the entrance and found the same thing again. This was the conversation between me and the staff member at the door:

Him: Alright Mate? Anyway, ya can't go in at the moment cos the tills 'ave gotta restart. Come back in a coupla minutes and they'll be ready again

Me: Why can't I shop now? By the time I've got what I need surely the tills will be done.

Him: Cos... Ah, I dunno why, but the boss said you lot can't come in right now.

Personally, I thought he was a very rude man.

GMTV2009 wrote:Personally, I thought he was a very rude man.

From how he spoke, I bet he thought that dog had a fluffy tail!

It's called a night audit. Every major hotel chain does it, where one day ends and a new one begins. Sometimes this is midnight, usually it's between 3am and 5am. Not dissimilar to TV schedules. The accounts for the previous period of time must be collated and filed and all counters set again to zero, and all tills returned to float levels.

So remember how I was saying we were having 8 Tescos in Dundee, well they're just busy making a new Tesco Express under the casino so that'll be 9.

In other tesco news, Tesco Riverside is to replace their manky, overpriced, outsouced, greasy spoon... with a Costa. Yay @ that.

I for one am very excited about soon having access to a whole new Tesco experience that only requires risking one's life past two roundabouts to reach.

Another Tesco has pretty much been given the go-ahead here, giving us our 10th store.