Dear Westside community partners in the natural food game: I love New Leaf. I love the very idea of New Leaf. But since expansion into the Big Store, the delivery system seems to have bogged down.
Sandwiches are now made in slow motion, even at the obviously busy lunch hour. By individuals who appear never to have seen a loaf of bread. Tuna sandwiches are laboriously constructed as if working from blueprints printed in Latvian. Same thing at check out.
Even during peak hours, there are few check out folks on duty. And – forgive me – they are slow. Often they stop in the middle – the middle! – of a transaction and chat with other checkers. Or leave the checkout lane entirely and go off on a mission of mercy for another patron. Well-meaning, but unclear on the concept.
I urge New Leaf management to spend more time on staff training. Thank you.
Your friend,
Christina
Indeed. Hasn’t the employee “tone” at NL always been a little less than friendly and certainly not customer oriented? I once was about to spend something like $10/lb on some beef and asked the new person behind the meat counter (not one of the great butchers that worked there for small amounts of time) for suggestions on how to cook it. “I don’t know anything about meat, I’m a vegetarian.” Okay, but as a customer, and one who shopped there, especially for the good meat I couldn’t get at Shoppers, at least three times a week for years and years, this was a big fat bummer and not all that unusual.
I’ve always thought it had to do with employee treatment. Why work for “the man” if you don’t get paid and/or treated well? The NL’s in SLV seem to have a brighter set of employees (and I’m not referring to their intelligence) which I have attributed to a different set of owners and management. In Santa Cruz, it’s almost a hostile interaction (with not all, of course, but those who are friendly and have a good work ethic don’t seem to stick).
I don’t live in the Santa Cruz area any longer and since where I now call home is rural and close to marketless (though we do have one that is fantastic, just tiny, and we do have a farmers market that is fantastic, and very very tiny), I look forward to my trips to SC to stock up. My visits to the new New Leaf have been fun in the “oh my goodness there is so much cool stuff here” but the interactions with staff the same, as in, “why am I spending my money here?” I try staying local, though the pull towards Whole Foods is stronger because I think the folks there get paid well and are treated much better than at NL. They certainly don’t scowl if you ask a question and the service is much faster at WF. Besides, since I’m spending a hefty amount of my wages at either store, I’d rather know that a meaningful portion of it is going to the workers by way of their pay and benefits.
That’s my two cents, anyway. You can tell, this has been bugging me for all the years I shopped at NL (many). Thanks for the forum.
Yours from the Mono Lake area.