I walked all over the damn store looking for butter

Corporate metric improved: people spend more time in our stores now!

thats how CEOs define their rules when their then-by-them-damaged company has to pay them a huge bonus for causing permanent damages to the company 🤷

A supermarket I go to sometimes around a year ago decided to "reorganize" everything. The first day I went there after the reorganization I almost suffered a meltdown. You know where they put the biscuits and cookies?

You guessed it! In the same aisle than stationery and printer ink. I am not kidding, the psychopath who did this, for some reason decided that printer ink was somehow related to breakfast biscuits.

They do this shit on purpose. Years ago I worked for the evil empire (Wal-Mart) and they put all the coffee filters next to the coffee makers in the appliance section, not with the coffee in the grocery section or with the consumable paper products. It forces customers to walk around the store to find things. And they would rearrange it every 6 months or so.
- When I was but a youth, I met someone and asked where they worked. They, too, said "the evil empire" (meaning Walmart) but I, being naive and having recently discovered Linux, said "Microsoft?" They laughed and responded in the affirmative.
  I believed that for weeks before a Walmart-specific story came up in conversation.
- Where I live supermarkets have coffee and smoothie vending machines, so you can have an in-store-coffee while you are buying your groceries. They have it installed to keep you longer in their store, hoping that you buy stuff you didn't need in the first place.
printer ink was somehow related to breakfast
For when you want your coffee really, really black.
- Unless you're out of blue ink, then you can't print black coffee, even if your black cartridge is full.
I think it's more plausible that the original fridge had broken down, so butter was relocated to an alternative temporary.
- Why would there already be a fridge in the stationary and ink aisle?
I don't think I've ever seen something like printer ink at a grocery store.

Well of COURSE the butter is in the Beer & Wine aisle. I mean where ELSE would you expect to find butter? In the DAIRY section? It is to laugh.

Butter beer. Somebody like Harry Potter
"I can't believe it's not Budweiser"
The beer&wine section starts there. The portion until the sign is part of another section, that OP never bothered to include in the pic. Presumably the dairy section.
Put another way: if you're coming from the beer&wine section, the sign probably says "dairy".
Either that or the store people just fucked up.
- This is a Safeway, and those signs are at the ends of the aisle, so no, he didn't just conveniently crop out more aisle that says dairy. The dairy section is usually open air chillers, not closed refrigeration units like this.
  Some Safeway stores are ancient and too small to carry all the product people expect to be able to find these days, so they put stuff in nutty locations like this from time to time.

This is honestly pretty frequent if you shop for anything beyond staple items. Like, pine nuts are not with the other nuts, for example. Cocktail garnishes are not with the other pickles. Canning pectin is not with the jello, etc.

You just can't really trust the signs that much. At least in this case it was an entire visible section and not a single tiny box they hid among a bunch of tangentially related items.

Canning pectin is with the canning jars!
Now, where those are is extremely confusing. Currently I think it's near the sugars.

Clearly butter is popular with beer drinkers. 2 cases of beer 2 lbs of butter, what a fun night awaits. Slip slidin' away!

Home improvement stores do the same illogical placement of their goods: If you want to buy a shovel, you would that shovel expect to be located in the aisle with the garden tools, right? Wrong! Of course, it is located in the timber isle, because the handle is made of wood - that's what they probably thought.
- that... hasn't been my experience. Gardening shoves are in the gardening section and shovels for wet concrete are next to the bags of concrete.

I think my head would explode if that happened to me. I'd just start moving it back to the dairy for them while tutting very loud.

If looked at in a certain way butter is a chilled beverage.

I like a buttery Chardonnay

i like the butt'ry biscuit base

Nothing like the old wine/butter aisle

Nothing like the old ~~wine/butter~~ French Cuisine aisle
For the really good nights

I wish grocery stores (especially those you can also order from online) had a page where you could pick the store (if there are multiple) and then search for the thing you need and it had a number label that would be associated with the section it is in. This weird example from op would be: beer 10, butter 10, wine 10 etc without it being confusing because it isn't a category anymore and you only need to look in that section instead of looking like a lost kid running around in the whole store. Also filling up that big sign with just a number would be a lot easier to read from far away.

They can keep the categories if they stick to them, like meat, bread, snacks and so on so ppl who do not care about the number system can still kinda guess like today...

Some stores do just that. I know I've done it for Target, Walmart, Home Depot, and Lowe's.
- Home Depot has their interiors mapped out on Google Maps.
  It's fantastic. Since they did that I'm pretty sure I've never spent more then ten minutes in one unless I wanted to.
- Yes, I think other types of stores are better at it. But the stores that are only groceries, are there any that use that?
I saw it a bit late, they actually have a number assigned to the sign. Do they use a number system already? Who is it for?
- I think it's just so an employee can say "that's in aisle 7" without having to walk you there.
- The store's app will list the aisle number, of the specified store, if you pull up a product. However the app is a cluttered mess that commonly has issues loading, so asking an employee is just faster anyways.

Guess I’m built different, I noticed the butter immediately but took 2 minutes to figure out what the problem was before I saw the sign

It didn't take long to spot the issue but the idea of using those signs is absolutely insane to me. Butter is obvious.

At least you know it's somewhere in the fridge section, yah?

But I'm sure everyone has done that while looking for something and it is not cool.

Problem is, there were like 8 different refrigerated sections. Milks and juices. Dairy, including cheeses and yogurts (which is where I was fully expecting it to be and which I went back to multiple times). Meats. Desserts and puddings. Salsas, dips and such. And several others. I think I just walked by the alcohol aisle repeatedly thinking, "Well, I know it's not down that one".
- And where was it?
You'd be surprised. I work at a store with only 2 refrigerated aisles and people still can't figure out where the eggs are. Even though they take up half the aisle and are labeled on the sign above. I swear people don't know how to shop.
- Just to add to the confusion, in Germany eggs wouldn't be in the refrigerated aisle.

Ahh yes, beer and butter, classic pairing

Also the butter in the photo seem so big, huge, kilos of butter per package!

Beer. Butter. Battlestar Galactica.
- One more episode. We have time, right?
- Beer. Butter. Battlestar Galactica.
  Beerstar Galactica, who hasn't heared of that epos !!!
The real butter is in the case with the Kerrygold. American Butter (I see Clover, Land o' Lakes, and Challenge, for example) is typically sold in one-pound boxes of four 8-tablespoon sticks. About ½ kilo in all.
Kerrygold, being more expensive because imported from Ireland, is usually sold as one 8-ounce slab, the equivalent of two sticks.
What you see in the tubs is either margarine, a mix of butter+oil, or whipped butter (adding air to make it softer , go farther, and seem like more).
Those large vats are just margarine, so much cheaper than butter.
- Thank you for clarifying.
- And much less flavour.
Ahh yes, beer and butter, classic pairing
i once visited a cocktail bar named "buttershaker" in germany, obviously butter is an important ingredient for numerous cocktails too ;-)

I used to live a couple blocks from a Safeway that decided to put the canned beans and canned chili in the wine aisle, with no sign to direct you there. Is throwing random shit in the wine aisle just a Safeway tradition?

The Safeway by me is pretty reasonably organized. Probably depends on the manager.
Safeway is a garbage store and its honestly your bad for shopping there.
If you want to give people an extra 50% on every grocery bill I've got a Venmo you can use.
- *you're

At least it wasn't also behind one of those asinine display doors that has a screen on it telling you what might be inside.

It's all intentional to get you to walk around the store more so you make more impulse buys. Same reason stores will reorganize things from time to time

Does the other side of the sign say the same thing?

Sorry I didn't get back there for a bit, but here's a pic of the opposite end of the aisle from today.
Neither mention butter.
Unless they consider it a "chilled bev", lol.

Man I hate safeway so much

So does everyone that works at Safeway
- And everyone who shops there

They prob do that because butter is a loss-leader

Omg, lol, beer and wine

I had a though recently. It would be neato to have some open source, crowdsourced world database of item locations, where you add this sort of information.

Tagged search of a store, where certain items are. What's stores in a city sell X item. That sort of thing.

Call it "WorldDB", bake it into OpenStreetMap.

No idea what the legality would be, but I would LOVE it.

May write a post about it at some point, as I am no programmer.

The problem is that stores regularly change the locations of items so everything would be constantly wrong.

TIL people actually look at what the aisle sign

That's all I do. And if I can't find what I'm looking for easily I do without it.
I hate shopping

Push enough soldering irons up enough urethras and this'll stop. Dealer's choice on when during this process to plug in the iron.

Put the need by a luxury item.

I despise this continuous trend of making stores less convenient and more confusing in order to force people to spend more time looking for things.

Same thing with making the signage over the aisles on opposite ends different. One end might be cake mixes, cooking implements, canned fruits, the other end flour, spices, sauces. Needs a trip past both ends to find cake sprinkles unless you randomly happen down the aisle and spot them

But they generally list things that are at least tangentially related to what you're looking for.
- Moreover alcoholic and non alcoholic is generally a hard line separation so children and whatnot don't have any real reason to be around there.
I'm used to butter being in the open top refrigerated bins. I associate the cabinets like this with frozen food. I probably would have missed it too.
It's breaks down alcohol into its categories but not list butter? Seems pretty dumb especially since loads of alcohol sections have a cold beer run like this. Market basket is first that comes to mind.
- Nobody is arguing the store isn't also dumb, just that op is too. Grocery stores usually have 2 aisles of cold stuff, it's not hard.

I never understood that mentality. Like if I want to know something I google it, I ask. I don't look in an encyclopedia for 20 Mins just to find out I'm in the wrong book.

You google what aisle the butter is in?
- They're saying to ask an employee
- Ya but I haven't found it yet, mind sending a link?
It's often the case, as it was here, that finding an available employee is a similarly challenging and time-consuming proposition.