Tired and Angry, Shoppers Want Grocery Strike to End

Jazz trombonist Rich Pulin went to the Ralphs in Sherman Oaks looking for sauerkraut. He left with only a sour mood, saying the temporary cashier tried to overcharge him.

Home health nurse Denise Jones was annoyed to find giant stuffed bears strategically placed to hide empty seafood and delicatessen counters at an Orange County Albertsons. “I’m supposed to forget that the seafood section was here?” she asked. “Give me a break.”

And computer consultant Bill Garrison is tired of shopping at a Stanton Food 4 Less, saying that much of what he wants is sold only in jumbo sizes there. “You can’t find smaller items,” he complained the other day. “It’s more like ‘Food 4 an Army.’ ”

These shoppers don’t see eye to eye on who is to blame -- the union or the supermarkets -- for the strike and lockout affecting 852 Ralphs, Albertsons, Vons and Pavilions stores in Southern and Central California.

But they do agree on one thing: After 10 weeks, they’re fed up.

“The whole thing has really affected me and a lot of people like me,” said Pulin, 62. “It feels like we are homeless. We’re scurrying around to all kinds of markets and places where we are not familiar with the people or the inventory.”

Shoppers are tired of stores that don’t have what they want. They’re mad that they have had to patronize higher-priced chains to avoid picket lines or face hectoring union members at their regular stores.

“It’s absolutely stressful to cross the picket lines,” said Kathy Confer, 47. “I say, ‘I’m on your side,’ and then I walk into the store and feel like a loser.”

Mike Kreman, 55, was at an Albertsons in Santa Monica on Tuesday to buy beer and wine for his holiday guests. “That fellow over there stared me down,” he said, tilting his head toward a picket. “I stared back. What are you going to do? This really gets to be quite a hassle.”

Kreman said he sympathized with the workers but wanted the labor dispute to end.

“It’s inconvenient for everybody,” he said. “You have to run around to three or four different stores. Especially for the holiday shopping, this makes it more difficult. Ralphs doesn’t have what I need. Whole Foods, Gelson’s and Bristol Farms are too expensive.”

The United Food and Commercial Workers union struck Safeway Inc.’s Vons and Pavilions stores Oct. 11 after talks on a new contract broke down. Albertsons Inc. and Kroger Co.’s Ralphs, which bargain jointly with Safeway, locked out their workers the next day. Within hours, picket lines went up at all three chains and shoppers scurried to find alternatives.

Federally mediated negotiations broke down Friday after the supermarkets rejected an offer from the UFCW, and talks are not expected to resume until after Jan. 1. The main sticking points are contributions to health insurance and a two-tier pay plan sought by the stores.

For shoppers, the crunch eased somewhat after Halloween when the union pulled its pickets from Ralphs, partly to give shoppers some relief. But even at Ralphs, people say they can’t always get what they want.

At a Ralphs in San Pedro, shopper Lydia Richmond, 46, grabbed a cart and took a deep breath, like a football player coming off the bench to enter a hard-hitting game.

She made a mental note to check all expiration dates and “sell by” labels. Even so, she said, she has been forced to shop at a small Mexican American market for fresh meat.

“The clerks and the chains are losing money. Why haven’t they solved this? Why can’t they compromise? It will be a happy day when they do,” said Richmond, setting her 2-year-old son, Matthew, in a shopping cart.

Mary Potts, 40, couldn’t find the produce she needed at a Vons in San Pedro and crossed the street to an Albertsons.

“All this is doing now is hurting the public. To me, it has just gone on for too long,” she said. Potts said she sided with the union at first, but now she just wants the dispute to end. “They need to put a closure on this,” she said.

Despite the thinly stocked shelves, some shoppers say the stores are starting to run a bit more smoothly.

During the first days of the strike and lockout in mid-October, chaos reigned. Temporary workers couldn’t tell shoppers where to find pickles, and cashiers went blank when customers paid with food stamps. With Teamsters refusing to drive across picket lines, hapless store managers were pressed into service to dock big-rig trucks -- often having to back up again and again to hit their mark.

But with more than two months on the job, many of the temporary workers are starting to hit their stride. At a Ralphs in Venice, a cheerful checker named Rachel greeted shoppers with the confidence of someone who had been doing it for years. The bagger had learned to place heavy items at the bottom.

At least one Wall Street analyst suggested that as temporary workers gained more experience, the financial pain for the markets would lessen.

“We do not expect the impact of the strike to be as great in the [fiscal] fourth quarter as it was in the third quarter, since shrink” -- spoilage and other losses -- “will be much lower and worker productivity will increase,” Meredith Adler of Lehman Bros. wrote in a Dec. 10 report on Kroger.

Many customers acknowledge that the temporary workers are getting better. “It’s getting to the point now where I’m not noticing much difference” compared with before the strike, said Garrison, the Food 4 Less shopper. “If it continues, I won’t see any difference at all.”

At a Ralphs in Encino, 84-year-old retiree Phyllis Miller was looking for a particular brand of wheat bread preferred by her visiting daughter. Store workers fanned out in search of it, just like old times.

“It was good service,” Miller said. “It was very, very nice.”

But Miller was quick to add that courtesy and proficiency don’t make up for relatively empty shelves.

“It’s not like it used to be,” she said. “I wish they would end the strike.”

Times staff writer James F. Peltz contributed to this report.