A night at the supermarket

Last night I was doing my shopping at the supermarket, as I often do. When I turned the corner into the confectionery aisle, I saw every centimetre of shelving being methodically ransacked by a platoon of people, like locusts on a crop. What confused me was that most were not wearing the supermarket employee uniform and were not carrying any calculators or portable barcode scanners. This meant it wasn't a stocktake.

So what could it be? I wondered quietly to myself. Perhaps there's been some kind of chocolate recall and these people need to sift the shelves looking for certain brands and certain batch numbers. Many packages lay on the floor. This was a feasible explanation. I also theorised that there may have been some kind of printed barcode scam, and they needed to check each product in the store to make sure its barcode was intact.

I kept wondering as I shopped, and only when I got to the checkout did I learn that it was a stocktake after all - those people were counting, then would write the total number of items next to the barcode on the shelf. Someone else was following behind and doing the traditional scan-and-multiply job, but without the hassle of counting items himself.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I wonder if the process was experimental.
PPS - I guess this story wasn't that exciting.