Ralphs Fresh Fare

(To square up the skewed unjustified average star rating)
* SHOP HERE... IF you like lots of parking, a security person to greet you at the entrance/exit, employees to assist customers, & a pharmacy...hello!! That's right, shop and pick-up your medicine or get vaccinated. (Great pharmacy crew too!)

To be honest... IF you don't mind limited selections & driving all over, sure you can find better prices elsewhere. IF you don't mind paying higher prices and limited selections, sure you don't have to wait in line to checkout.

IF YOU PREFER... a parking spot right away, a great selection of fresh produce & everything else at fair prices, a convenient pharmacy, good customer service, & a relatively quick checkout... shop here!!

I had to run into this Ralphs for some quick odds and ends. First, we missed the side street to get into the Ralphs parking lot. The easiest entrance is from Chapala Street.

The store itself is plenty big. When I came at 11:42am there was not enough front-end register folks to properly help address the customers. This location is doing what they can to force people into self-checkout, which I like, but even that was overly congested. It took me about 10 minutes to pay for my 3 items, because I was in a hurry, I was a tad frusturated.

I was in Santa Barbara and near the transit station and I had fifteen minutes to kill before the restaurant I wanted to go to opened.

This Ralph's was huge. Lots of great selection and a nice produce section and the only other one I have been to was on Pacific Beach in San Diego. The San Diego one is nice, but this one was even nicer, if that is possible.

I was on the lookout for some powdered Crystal Light for a pitcher back at the place in Carpinteria we were staying at. They had about 6 different kinds. Score! I went with raspberry iced tea. The lemonade is also a winner if you would like to try it.

The lines were a little long, but I went through the self check-out. There are a ton of restaurants nearby and the main drag is really close as well.

Always nice to get a nice grocery store where you know the real estate is expensive.

Today, my friend was denied getting beer because they had an ID from another country. I tried to pay for it myself with my California ID and personal credit card, but Eric, the manager, spoke rudely to me and kicked me out of the store. Well to be honest he acted Racistly.

I love shopping at the downtown Santa Barbara Ralphs. The staff are terrific - especially Ray in the produce section. He always has a smile and a kind word to share with everyone. He's great and much appreciated by all of us lucky shoppers.

Only two cashiers with lines to the back of the store. This happens almost every time I go to this store. New self checkout is a joke. Line even longer for those.
If you want to get deli or butcher service good luck.

I just visited Ralphs and bought some groceries. When I walked over to the meat department for ground turkey meat I picked up 2 packages, and the smell was awful. I asked the guy at the meat area and he said that it was a dripping issue around the meat. I went to check out and the smell was awful and gross.
It was so bad the smell stayed in my fingers.
I would suggest to please don't buy meat here.

I find it truly risible how this bourgeoisie Ralph's that would be 4 times as ghetto elsewhere is a two star Ralph's here. There's a friggin' fountain out in the front and custom tiling on the back of the building at the loading dock. The aisles are clean, immaculate and fully stocked. Whoever made that asinine gripe that beer cannot be purchased at self check out wouldn't be able to get that at any Ralph's anyway, because ID has to be checked with alcohol, Einstein. It's telling how a place probably swankier than many wedding venues can be rated two stars by Santa Barbara yelpers. Good grief.

Spacious which makes it easy to navigate. Lots is parking underground. Fresh produce when you enter. Convenient location. Didn't have that many cashiers so it was a bit of a wait but everyone is friendly.

We've been shopping here for 10+ years, and are loyal to downtown Ralphs.

The folks who work at this Ralphs are wonderful, helpful & kind. They persevered through the pandemic and did not bail in big numbers as other workers did.

That said, the parking lot is EXTREMELY dangerous, and getting more and more so as time goes by.

For that reason alone, and nothing else, I'm assigning one star.

SB is a tourist town. Folks google "grocery store" and get off the freeway to shop here, or stock up their Airbnbs, year round. They do not have their bearings in SB.

Out-of-towners do not realize that, beyond the small, crammed street-level parking lot, which features faded-paint "in" and "out" arrows off of a 3-lane, busy main street (Chapala St), there's a huge basement-level parking lot.

As a result, they are aggressively zooming around the street-level lot, looking for spots, going the wrong way, and ignoring the two hard-to-see stop signs.

There is no signage to tell them that there's an underground lot, or how to get down there. Zero.

Meanwhile, in the underground lot, NO ONE is stopping for the stop signs which keep folks whom are exiting safe. Again, the stop signs are difficult to see. Drivers are literally zooming in and out of that lot.

This is so dangerous. Today, I was twice cut off by drivers ignoring stop signs. One driver literally drove through the stop sign and aimed right into me.

I observed a big back-up on my way in, two people shouting at each other, and prayed that they didn't have weapons.

I spoke to the very nice folks who run this store. They seem powerless to change this situation.

It doesn't help that the lot is now shared with the cannabis store next door, minimizing its already-jammed capacity.

Note to Ralphs Corporate: DO SOMETHING. You have all of the resources ($$$) of the Kroger Corporation available to fix this.

Create an agreement, as many SB businesses have done, to exclude the cannabis-store patrons from parking there, and create signage to indicate "Ralphs Parking Only." Enforce this via security staff. There is a city lot right across the street to accomodate cannabis store patrons.

Make the stop signs, painted arrows and safety features bigger / more highly visible. Light them up for evening safety.

Place security personnel in the parking lot, where they are needed, especially now / high tourist season in SB.

If nothing changes, people are going to get hurt, I promise you.

Thank you for your consideration.