I said it with a smile on my face. Really, I did.
"I'd like to express my displeasure with this next flyer we're running."
Trouble was, I had forgotten that the man to whom I addressed this (not quite) tongue-in-cheek comment lost his sense of humour in a tragic frowning accident years ago.
"Displeasure!" he barked back, and I could almost read his mind: the gall of this guy, suggesting that something in my purview is less than absolute perfection.
"Yes," I said, "I'm short seven bunkers here. There are seven things on sale to which I would normally devote extra space. But I can't, because of the sheer volume of other things on sale."
"Don't talk to me about space," he said. "I worked at ------- and we were busier than you in half the square footage. Besides," he added with a glint in his eye, "we spent several hundred thousand dollars renovating your store to give you more space. And now you're complaining? Humph."
Some rather uncharitable thoughts were swirling through my head, the mildest being thank you so much for your help in addressing this issue.
People from Head Office are rare visitors to our little world...on account, ironically, of our store being one of the best in the chain. You'd never know that when they do come in, though. The saying, as heard by Head Office personnel, goes like this: if you don't have anything nasty to say, don't say anything at all.
And so even before this Easter ad began, I was juggling logistics like so many glass bottles. I spent the better part of an entire day just deciding what would go where, what would have to stay on its shelf, exactly how much I could bring in and still close my freezer door, and so on.
Saturday: record day. Oddly enough, some of my specials didn't seem to be moving as well as I had anticipated. The frozen vegetables and pies were just sitting there. The Philly cream cheese at $1.47, though, was a hit. No wonder: the regular retail on that is now $3.19.
I had ample (so I thought) stock coming in later today, so I didn't bother ordering any more vegetables or pies for Monday. I did, however, leave a note for my assistant to re-check on Sunday morning and order if he felt we needed it.
I came in Monday morning to find no pies left and almost no vegetables. And none of either ordered. Crap.
"Did you check the stock?" I asked him.
"Yes," he said, "and this is what we had as of Sunday morning..."
A lot. Enough. I would have come to the same conclusion he did: we didn't need any more stock until Wednesday. Neither of us could have anticipated a Sunday that completely shattered the previous record. Compared to the last benchmark, Sunday was substantially busier than Saturday had been.
Worse: I was out of Philly bricks. What the hell?
I keep a sales journal dating back to Christmas of 2002. Every time I underestimate (or overestimate) a sale item, I write down what I did order and what I probably should have ordered. It's a you-screwed-up list that has been very helpful to me over the years. Also helpful is the predictable rotation of sale items. There are about ten things that predictably go on sale every Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. (This year, they'd added seven extra items, which prompted my complaint to Head Office.)
Philly cream cheese is one of the standards, though it had never been on at this price. I had noted in my sales journal that in the spring, the tubs dramatically outsold the bricks. The exact opposite obtains in October and December: everybody's baking. But in spring, the tubs sell more than the bricks. Got it?
Nope. I forgot to let my customers know.
No fewer than thirty people on Monday stared at my Wall O' Tubs and asked me where the cream cheese was. "Right here, ma'am", I would say, while bracing myself for the onslaught to come. "No, I mean the boxes". "I'm sorry, we won't have any more of those until Wednesday".
Cue the cursing. Most of them would stare at me as if I were some sort of mental defective and more than a few would say something like "you never have anything I need."
You never have anything I need. Why is it that without fail, anybody who says this has a shopping cart that's at least half full? It's all I can do not to offer, ever so politely, to put everything in their cart back. You know, since they don't need any of it.
I left yesterday not knowing if or when my Danone yogurt order was going to show. There was a big farmer's protest across Ontario yesterday: they surrounded several warehouses and slowed traffic to a crawl. They have a valid point: it's practically impossible to make any money at all farming any more. But inconveniencing the grocery-buying public on one of the busiest shopping days of the year won't garner Brownie points.
Of course, Danone yogurt was on sale. Of course, I was flush out. This was actually purposely done--I had to run out of something refrigerated on account of my walk-in cooler being jammed with milk and, not to put too fine a point on it, EGGS. But normally Danone's in no later than ten in the morning and here it is four in the afternoon and no yogurt.
Cue more cursing customers, looking to smear yogurt on their Easter hams, or something.
Sigh.
Folks...I'm just doing my best. It's all I can do.
Easter has never been a big deal in my family. It's odd, because generally they're suckers for a holiday, a birthday, a pseudo-holiday like Mother's Day, you name it. But Easter? I did the chocolate hunt when I was a kid, sure, but since then, just a day off.
Easter is obviously a huge deal everywhere else: the stress level actually rivales the Yuletide season. Strange.
Tomorrow is supposed to be even busier than Thursday. Some people think it will be busier than last Saturday, which is hard to imagine. We shall see.
Happy Easter, everyone.
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