The Great $1.00 Sale

That should be "g-r-a-t-e", as in what our teeth do every time we hear there's one of these suckers coming.

Look, people. They're chickens. That's all they are. And just because we have whole chickens on for $1 a pound doesn't give you the right to (a) snatch them out of other customers' hands; (b) run your cart into displays or customers out of sheer frustration that they got a chicken and you didn't; (c) engage in fisticuffs to the point where the police must be summoned.

I LOATHE these sales, the ones they put on every six to eight weeks or so, the ones that have some variant of "$1.00" in their titles. (The ones that have titles!) They draw new people into our store--which you'd think would be a good thing--but these new people are usually what we call 'cherry-pickers': customers who buy nothing but flyer items and thus cost, rather than make, the store money.
Even the cherry-pickers would be tolerable if they weren't so effing RUDE.

This was billed as the sale to end all sales. In fact, we extended our hours of operation for this one: we opened at 7 a.m. last Saturday. Head office, in its infinite wisdom, put this information on the back of the flyer, where very few people would find it (not that putting it on the front page would have done much better...in this postliterate world, we get at least one person a week walking right through the sign that says EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY ALARM WILL SOUND). Nobody reads anymore. They read numbers, to be sure: I keep a pocket full of pennies to dispense to the customers who are so very quick to notice when they're being overcharged by two cents. But words? Strung together in sentences like

"WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO LIMIT PURCHASE QUANTITIES TO REASONABLE FAMILY REQUIREMENTS"

--naw. Too many syllables. Wanna look at pictures instead.

Okay, so here's one: a picture of a cart loaded down with Fruitopia chilled 1.89-litre juice cartons--at least 40 of them. Circle the cart. Now put a BIG RED LINE through it.

Look, I don't care what size "family" (store) you're buying this for. They don't MAKE refrigerators that big for domestic use, okay? I've got a fridge over there that'll hold what you think you're going to be allowed to buy. It's a walk-in. We're not that stupid here. And this is not a warehouse. Bitch all you want, it won't change anything.

I don't get people. I know, I've said this before. But really. Our frozen Fruitopia retails for 97 cents...every day. Yet people routinely go apeshit when the chilled stuff is on for $1.00. Convenience, they say, looking at me as if I'm a moron. Oh really. But you have to freeze the chilled cartons if you're going to buy them in bulk like that. How convenient is that, hmm?

Over in dry grocery, one of the specials is Scooby-Doo "cereal" for $1.00. The regular price on this "cereal" is $4.17. Now, head office didn't do us any favours here--for some reason, the damn stuff was out of stock on the second delivery of the ad, meaning we got none beyond our initial set-up until after the weekend's business was over. The chain newsletter resounded with cries of "Scooby-Doo, where are you?" Beyond the first couple of hours on Saturday, we had to constantly remind customers that if we had a choice, we'd have all the breakfast candy in the world for them to feed to their already hyperactive children. (Well, we cleaned that up a bit, but the sentiment holds.) Unfortunately for all concerned, the choice is not ours.

People don't understand this. They think that everything is always within our control, when in the real world, very little is. The retail model has shifted over the past decade or so to "just in time" inventory control. In the name of efficiency, you're supposed to order just enough stock to make it to your next delivery. Everything is built with this in mind: the backroom is just so big, the damned dairy cooler is just so SMALL! If you build in too much of a buffer, you're going to have to deal with the logistics of where to put it all--or you might not get all you ordered, on the basis that head office knows better than you what you're going to sell. If other stores increase their orders beyond what the warehouse has in stock, then the warehouse has to procure more product and find a cost-efficient way to get it to that store--something easier bitched about than done.
By and large, this system works...if everything falls together just right, and if we all know what we're doing. I pride myself on knowing what I'm doing, but I'm human and fallible and I'm really sorry we're out of Eggo waffles for $1.00. More will be in at 2:07 today--at least that's what we're told--but anything can hold that up. Weather. Traffic. Waiting for deliveries at other stores. Improper loading by unionized warehouse workers who don't care whether your product arrives in one piece or not...so it arrives all over the trailer and has to be picked up and repiled. Stuff like that.

We've been circling around the meat department here, stealing glances at the mayhem. Now we'll just wade on in, okay? Don your jock...you're gonna need it.

The chain reserved a whack of chickens for this sale several months ago. The sale was known about only at the highest levels until August 12th or so. The secrecy was so pervasive, you'd think our lead item was the final installment of Harry Potter at $1.00 a pound, but no--it was whole chickens. To better ensure the competition didn't get hold of this and pre-empt us somehow, head office did all the pre-books...and they woefully underestimated how crazy Ontarians are for their chickens.
I'll give you some stats that don't breach confidentiality: one, our store alone has sold 12% of what was budgeted for an 80-plus store chain; two, we've sold not much more than 12% of what we could have sold if we'd had an unlimited supply. To have the kind of unlimited supply we'd need, however, we would have to back a tractor-trailer loaded with chickens up to our receiving door and run it day and night to keep the chickens cold. Of course, receiving anything else (milk, bread, eggs, etc) would be out of the question for a week.
To put it another way, we sold 400 chickens in less than 20 minutes. A middle-aged cunt (sorry, ladies, "cunt" is really le mot juste in this case) grabbed a bag of chicken from an elderly lady's hands--right out of her hands!--whereupon the elderly lady turned and spat "I hope you choke on it!" A deadly serious game of bumper carts ensued whenever a load of chickens arrived. Seriously, your jaws just drop watching this. And the store across town had to call the police when an all-out brawl broke out in their meat department. Over chickens. You're not sure whether you should laugh or cry. Or scream.
Or maybe just sigh in relief as Friday passes and the ad is over. Now we've got...oh-oh, Pizza Premiers at $2.97.

Here we go again.