The Joys of Retail (Tales from Aisle 10, Part III)

My work life has been some kind of interesting lately.
Our flyers have taken a turn for the heated, with a real emphasis on my dairy and frozen departments. Items I've rarely or never seen on sale in seven years have been promoted with great fanfare, leaving me utterly clueless as to how much stock to bring in.
Some examples:

Delissio Pizzas, $3.77: These regularly retail for $7.27 at our store and up to $8.99 elsewhere...you can imagine the stampede. To make matters more interesting, I had to book my stock five weeks in advance. At that point, we had just had Delissio on sale for $5 and I'd been amazed at the demand. So I ordered lots.
Nowhere near enough, as it turned out.
Luckily, Head Office had let it be known there was additional stock available, and I took full advantage, doubling and tripling my initial allocation for each delivery. Accordingly, I never...quite...ran out of pizza until late on the last day of the flyer. (At one point I was down to six cases in the store, which is considerably more tight than I like to cut things, but at least I wasn't entirely out for a length of time like, ahem, every other store in the Tri-Cities.)
Of course, I cheated: I put a limit of four pizzas per family per day on right early, after customers were seen grabbing cartsful of pizza, and left it on through most of the weekend.
I don't like to put limits on things, for several reasons. People think they're unfair--at least once an hour you have to explain to somebody that "four per family" applies even if you have fourteen kids, and we won't accept your claim that you're shopping for six different families in your neighbourhood, and we're so sorry, but the limit also applies if you don't understand written or spoken English. (It is really amazing how many people will talk to you in perfectly fluent English until you try to tell them why they have to leave some pizza for other people, at which point they don't understand a word you say.)
And despite our best efforts, the limits don't work very well. Husbands and wives split up and
go through different tills. Mothers send each of their kids around at intervals to garther four pizzas apiece. I've known people who will actually drive from store to store getting the limit from each...which is a great argument for gas at $4 a litre, as far as I'm concerned.
Last time these pizzas were on sale, at $5.00, I was hung with several cases of the Roasted Vegetable variety. So I didn't order quite as many of them this time around, relative to, say, Pepperoni, Deluxe, or Hawaiian. Big mistake: every vegetarian came in from miles around, and when the Roasted Vegetable was sold out (hey, I never said I was in stock on all kinds the whole time), the customers got right ornery. We were threatened with lawsuits ("you people don't care for those of your customers who eat properly!", one elderly man said rather haughtily). Another customer claimed to have been in four times looking for Roasted Vegetable, including the day before the flyer broke. This on Saturday, about half an hour after I ran out of stock for the first time. This, too, is typical.

2L carton milk, $1.88:

Before I detail this little fiasco, let me explain the peculiarities of the dairy industry in Southern Ontario.
Unlike everywhere else on the North American continent, our milk comes, by and large, in two formats: cardboard cartons, for any size under 4L (Americans: think of 1L = 1 qt.), and bagged 4L (roughly a gallon) milk. The latter, a format that so far as I know is unique to Ontario south and east of Thunder Bay, is hard to explain to someone who's never seen it before. Every year we get freshman university students arriving from out of province who regard my milk counter with a completely bewildered eye, looking for jugs that are almost impossible to find outside certain convenience stores. Instead, we have milk bags. Think of the kind of thing bread is wrapped in, including the little bread tie with the expiry date stamped on it...only instead of slices of bread, put three plastic baggies full of milk in there.
This is, of course, patently ridiculous. It requires the purchase of a dedicated milk pitcher to hold each individual plastic baggie; also required is a pair of scissors, a knife, or a dedicated tool to rip the bag open. And then, of course, the bag is open, exposed to the air. Most elderly people who shop in our store refuse to buy a 4L bag of milk despite a significant cost-savings for that very reason. They prefer cartons with screw-tops.
Jugs have screw-tops. But for reasons unfathomable, I doubt you'll see milk jugs in Southern Ontario grocery stores anytime soon. It's a mystery.

Anyway, back to the 2L cartons for $1.88.

We've never ran this before. We did run a 1L sale (99 cents) the last time I went on holidays, and I used those numbers as a rough guide.
Sales like this bring out the mathematically challenged in hordes and in droves. They even put the math on the flyer...prominently displayed: "equal to $3.76 for a 4L bag". (A four litre bag retails for $4.49 in our store...$5.29 if it's homogenized --whole--milk.)
They need not have bothered printing anything on the flyer. I can't begin to tell you how many people insisted the bag was still cheaper. There being three baggies inside a single 4L bag of milk, it seems people believe each baggie somehow contains 2L. Mathematically impossible, but there you go.
I didn't bring in very many milk bags to start this sale, stupidly forgetting people are stupid. Accordingly, I ran out of bags--something my boss was perfectly okay with, because even at the sale retail we were making money on the 2L cartons, whereas we lose a lot of money on every bag we sell.
If the definition of insanity is doing something the same way over and over again and expecting a different result, then besides being stupid I must also be insane. I kept thinking people would eventually twig to the fact they were saving money by purchasing two 2L cartons. Some did, but not many.
I cut my display space for bags right down and put all kinds of crates full of cartons where my bags normally go. It didn't help, confirming once again my suspicion that most people shop on autopilot.

Just to explain the sort of thinking I put into these promotions....

What kind of milk do you drink? I drink 1%, myself (or filtered skim, which tastes the same). In this I am not alone: 1% is almost equal to 2% in sales. Skim sells about half what 2% and 1% do and homo (3.25%) about half of skim. Homo milk is generally bought only by mothers with small children...and Asians, for some reason.
So when we ran the 1L at 99 cents sale, those were the ratios I followed...and was promptly out of homogenized milk. I'd thought people's taste in milk to be pretty static...that they wouldn't buy homo just because it represented a better deal--and I was wrong. Oh, well. I've been wrong before, and will be again.
And was again, I mean. This time, with homo 2L at $1.88 representing an even better deal, I brought in quite a bit of homo. And got hung with it. Not to mention the skim milk, which hardly sold at all. I give up.

Then there's this week's special.

Ristorante Pizzas: buy 2 at $4.00 each and get a Casa di Mama Pizza FREE

This is another thing new to my department: a buy two, get one free event. Total crapshoot. On the one hand, you have to spend $8 to get that free pizza...will people want to do that? On the other, that's $2.67 a pizza. When we ran the Ristorantes at $2.77 a few weeks back, we sold thousands of them...and the number one complaint from that ad was that the Casa di Mamas (which are the only pizzas with meat on them) weren't included.
As it turns out, I got lucky and properly gauged demand. This time. That said, it's been amusing to watch people misunderstanding that bolded line of text. People have been buying three Ristorantes expecting one of them to be free. Or three Casa di Mamas. Or two Casa di Mamas and a Ristorante. Or--my favourite--three Ristorantes and three Casa di Mamas (which are all free...right?)

Apropos of nothing at all, for the second time in just three months we had a customer take a crap on the floor in my frozen department. Or to be more accurate, leave a crap. I thought I'd seen the last of that when I left 7-Eleven. Apparantly not. New Price Chopper slogan: Our prices are so low, you'll shit yourself!