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You'd think they'd know better.

You'd think they'd know better than to assume customers read things. You'd really think they'd know better than to make customers read all this.

Okay, first of all it's a one day sale. That's nice and prominent--written twice, actually, which is great. It won't stop people from coming in Monday and trying to buy butter for $1.97. Short of whipping blocks of butter at people's heads, nothing is going to stop them from coming in Monday expecting to get a great deal on butter. (The regular price on this stuff is $5.79.)

I don't have a problem with a one-day sale. Lots of places do it. I wish we did it more often. But that's only the beginning.

You have to spend $50.00 before taxes to get your butter for $1.97. If you don't spend that much, the butter will ring through at $5.79.

Now this I have a wee problem with. First of all, it's written in relatively microscopic print on the flyer. Second, putting myself in the customer's shoes, maybe I don't want to spend fifty bucks. Maybe I just came in to get a few pre-Easter goodies and hey, look at this butter for $1.97 on the front page.

We have never run this sort of promotion before...and I hope to hell we never do again. From our point of view, this is a way to increase 'basket size'--the average transaction, in other words. It's a critical measure of retail performance, far more important than a mere customer count. See, what tends to happen nowadays--especially in this city, where there are about ten too many grocery stores--is rampant and excessive cherry-picking. People go from store to store to store, buying only the stuff on sale (and often, only the stuff on the front page of the flyer). Most weeks it's possible to outfit a pantry, a fridge, and a freezer fairly well buying only the "big deals"...that's how many chains there are. I can't blame the customer, exactly: who doesn't want to save money? Plus it's not the customer's job to worry about how much the store's losing on the stuff they're buying. That's my job, and I worry about it a lot.

So along comes this promotion to increase basket size, and it seems pretty simple...if you're us. But the customer has to contend with (a) a limited time offer; (b) a precondition that she spend what might be an exorbitant amount of money to her; (c) only certain varieties of the butter being on sale, to wit salted, unsalted, and light blocks of butter, NOT the sticks which look almost identical; and oh, yes, (d) a limit of two blocks of butter at the sale price. Any additional blocks will automatically ring through at--you guessed it!--$5.79.

I'm sorry, but this is more trouble than it's worth. It's impossible to forecast, for one thing. We were oh-so-helpfully given the number of $50.00+ transactions for this day last year, which is a good start, but now I've got to balance this flyer against last year's (which was much stronger overall), balance that against how many additional people might be coerced into spending fifty bucks for the privilege of cheap butter (not many, I'd imagine, but who knows?) All this bearing in mind that any product I'm left with at the end of the day, I'm stuck with--I sell about a case of each variety every two months at the regular price. As if all that weren't enough, I have to figure out the ratio of salted to unsalted that people will buy. (The "light" butter is negligible...would you buy "light" butter? Butter in which half the butterfat has been removed and replaced with water and air?) I settled on 70% salted/30% unsalted. Wrong. Should have gone 85/15, or even 90%/10%.

Forecasting aside, it's just plain too much for the customers to deal with. Literally every five minutes, somebody has to go to the tills and bring back a shopping basket full of butter, from people who either didn't read the "limit 2" part and/or people who didn't read the "with $50.00 purchase" part. It doesn't matter how many signs you put up. Sometimes it doesn't even matter if you tell the customer the details, because a surprising number of them pretend not to understand a word of spoken or written English. We had quite a few people expecting to get free butter today.

When you gently point all this out to, well, pretty much everybody, what you mostly do is piss pretty much everybody off. Which is the exact opposite of what you should be doing as a retailer.