Every so often, circumstances at work drive me to drink. This would be one of those weeks.
The ad this week is one of those infamous "dollar days" jobbies that strike fear into the hearts of grocery store workers everywhere. Although this particular flyer threw a couple of new wrinkles at me. More like crevasses, actually.
Okay, let's start with the NESTLE REAL DAIRY FRENCH VANILLA or SMARTIES ICE CREAM, 450 ml for $1.
A couple of weeks ago, when I found out we were running this item, I reacted with exasperation. You're kidding, right? See, the last time we had this stuff on sale (same price, roughly the same time of year, and--well, okay, only the French Vanilla), I went through one of the biggest runarounds of my career. My head office wanted to send me nine skids--which would have filled my walk-in freezer to capacity. I kvetched and moaned and we settled on seven...1920 units to a skid...13440 units. I was told I'd run out. I felt otherwise. Especially after I saw the product for the first time as seven skids landed in my freezer.
450 millilitres is not a lot of ice cream. It's smaller than a Haagen-Dazs tub.
Well, this flopped like nothing before or since. I watched countless people approach my huge display of ice cream, pick up a tub, note its almost total lack of weight, and put it back. I'm not paying a buck for a spoonful of ice cream!
We sold 1843 units, less than one of those pallets...for the week. I was stuck with the rest of it, despite repeated--like, every day--calls for somebody to relieve me of this white elephant taking up my freezer space. Six weeks later, I still had two full pallets left, which were FINALLY moved to stores in Toronto.
Three years later, and here it is again. Well, at least this time they've got Smarties ice cream too...I bet I'll sell twice as much of that. But still, I ain't takin' the four skids they want to send me. I took 3920 units, fully expecting to be left with a skid at the end of the ad.
Gone Saturday, two days into the ad. All of it. Sold.
Now I ask you, how the hell was I supposed to predict this? And will I have time to explain to every second customer that we sold more than twice as much in two days as we had in a full week last time it was on sale? Would anyone believe me when I tried?
I managed to get another shipment delivered yesterday. Hopefully it lasts the rest of the week.
AUNT JEMIMA WAFFLES, $1. This is another item we don't normally carry, although it's in the flyer every other month like clockwork, always at $1. I had to book this product six weeks ago...and I furthermore had to take the whole week's worth of sales on one delivery. Can't say I was overly impressed with this.
Especially when that amount, which had always lasted me the week, was sold out Sunday, with no more available anywhere. Gee, it almost seems like I'm deliberately trying to piss people off, eh?
But those two things pale in comparison to the fiasco that is 1L MILK for $1.
It seems like I just wrote about this when we had 2L cartons on sale for $1.88 all of a month ago. Well, this presents all the same challenges, multiplied beyond belief because this time, chocolate milk is included.
Ever heard a war cry? Ever wondered what the warrior would say if he had to put it into words? I know. He'd say this: CHOCOLATE MILK IS ON SALE!
Literally thousands of people who have not the slightest interest in chocolate milk at regular price will bathe in the stuff when it's on sale. Nobody buys one or two cartons: the minimum seems to be four, and many people buy to get twelve, sixteen or even more.
My cooler is meant to hold nine pallets. I somehow--I'm still not sure how--managed to cram sixteen in there last Thursday, and still ran out of chocolate milk sometime Saturday. Short of getting twice-a-day deliveries (for which we're charged a great deal of money), I'm not sure what else I could have done.
I worked Saturday, the busiest day we've seen since Easter 2006. I was off Sunday and damned glad to be. Except Sunday night, I couldn't sleep. At all.
There's no milk in the store!
Sure there is, you ordered lots. Remember how much was still there when you left yesterday?
Yeah, I do. And it's all gone now. You're going to walk in there tomorrow morning and there won't be a drop of milk in the whole effing store.
Okay, Ken, I lectured myself, this problem--if it is a problem--is going to be there (or not) tomorrow morning whether you sleep or not, and you'll face it a whole lot better if you sleep.
Sure, my mind agreed. I'll go to sleep. Just so you know, though, there's no milk there right now. I'm sure of it. The boss is on holidays this week, his flight to Vegas leaves sometime tomorrow, but you can bet the house he'll pop in first thing to fire your ass.
Shambling in like something out of Shaun of the Dead Monday morning, I put off actually touring my dairy department for twenty minutes. That's how scared I was. When I finally went down there, I found the following:
--yes, I was out of chocolate--but I was out of chocolate before I left Saturday;
--the homo was a titch light (hard to guess how many people will switch milk preferences just because the whole milk represents a better deal)
--the 2% and 1%, which were what I was really afraid of, were perfect
--I actually had too much skim milk.
All in all, not bad. Now if only my cooler were three times the size.
God, I'll be glad when this week's over. Except next week's ad is almost as hot. Here we go again.
Showing posts with label retail. Show all posts
Showing posts with label retail. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
Sunday, January 27, 2008
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!
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!
Sunday, December 16, 2007
If they came in today, maybe they WILL come in at three in the morning...
I don't understand people.
Environment Canada had been on red alert for days. "Major Crippling Extreme Snowstorm/Blizzard/Kyag" Due Saturday night", they shrieked. (Kyag: Kiss Your Ass Goodbye.) Living here in Southern Ontario, you get used to this sort of thing: the media goes into a frenzy on the mere speculation snow might fall. I'd understand this sort of behaviour in, say, south Texas...but this is Canada, which is supposed to be "the true north", eh? Besides, more often than not, they forecast a foot, we'll get an inch.
This Time We Mean It
Browsing various weather sites, I started to think we might actually get some sort of storm this time round, not just a light dusting. The official public forecast had a little addendum after all the doom-mongering to the effect that there was a "high degree of certainty" among all the various weather models that this was a major storm and there would be no missing it.
Various forecasts called for anywhere between 20 and 50 cm (8" to 20"). Everybody agreed on the winds, gusting up to 70 km/hr (45 mph), which would produce whiteout conditions and generally wreak havoc. This was all supposed to start last night and continue throughout the day. Side streets would be impassable. Plows would be taken off the roads. Asses would be receiving big smacking goodbye kisses hither and yon.
I woke up this morning to 10 cm (about 4"), with almost no wind. But within half an hour we had freezing rain and the wind was picking up. By the time I got to work, we had normal winter weather conditions...for my dad's place, a few hours north and right in the buckle of the snowbelt. The roads were not pretty and getting worse by the minute. To be honest, I hadn't seen it snow this hard here in Waterloo for several years. "Nice slow day at work", I thought.
And it was. But not near as slow as it should have been.
I had to repeatedly restrain the urge to walk up to a random shopper and say something like "excuse me, sir. What in the almighty BLEEP are you doing in here? Will you starve to death if you don't buy those pear slices today? I mean, hey, we appreciate your patronage, but we don't ask that you risk your life!"
Then I heard we were going to be open Boxing Day. Again.
I don't have to work, so it shouldn't concern me. But it does--because it's yet another example of consumerist society run amok.
The cold, hard facts about Boxing Day at our store: we've been open two years in a row now, and if you took all the customers we served on Boxing Day 2005 and 2006, added them to the customers we'll serve on Boxing Day 2007, and hell, let's add in next year's as well...you'd still have a slow day. PEOPLE DO NOT BUY GROCERIES ON BOXING DAY. And why? Because they bought all their groceries in the three days leading up to Christmas. Also because they're too busy buying electronics.
But there will be a few customers, a very few, and heaven forbid we give them up. So we'll be open on Boxing Day for your convenience. We'll lose our shirts, but that's not important.
The call-in show on 570 News today (a repeat from earlier in the week, or believe me, I would have been on the phone posthaste) was on the topic of Wal-Mart, and how they're now open 24 hours during December: good thing or bad thing? The overwhelming consensus was that this was fantastic, and about bloody time. I listened with steadily growing anger until somebody finally spoke for people like me. "You don't have time? Make time. People had time twenty years ago. Nobody was clamoring for the chance to go out and buy stuff at three in the morning."
Amen to that, brother.
Besides, I'm willing to bet the Wal-Mart parking lots aren't exactly stuffed full at 3 a.m. In fact, I bet they're pretty much empty. But there's still the odd customer, see...
And here's where the Train of Logic runs clean off the Rails of Reality. What are people buying at Wal-Mart at 3:00 a.m? Mostly Christmas presents. Maybe the odd bit of grocery--most Wal-Marts in Canada still have a pitiful grocery selection, anyway. But because they might be buying the odd bit of food, all grocery stores have to extend their hours at the very least.
As we have. It was announced sometime in November that not only would our "summer hours" (open 'til 10 p.m. instead of 9, six days a week) be permanent, we'd also be open until 11:00 on Fridays and Saturdays. The rationale was this: "the malls are busy right until they close. We will be there to satisfy our customers' grocery needs."
I could get behind that sentiment, I really could...if our customers had grocery needs at that hour in the winter. Their cars are stuffed with Christmas gifts and all they want to do is go home. Who can blame them? It explains why, in the twelve extra hours we've been open so far, we've served something like...twelve customers.
Nevertheless, next year I bet we'll be open 'til midnight. Unless, of course, we're open 24/7/365...all hail the Great God Capitalism.
Environment Canada had been on red alert for days. "Major Crippling Extreme Snowstorm/Blizzard/Kyag" Due Saturday night", they shrieked. (Kyag: Kiss Your Ass Goodbye.) Living here in Southern Ontario, you get used to this sort of thing: the media goes into a frenzy on the mere speculation snow might fall. I'd understand this sort of behaviour in, say, south Texas...but this is Canada, which is supposed to be "the true north", eh? Besides, more often than not, they forecast a foot, we'll get an inch.
This Time We Mean It
Browsing various weather sites, I started to think we might actually get some sort of storm this time round, not just a light dusting. The official public forecast had a little addendum after all the doom-mongering to the effect that there was a "high degree of certainty" among all the various weather models that this was a major storm and there would be no missing it.
Various forecasts called for anywhere between 20 and 50 cm (8" to 20"). Everybody agreed on the winds, gusting up to 70 km/hr (45 mph), which would produce whiteout conditions and generally wreak havoc. This was all supposed to start last night and continue throughout the day. Side streets would be impassable. Plows would be taken off the roads. Asses would be receiving big smacking goodbye kisses hither and yon.
I woke up this morning to 10 cm (about 4"), with almost no wind. But within half an hour we had freezing rain and the wind was picking up. By the time I got to work, we had normal winter weather conditions...for my dad's place, a few hours north and right in the buckle of the snowbelt. The roads were not pretty and getting worse by the minute. To be honest, I hadn't seen it snow this hard here in Waterloo for several years. "Nice slow day at work", I thought.
And it was. But not near as slow as it should have been.
I had to repeatedly restrain the urge to walk up to a random shopper and say something like "excuse me, sir. What in the almighty BLEEP are you doing in here? Will you starve to death if you don't buy those pear slices today? I mean, hey, we appreciate your patronage, but we don't ask that you risk your life!"
Then I heard we were going to be open Boxing Day. Again.
I don't have to work, so it shouldn't concern me. But it does--because it's yet another example of consumerist society run amok.
The cold, hard facts about Boxing Day at our store: we've been open two years in a row now, and if you took all the customers we served on Boxing Day 2005 and 2006, added them to the customers we'll serve on Boxing Day 2007, and hell, let's add in next year's as well...you'd still have a slow day. PEOPLE DO NOT BUY GROCERIES ON BOXING DAY. And why? Because they bought all their groceries in the three days leading up to Christmas. Also because they're too busy buying electronics.
But there will be a few customers, a very few, and heaven forbid we give them up. So we'll be open on Boxing Day for your convenience. We'll lose our shirts, but that's not important.
The call-in show on 570 News today (a repeat from earlier in the week, or believe me, I would have been on the phone posthaste) was on the topic of Wal-Mart, and how they're now open 24 hours during December: good thing or bad thing? The overwhelming consensus was that this was fantastic, and about bloody time. I listened with steadily growing anger until somebody finally spoke for people like me. "You don't have time? Make time. People had time twenty years ago. Nobody was clamoring for the chance to go out and buy stuff at three in the morning."
Amen to that, brother.
Besides, I'm willing to bet the Wal-Mart parking lots aren't exactly stuffed full at 3 a.m. In fact, I bet they're pretty much empty. But there's still the odd customer, see...
And here's where the Train of Logic runs clean off the Rails of Reality. What are people buying at Wal-Mart at 3:00 a.m? Mostly Christmas presents. Maybe the odd bit of grocery--most Wal-Marts in Canada still have a pitiful grocery selection, anyway. But because they might be buying the odd bit of food, all grocery stores have to extend their hours at the very least.
As we have. It was announced sometime in November that not only would our "summer hours" (open 'til 10 p.m. instead of 9, six days a week) be permanent, we'd also be open until 11:00 on Fridays and Saturdays. The rationale was this: "the malls are busy right until they close. We will be there to satisfy our customers' grocery needs."
I could get behind that sentiment, I really could...if our customers had grocery needs at that hour in the winter. Their cars are stuffed with Christmas gifts and all they want to do is go home. Who can blame them? It explains why, in the twelve extra hours we've been open so far, we've served something like...twelve customers.
Nevertheless, next year I bet we'll be open 'til midnight. Unless, of course, we're open 24/7/365...all hail the Great God Capitalism.
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
A Whole Lotto Trouble
Back when I was a child--oh, hell, probably up into my teens--I used to lie as a matter of course. I lied for the same reason most people lie: because the truth was unpleasant, better avoided. And of course the truth could never be avoided for long, and of course I'd be in trouble, and of course it would be twice as much trouble because I had lied.
And yet...I'd just turn around and lie again the next time I had the opportunity. Over and over and over again. Why? Because this time I'd get away with it, is why.
It never worked, you know. Not once. My greatest, most elaborate lie was also my last of any consequence: for well over a year, I said whatever came to mind to keep people from finding out I had dropped out of university. I had three excuses for maintaining this fiction: one, as usual, the truth was not pretty; two, I felt I had to hide my Internet addiction, which contributed; three, at the time I couldn't even explain myself. I had what to me were damned good reasons, but to others they'd probably ring hollow.
Oh, I harboured few illusions throughout: I figured people probably thought I was a fraud. But if I didn't actually admit it, I could just continue on with my life, and maybe it would all go away. After all, I am not a piece of paper.
But then...I work in a grocery store. The truth will out. It becomes a matter of accepting the truth, and working with it...something I think I'm pretty good at, all things considered.
That all came to mind as I read the headlines regarding the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation scandal. It is alleged by the Ontario ombudsman, Andre Marin, that OLGC knew some of its retailers were scamming the public out of tens of millions of dollars...and did nothing. They were more concerned, Marin suggests, with the impact of bad press on their bottom line than with the fraud itself.
Well, hey. Now they've got the fraud and the bad press--and a whole lot more of both than they would have had if they had simply admitted the problem when it was discovered and taken immediate steps to rectify the situation.
But that's not how it usually works, is it? Fraud and misdirection are so rampant in society today--from the widespread cheating that goes on in schools everywhere to the even more widespread cheating of the public engaged in by the Enrons, Bre-Xs, and Nortels of the world--that we don't even bat an eyelash when something comes out in the wash. It's expected. Jean Chretien referred to it, famously, as "the normal operation". It's so expected, in fact, that whenever somebody actually dares to publically admit wrongdoing, not only are they forgiven instantly, the admiration of their public only grows. Think Bill Clinton.
I attended OLGC training way back in the late nineties, just as the first documented instances of fraud were occurring, and there was almost nothing mentioned about security or how to spot irregularities. Much more time was spent discussing all the ins and outs of operating the terminals...which I had been operating, at that point, for six years, I might add. Retailers were never discouraged from playing. In fact, I specifically recall somebody--I wish it had been me--asking why that might be, since most retail contests are off-limits to people who sell the product.
The answer was telling: "There's no conflict of interest", we were told, "since there's no way to determine a winning ticket ahead of time."
Oh, really? In 2004, the OLGC 'discovered' a practice they dubbed "pinpricking", wherein a retailer would lightly scratch the surface of an instant ticket to see if it was a winner.
As for 6/49 and other online games, sure, you might not be able to tell a winner ahead of time, but it's child's play to hide a winner after the fact.
Say somebody comes in with a jackpot winner. The cashier inserts the ticket into the machine, punches in a four digit verification code, and the machine launches into a catchy little song. If you've been in a variety store in Ontario, you've almost certainly head the tune more than once. Indeed, I was heartily sick of the little jingle...because it was exactly the same song no matter how much was won.
A little sheet of paper ejects from the machine, stating winnings. "Free Ticket", it says, or "$10.00" or, presumably, "$24, 518,989.24". 7-Eleven's policy when I worked there was to immediately give that slip to the customer. Little Short Stop, on the other hand, insisted the slip be kept to ensure the tills were in balance at shift end. I disagreed rather vehemently with this policy, and made a point of at least showing the customer what she had won. Very occasionally I'd get a winner who wanted that slip as proof--and there was no way to get a duplicate. Those are the moments as a retailer that you hate: when you have to obey a patently stupid and possibly illegal policy.
I always thought Short Stop's system was ripe for fraud, but even 7-Eleven's can be beaten: simply keep a bunch of free ticket slips on hand and substitute when appropriate. Don't think it doesn't happen: from 1999 to 2006, at least 209 retail owners or employees "won" major lottery prizes. Chance would dictate eight to ten winners over that span of time.
As one who has worked in the industry, I have one piece of advice for online lottery customers: check your tickets ahead of time. It never failed to amaze me how many people would meander in to the store at ten o'clock of a Sunday morning and proceed to produce twenty or forty tickets dating back as much as six months. I never could even begin to understand this practice: if there's even a remote chance I'm a millionaire, I want to know about it. Like right now. But there's a more compelling reason: if you know what you have won before you hand your ticket over, you're much harder to scam.
In the meantime, I would expect the minister responsible for this fiasco to step down immediately, pending a full inquiry. And it goes without saying that retailers must not be allowed to claim prizes, or to have them claimed on their behalf.
And yet...I'd just turn around and lie again the next time I had the opportunity. Over and over and over again. Why? Because this time I'd get away with it, is why.
It never worked, you know. Not once. My greatest, most elaborate lie was also my last of any consequence: for well over a year, I said whatever came to mind to keep people from finding out I had dropped out of university. I had three excuses for maintaining this fiction: one, as usual, the truth was not pretty; two, I felt I had to hide my Internet addiction, which contributed; three, at the time I couldn't even explain myself. I had what to me were damned good reasons, but to others they'd probably ring hollow.
Oh, I harboured few illusions throughout: I figured people probably thought I was a fraud. But if I didn't actually admit it, I could just continue on with my life, and maybe it would all go away. After all, I am not a piece of paper.
But then...I work in a grocery store. The truth will out. It becomes a matter of accepting the truth, and working with it...something I think I'm pretty good at, all things considered.
That all came to mind as I read the headlines regarding the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation scandal. It is alleged by the Ontario ombudsman, Andre Marin, that OLGC knew some of its retailers were scamming the public out of tens of millions of dollars...and did nothing. They were more concerned, Marin suggests, with the impact of bad press on their bottom line than with the fraud itself.
Well, hey. Now they've got the fraud and the bad press--and a whole lot more of both than they would have had if they had simply admitted the problem when it was discovered and taken immediate steps to rectify the situation.
But that's not how it usually works, is it? Fraud and misdirection are so rampant in society today--from the widespread cheating that goes on in schools everywhere to the even more widespread cheating of the public engaged in by the Enrons, Bre-Xs, and Nortels of the world--that we don't even bat an eyelash when something comes out in the wash. It's expected. Jean Chretien referred to it, famously, as "the normal operation". It's so expected, in fact, that whenever somebody actually dares to publically admit wrongdoing, not only are they forgiven instantly, the admiration of their public only grows. Think Bill Clinton.
I attended OLGC training way back in the late nineties, just as the first documented instances of fraud were occurring, and there was almost nothing mentioned about security or how to spot irregularities. Much more time was spent discussing all the ins and outs of operating the terminals...which I had been operating, at that point, for six years, I might add. Retailers were never discouraged from playing. In fact, I specifically recall somebody--I wish it had been me--asking why that might be, since most retail contests are off-limits to people who sell the product.
The answer was telling: "There's no conflict of interest", we were told, "since there's no way to determine a winning ticket ahead of time."
Oh, really? In 2004, the OLGC 'discovered' a practice they dubbed "pinpricking", wherein a retailer would lightly scratch the surface of an instant ticket to see if it was a winner.
As for 6/49 and other online games, sure, you might not be able to tell a winner ahead of time, but it's child's play to hide a winner after the fact.
Say somebody comes in with a jackpot winner. The cashier inserts the ticket into the machine, punches in a four digit verification code, and the machine launches into a catchy little song. If you've been in a variety store in Ontario, you've almost certainly head the tune more than once. Indeed, I was heartily sick of the little jingle...because it was exactly the same song no matter how much was won.
A little sheet of paper ejects from the machine, stating winnings. "Free Ticket", it says, or "$10.00" or, presumably, "$24, 518,989.24". 7-Eleven's policy when I worked there was to immediately give that slip to the customer. Little Short Stop, on the other hand, insisted the slip be kept to ensure the tills were in balance at shift end. I disagreed rather vehemently with this policy, and made a point of at least showing the customer what she had won. Very occasionally I'd get a winner who wanted that slip as proof--and there was no way to get a duplicate. Those are the moments as a retailer that you hate: when you have to obey a patently stupid and possibly illegal policy.
I always thought Short Stop's system was ripe for fraud, but even 7-Eleven's can be beaten: simply keep a bunch of free ticket slips on hand and substitute when appropriate. Don't think it doesn't happen: from 1999 to 2006, at least 209 retail owners or employees "won" major lottery prizes. Chance would dictate eight to ten winners over that span of time.
As one who has worked in the industry, I have one piece of advice for online lottery customers: check your tickets ahead of time. It never failed to amaze me how many people would meander in to the store at ten o'clock of a Sunday morning and proceed to produce twenty or forty tickets dating back as much as six months. I never could even begin to understand this practice: if there's even a remote chance I'm a millionaire, I want to know about it. Like right now. But there's a more compelling reason: if you know what you have won before you hand your ticket over, you're much harder to scam.
In the meantime, I would expect the minister responsible for this fiasco to step down immediately, pending a full inquiry. And it goes without saying that retailers must not be allowed to claim prizes, or to have them claimed on their behalf.
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Tales from aisle 10 (II)
The behaviour of grocery shoppers never ceases to amaze me. Not a day goes by when I don't wonder whether I should switch careers, not out of any great hatred for my job (I enjoy it, even with its frustrations) but because Mental Sarcastic Bastard's getting harder and harder to keep in check. Bilious thoughts bubble up out of the muck on a daily basis:
My God, the things people will do for other people's tap water. I am STILL having trouble even comprehending the madness that descends upon an entire city whenever bottled water goes on sale. Even granting that our city's tap water is barely fit for human consumption (it's the only water I've ever tasted that makes me thirstier the more I drink!), there are so many more cost-effective options. Tap water plus any sort of filter plus reusable plastic jug: roughly one-hundredth the cost, per liter, of even the cheapest bottled water. For those, like me, who wish Brita containers came in reasonable sizes, there are those 19.5-litre bottles, infinitely reusable, that cost between 51 cents each (that's the plan I'm on) and $6.99 (if you buy them at the grocery store). Even adding in the cost of the cooler, considering it should last many years, you're saving a huge amount of money. Of course, if you live most anywhere else urban, you can simply turn on your tap: your rate should be something on the order of $1.82 per thousand litres, plus nominal service charges.
That's all most bottled water is, by the way: other people's tap water. But hey, it's your money.
I had a woman today looking for frozen spinach. Actually, I get quite a few people like her who, upon being led to the frozen spinach, look at me, shake their heads, and say "no, I mean boxes."
Further inquiry usually leads to the revelation (for the customer) that the bags we have now and the boxes we stopped carrying more than three years ago are exactly the same size: 250 grams. I say usually because several customers will swear up and down they bought much larger boxes of spinach here just last week. You're not supposed to contradict the customer, ever, so my standard response to but I just got it here last week! is "If you did, ma'am, it was a mispick: something shipped to us in error that we're not able to get again. Sorry about that."
Today's customer looked at me like I'd lost my mind when I told her, regretfully, that the box of spinach she sought was long gone. "But we have these bags," I started to say, getting the "buh" out before she snapped "in THIS store, you mean."
MSB almost made it past the censor-man. Of course in this store. This is the store you're in, this is the store I'm in, this would be the only store I'm qualified to speak about.
Did I ever mention just how much I adore being snapped at?
"These bags are tiny!" she said in an accusatory tone of voice, as if I had known she was coming 'round the corner, shrunk them just in time, and was even now gloating over my accomplishment.
"Actually, ma'am, I think you might find they're exactly the same weight as the boxes you normally buy elsewhere. They're 250 grams." Watch it, Ken, that came perilously close to a contradiction.
"What's that in ounces?" she asked, entirely unmollified, as if the whole metric system has tormented her for the thirty years it's been in effect. Probably has. God, three pet peeves in one customer, this had to be some kind of record.
"Eight ounces. One cup." For about the millionth time I found myself wishing I could say what I really was thinking: how the hell should I know? What century are you living in, anyway? Are you going to ask me the length of this aisle in cubits, next?
Last Friday night, someone asked me for the Aunt Jemima waffles on sale for $1.00. "Sorry, sir, they were on sale last week." Whereupon he plucked a flyer out of his pocket and whipped it in front of my face. "Right...THERE!" he almost yelled.
"May I see that flyer, sir?" I asked. He gave it to me. While pretending to study the waffles which were indeed pictured, I plucked a pen out of my pocket, turned the flyer over, circled the line that said--essentially--"These Low Prices Were in Effect LAST WEEK!" and, using the exact same motion he had so suddenly employed (okay, I didn't get quite so close to his face), said "no, right...THERE!"
I think he got the point. He did look a little sheepish.
I rarely let my inner demon out at all. Most customers have no idea the thoughts swirling just aft of my forehead--sometimes I'm amazed I can keep a smile on my face and in my voice while those thoughts swirl. Oh, look, another illiterate....ma'am, if that milk was any closer you'd be lactating...really, now, does every mom, Nic and Sherri have to let their kids run hogwild in here?....what did you mean by leaving that cart so far from the corral? Are you rude, or just lazy?...
Then there's the wee-wee matter of the bathroom. Our public loo's located just past the tills on the way out the front door. The staff bathroom, contrary to extremely popular customer opinion, is NOT in the back room, it's upstairs...about as far from the back room as you can get and still be in the same building. I can certainly understand the odd customer wandering into our back room looking for the lavatory, because (a) it's invisible until you're past a cashier and (b) quite a few stores do have public bathrooms off their back storage areas. But you get people marching back there as if they're reporting for work, eyes scanning everywhere for a bathroom that simply must exist (after all, there's no sign!), then actually arguing with us when we tell them it's at the front of the store.
"Aww, c'mon. Let me use yours, then."
" 'Ours' is actully even further away from here, and behind a locked door."
"No, it isn't. I know you've got one back here. It's THE LAW."
???????
You, sir, are full of shit. Not just literally, either.
Every day brings its share of cuckoos: the woman who insists her groceries are all keyed in manually, convinced the scanner emits radiation or something (look around, lady--notice all those other customers getting their groceries scanned? Look pretty healthy, don't they?). I put a sign up informing people that the goat's anus tartare they're looking for is on the endcap at the front of this aisle, right next to the squirrel testicles ( I'll even put in helpful arrows, in case 'front' isn't clear enough) and scores of people will move the sign, peer at the empty shelf behind it and demand to know where the goat's anus tartare is. The people, about ten out of every ten, who won't take the top copy of a pile of newspapers. The related people who insist on getting milk right from the back of the shelf, even when it's the same date. Sometimes I just shake my head.
Sometimes it doesn't stop shaking.
Thursday, December 28, 2006
Retail Rambles (or, Hail to the Sheeple)
First off, obligatory Georgia update: I feel for all the world like a new father. Georgia is by turns endearing and annoying, sometimes both at once. Her bladder is only slightly larger than my wife's, and thus I must keep one eye peeled at all times for the ol' drop and squat. And the sensation of peeled eye is mighty disagreeable.
Tux is getting along much better than I thought he would. Georgia seems to worship the ground he lopes around on. We have Tux trained, every time he comes in the house, to ascend the three steps from our tiny side landing to the kitchen proper, turn around, and sit, so that we can clean his paws with a towel we keep for the purpose. Well, every once in a while, Georgia will come in, wriggle her way up the three steps (each one taller than she is), and immediately turn around and do a perfect sit. It's the cutest thing.
She's really cute, in fact, up until the moment she chomps down on some exposed skin with those vampire teeth of hers. Or when she has a dump. Jesus, it'll turn your socks inside out. Or when she begs to go outside for the third time in a night. The only thing that gets me out of bed is the sleepy thought she might be readying another dump: better out than in. Believe me.
By and large, though, I'm glad we got another puppy. So is Tux, I think.
****************************
My friend Jen wrote on her blog, just before Christmas, that she was worried about the lack of shoppers in her woods-neck. So was I, at the time, in mine. Now, last year, Christmas fell on a Saturday, giving us a full week of retail mayhem before the fact. It also meant that most stores would be closed the entire weekend, which lent shoppers a frisson of panic. (Close a store for just one day and watch the sheeple stampede the day before. Close it for two...)
This year, with Christmas on a Monday, it was widely believed that people would hold off until the weekend for the vast majority of their shopping.
They never came. At least not in my store. And not, from what I've heard, in many.
Oh, Wal-Mart did well, I was told. Now, I'm not a fan of Sam Walton's empire. I don't believe all the myths that have sprung up around it...it's possible to fight Goliath and win; the store's arrival in a small town actually creates more retail than it destroys (lots of stores want to locate adjacent to a Wal-Mart and feed off the business). There's no doubting it's anti-union, but, then, so am I.
No, my biggest peeve about Wal-Mart is the self-fulfilling prophecy retailers have built up around it. It's American, it's huge, we're doomed.
Wal-Mart has two major vulnerabilities. They pride themselves on service, but in my experience, their customer service is average at best. Some old coot grunting you a good day as he hands you a cart doesn't put me in mind of superior service. Again in my experience, they don't treat their regulars any differently than they treat first-timers...and they do nothing much to encourage first-timers to become regulars.
Their second problem, and it's almost as big, concerns their pitiful selection. Caveat: I haven't seen the new Wal-Mart Supercentres which claim to out-selection any of the discount banners at discount banner prices. The closest one of these behemoths to me is over an hour away. But [cue theme from Jaws]...they're coming...
The regular Wal-Marts have no produce, no meat, no bakery, no deli...just some grocery and dairy and a very limited amount of frozen goods.
And I'll admit what's doubtless another proof of impending fogeyism: I don't like the idea of buying groceries the same place I buy clothing. There are a couple of retailers advertising on this very theme right now: Pharma Plus ("buying your eggs the same place you buy your cough medicine...[we] put your health first")...which would carry more heft if they didn't stock a bunch of food. Then there's Black's, with that really...sweet...ad about digital cameras:
"Hi, I want to buy a digital camera."
"Sweet. What kind do you want?"
"Uh...I was kinda hoping you could help me out with that."
"Sweet. I'd get this one."
"Why?"
"It's sweet."
Those two campaigns sum up my feelings about retail. Do what you're good at, and do it well, and don't overgeneneralize. (Perceptive readers might question me on my love of Canadian Tire, which is general merchandise nirvana. Yup, and should they ever start selling meat, I ain't buyin' it there.)
But Wal-Mart does overgeneralize, at least in my opinion. It's not a popular opinion, obviously, because people like to shop there. (One other nuisance: rude customers abound in Wal-Marts. I'm not sure why this should be, and I hesitate to advance any suggestions for fear of being branded...well, never mind. But they push, they shove, they elbow, and then they give you dirty looks for being in their way.)
But Wal-Mart has enough clout that it sets the staple prices in town. If they want to sell butter for $3.49, we're all obligated to follow along, and never mind that butter costs us $4.19 a pound. Stupid, really. Staples like butter aren't, generally speaking, the sorts of things people will drive out of their way for.
Anyway, I found out where all our business went. Real Canadian SuperStore. They did $2.8 million in the week leading into Christmas. In ONE STORE. Think about that a minute. Add up your family grocery purchase for the week; then grab your trusty calculator and enter 2800000/that. There's a rough customer count for you. Nice, eh? I remind you, ONE STORE.
How did they do it? Two ways I noticed. One, their flyer was full of deeply discounted general merchandise, including DVD players for ten bucks (not a name brand, mind you...) The second thing they did was run a promotion Friday and Saturday night from 9:00-midnight: NO TAX ON ANYTHING IN THE STORE. (And the fine print taketh away: tobacco, pharmacy, and a few other categories.)
Now, I'm not a sheeple. I see "NO TAX" and I don't think "whoa, I'm cheating the government!" or "yowza, that means half price!" I'm not cheating the government; the tax is being paid on my behalf. And it's a savings of either six or maybe as much as fourteen percent. Picture that on a Boxing Week Blowout sign. "SAVE SIX TO FOURTEEN PERCENT ON TAXABLE ITEMS IN OUR STORE!!!!! IF IT'S NON-TAXABLE, PAY...REGULAR PRICE!!!!!"
Doesn't that just get your motor running? Yeah, right.
But see, you're not a sheeple, either. The sheeple descended on that place in droves on Friday and Saturday night.
The more I think about it, the more I'm willing to pay regular price on things to avoid the kind of mob scene we saw in Future Shop this Boxing Day, or what was seen in Real Canadian SuperStore pretty much all last week.
And here's the kicker. I'm pretty sure RCSS, for all the volume it did, lost money for the week. Margins in this industry are razor thin to begin with, and the loss leaders they advertised may have been heavy on the leader, but they were just as heavy on the loss. Try a little irony, it's good for your blood.
So now we're in the doldrums, the absolute deadest week of the year. We've got a two-day sale on Delissio Pizzas coming up: a two-pack for $5.97. Pretty impressive considering one's $7.47. But is it impressive enough to draw a crowd? We'll see.
Monday, November 06, 2006
Well I'll be a SAP-sucker...
We did it.
We went live without going dead. Only a few glitches--for a while we had no way to enter or send orders to our warehouse, for one thing. All three warehouse loads that were slated to arrive yesterday afternoon showed up early this morning instead, back to back to back. I had anticipated this, but I could have done without the three separate emails telling me all was fine, all manner of things were fine, and that all loads would arrive on time. Sure, guys, pull the other one, wouldja?
In the manner of all upgrades everywhere, they've managed to introduce a few "features" of dubious value, things that create more work with little perceived benefit--at least at store level. I do hope my company is growing its own forests, because the stream of paper coming down to the stores has suddenly become a torrent. On the other hand, there are nice handy-dandy things like the ability to change dozens of prices at once. The invoices from the warehouse are a lot more readable.
Today was (hopefully) my last day dealing pretty much exclusively with SAP (have you ever head a more vague company name than Systems, Applications, Processes?). Now to get back down there and sniff my dairy air.
We went live without going dead. Only a few glitches--for a while we had no way to enter or send orders to our warehouse, for one thing. All three warehouse loads that were slated to arrive yesterday afternoon showed up early this morning instead, back to back to back. I had anticipated this, but I could have done without the three separate emails telling me all was fine, all manner of things were fine, and that all loads would arrive on time. Sure, guys, pull the other one, wouldja?
In the manner of all upgrades everywhere, they've managed to introduce a few "features" of dubious value, things that create more work with little perceived benefit--at least at store level. I do hope my company is growing its own forests, because the stream of paper coming down to the stores has suddenly become a torrent. On the other hand, there are nice handy-dandy things like the ability to change dozens of prices at once. The invoices from the warehouse are a lot more readable.
Today was (hopefully) my last day dealing pretty much exclusively with SAP (have you ever head a more vague company name than Systems, Applications, Processes?). Now to get back down there and sniff my dairy air.
Thursday, November 02, 2006
Crunch time
Y'know, if I hadn't just got back from holidays...I'd need a holiday right about now. Our entire company, all banners, is undergoing a major computer system transformation and "go live" is this weekend. The final two training sessions took place while I was away, so I've had to glean what I can from the training manuals. I have a reasonable idea what's going on, but the sheer volume of information is a bit intimidating. Emails from head office come in seemingly every few minutes. Do this! Don't do that! Stand on your head and meow like a kitten!
"Go Live"...one only hopes it doesn't mean we're all about to get zotted.
I've had to let my dairy department slide, as this other has been almost a full-time proposition. I have an assistant down there holding things together with spit and baling wire, but it's touch and go. Thankfully, we are getting a part-time administrative assistant to take some of the heat off. Once I've got her trained, I can go back to being a full time Dairy Co-ordinator.
Part of me will miss the paperwork. I know, I'm weird, but I enjoy paperwork. I find I can get right into the nuts and bolts of the business, and the responsibility to get it right is one that sits well on my shoulders. Down on the floor, well, it's an endless cycle: stock this, order that, clean the other, and repeat. It's not that I don't enjoy my job--I do--but it is undeniably tedious at times.
Meanwhile, I work all weekend--if things go well, I won't be in there long on Sunday, but any glitches will have me there for the day, meaning I'll be working twelve days straight. Luckily, my stress level started somewhere well below zero, so I'm still game. Pile it on, baby!
"Go Live"...one only hopes it doesn't mean we're all about to get zotted.
I've had to let my dairy department slide, as this other has been almost a full-time proposition. I have an assistant down there holding things together with spit and baling wire, but it's touch and go. Thankfully, we are getting a part-time administrative assistant to take some of the heat off. Once I've got her trained, I can go back to being a full time Dairy Co-ordinator.
Part of me will miss the paperwork. I know, I'm weird, but I enjoy paperwork. I find I can get right into the nuts and bolts of the business, and the responsibility to get it right is one that sits well on my shoulders. Down on the floor, well, it's an endless cycle: stock this, order that, clean the other, and repeat. It's not that I don't enjoy my job--I do--but it is undeniably tedious at times.
Meanwhile, I work all weekend--if things go well, I won't be in there long on Sunday, but any glitches will have me there for the day, meaning I'll be working twelve days straight. Luckily, my stress level started somewhere well below zero, so I'm still game. Pile it on, baby!
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
Shopping...
I'm not your typical man in oh so many ways.
I don't ogle women's boobs. Cars to me have four wheels and go places and that's all. I couldn't care less if I lose all my hair--actually, I think I'd like to: one less thing to do in the morning.
Let's see: my jealousy gene was never installed; I don't hog the remote (actually, my wife does that in our house); I actually have to love somebody--or at least like them a lot--to have sex with them; my job is what I do, not who I am. If you ask me the date of my anniversary or my wife's birthday, I don't have to hesitate.
Oh, there are plenty of ways I do resemble your stereotypical man...I derive an insane amount of pleasure from farting; I love several sports, especially hockey; unlike most women, I don't register dirt until it can support agriculture. I have selective hearing. Sexual thoughts enter my brain without knocking, kick around in there for a while, and then leave, only to come back later, say, in the next minute or two.
But by and large, I'm different. Abnormal. For instance, I don't mind shopping with my wife. Even for clothes.
In fact, I've picked out almost half her wardrobe over the years.
It helps that Eva's not your typical woman, either. She hates shopping when it's crowded. She won't spend her life's savings for a designer label. Nor does she agonize, either in the store or daily at home, over what to wear. We both share the conviction that clothes exist largely to cover nakedness, and any other function they have is largely irrelevant. Sure, you can't wear your comfies out to a fancy dinner, but beyond that...clothes are clothes.
I find it disgusting, in this rapidly obesifying society, that decent clothes for fat women are so hard to find. I know I just got finished saying that clothes are pretty much just to keep you covered, but why would anyone want to be covered in the dress their great-grandma was buried in? And just who was it that decided fat people are always cold? Eva for one is hot at any temperature much above absolute zero...which renders at least three quarters of Pennington's stock way too heavy for her. I can't begin to tell you how many times I've spotted a beautiful looking dress/skirt/what have you, only to dart to it, heft it, and think my God, she'd be reduced to a puddle within half an hour.
Eva does have her little pet obsession: purses.
I've never really understood purses. You don't see men carrying anything analogous--but then, women's wear typically doesn't have pockets. Men do have them--and most of us don't stuff them to anywhere near the degree women cram their purses. It's almost as if they expect Monty Hall from Let's Make A Deal to step out from behind that bush and say "I'll give $50 to the first person who gives me a...hard boiled egg!"
Really, gals, how much of the stuff you carry around day after day do you actually need?
Anyway, my wife is on a lifelong search for the IDEAL PURSE. She doesn't spend her every waking moment thinking about it, by any means, but whenever we're out shopping and we go past a purse place, Eva will sweep the room with her gaze and say "nope, this place doesn't stock the IDEAL PURSE either. You ask her what the ideal purse is and she'll say "I don't know, I'll know it when I see it."
"Oh, come on. When you see it, what will it look like?"
"Well, it must have a long, adjustable strap. It must be roomy but not bulky. It needs a lot of compartments but it can't look like it has a lot of compartments. It needs a hideaway for personal items like tampons and such. (Ken intrudes...uck, I'm a typical man in that just typing the word 'tampons' makes me vaguely ill.) Don't know about the material, probably leather. Oh yeah, and it needs at least one sleeve on the outside for a work passcard, so that the card doesn't dangle."
"Shit, no wonder you can't find the IDEAL PURSE. You've set the bar impossibly high."
"Exactly. But someday I'll find it, and I'll buy ten of them."
Now, I'll readily admit there's some places I will not shop in. Michael's is one. I don't think men are allowed in there--they certainly don't make any concession to the male persuasion. Everywhere you look there are frilly little doomoms, thingamawigs and whatchamagirlies. Any man you find in Michael's invariably trails his partner by at least fifteen feet, walking warily and wearily, head down, hoping against hope that no other male will catch him in there.
But book shopping? I can do that all day. My wife who loves me also loves to shop for books, so we often end up in Coles or Chapters soon after a Pennington's run. It makes the clothes shopping even easier to get through.
(Any hints on the IDEAL PURSE should be forwarded to my email...)
I don't ogle women's boobs. Cars to me have four wheels and go places and that's all. I couldn't care less if I lose all my hair--actually, I think I'd like to: one less thing to do in the morning.
Let's see: my jealousy gene was never installed; I don't hog the remote (actually, my wife does that in our house); I actually have to love somebody--or at least like them a lot--to have sex with them; my job is what I do, not who I am. If you ask me the date of my anniversary or my wife's birthday, I don't have to hesitate.
Oh, there are plenty of ways I do resemble your stereotypical man...I derive an insane amount of pleasure from farting; I love several sports, especially hockey; unlike most women, I don't register dirt until it can support agriculture. I have selective hearing. Sexual thoughts enter my brain without knocking, kick around in there for a while, and then leave, only to come back later, say, in the next minute or two.
But by and large, I'm different. Abnormal. For instance, I don't mind shopping with my wife. Even for clothes.
In fact, I've picked out almost half her wardrobe over the years.
It helps that Eva's not your typical woman, either. She hates shopping when it's crowded. She won't spend her life's savings for a designer label. Nor does she agonize, either in the store or daily at home, over what to wear. We both share the conviction that clothes exist largely to cover nakedness, and any other function they have is largely irrelevant. Sure, you can't wear your comfies out to a fancy dinner, but beyond that...clothes are clothes.
I find it disgusting, in this rapidly obesifying society, that decent clothes for fat women are so hard to find. I know I just got finished saying that clothes are pretty much just to keep you covered, but why would anyone want to be covered in the dress their great-grandma was buried in? And just who was it that decided fat people are always cold? Eva for one is hot at any temperature much above absolute zero...which renders at least three quarters of Pennington's stock way too heavy for her. I can't begin to tell you how many times I've spotted a beautiful looking dress/skirt/what have you, only to dart to it, heft it, and think my God, she'd be reduced to a puddle within half an hour.
Eva does have her little pet obsession: purses.
I've never really understood purses. You don't see men carrying anything analogous--but then, women's wear typically doesn't have pockets. Men do have them--and most of us don't stuff them to anywhere near the degree women cram their purses. It's almost as if they expect Monty Hall from Let's Make A Deal to step out from behind that bush and say "I'll give $50 to the first person who gives me a...hard boiled egg!"
Really, gals, how much of the stuff you carry around day after day do you actually need?
Anyway, my wife is on a lifelong search for the IDEAL PURSE. She doesn't spend her every waking moment thinking about it, by any means, but whenever we're out shopping and we go past a purse place, Eva will sweep the room with her gaze and say "nope, this place doesn't stock the IDEAL PURSE either. You ask her what the ideal purse is and she'll say "I don't know, I'll know it when I see it."
"Oh, come on. When you see it, what will it look like?"
"Well, it must have a long, adjustable strap. It must be roomy but not bulky. It needs a lot of compartments but it can't look like it has a lot of compartments. It needs a hideaway for personal items like tampons and such. (Ken intrudes...uck, I'm a typical man in that just typing the word 'tampons' makes me vaguely ill.) Don't know about the material, probably leather. Oh yeah, and it needs at least one sleeve on the outside for a work passcard, so that the card doesn't dangle."
"Shit, no wonder you can't find the IDEAL PURSE. You've set the bar impossibly high."
"Exactly. But someday I'll find it, and I'll buy ten of them."
Now, I'll readily admit there's some places I will not shop in. Michael's is one. I don't think men are allowed in there--they certainly don't make any concession to the male persuasion. Everywhere you look there are frilly little doomoms, thingamawigs and whatchamagirlies. Any man you find in Michael's invariably trails his partner by at least fifteen feet, walking warily and wearily, head down, hoping against hope that no other male will catch him in there.
But book shopping? I can do that all day. My wife who loves me also loves to shop for books, so we often end up in Coles or Chapters soon after a Pennington's run. It makes the clothes shopping even easier to get through.
(Any hints on the IDEAL PURSE should be forwarded to my email...)
Friday, August 18, 2006
O.J. WAS The Real Killer!
"Excuse me...where is the Tropicana orange juice that's on sale?"
Sigh. "I'm sorry, it's all gone. We sold out this morning."
"Where do I get a raincheck?"
Umm, try the Weather Network? "I'm sorry, we don't give rainchecks; it's one of the ways we keep our prices down."
"What are you substituting then? [grabs a 1.89-litre carton] I want this for $2.00."
And I want you to GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE..."Once again I apologize. The Tropicana you're looking for has been on sale since last Saturday. We've sold through nearly 10,800 units. And we ran out of stock--for the first time!--about ten minutes after we opened this morning. And there was a limit of four per family per day on it for most of the ad. We don't substitute products, for the same reason we don't give rainchecks." In other words, lady, you're shit outta luck.
"Well, do the other stores in town have any? Can you call them?"
Let's see, I'm alone here, there are three skids of product to be worked, our system upgrade is belching up glitches requiring my attention every so often--like right now!--and...CUSTOMER SERVICE...CUSTOMER SERVICE...put a smile in your voice, Ken!
"Sure I can, but I'm pretty sure they ran out before we did." Damn, that smile was more like gritted teeth.
And sure enough, both stores were out of stock. So that customer went away disappointed, leaving me in peace for about twenty seconds before the next person said
"Excuse me...do you have any Tropicana orange juice?"
Work me into a lather. Rinse out my brain with soap. And repeat. And repeat. And repeat...
I understand. I do. When something's advertised in the flyer, it really should be there until the end of the sale. And there should be world peace, and a chicken--on second thought, make that a turkey--in every pot.
Every grocery store flyer I've ever seen, from every chain, states somewhere "all items while supplies last". Right next to "we reserve the right to limit purchases to reasonable family requirements" or something similar. It seems like either (a) nobody else bothers to read those parts or (b) they think that edicts like that only apply to other shoppers.
I know customers don't care--nor should they, really--but those Tropicana orange juices that were on sale for $1.00? Each one of them cost us $1.90. A little quick math will tell you we're losing our shirts on this item. In my heart of hearts, I'm actually rather glad it's finally gone. Aside from the fact I can't walk six paces without somebody accosting me on the last day of the sale.
Disclaimer to the above: At my particular store, we make every effort to remain in stock as long as possible, nothwithstanding our warehouse: if they are out of stock, so are we, and there's not a damn thing I can do about it. My customers are at the very end of a supply chain that extends for many links and, often, thousands of kilometers. That chain is only as strong as its weakest link--which you can be assured is rarely ME.
---------------------------------------------
Whew. Now that that's out of the way...
We had a system upgrade overnight last night. As an In-Store-Trainer, it fell to me to make sure the new system was backwards-compatible...that everything functioned properly before we opened the doors for business this morning. Which means I had to get out of bed at 4:10 this morning. Stipulated: I have always been a morning person. But 4:10 bears a suspicious resemblance to the middle of the night.
As it turned out, I almost didn't need to be there this morning. Thanks to the excellent team we have in place, much of my work was completed before I got there. I spot checked all manner of items, corrected several minor glitches, and then remained "on call" all day, scurrying hither and yon, making sure people knew their new responsibilities, fixing minor scan errors, and telling the multitudes that no, we don't have any Tropicana orange juice.
A fun day. A fun week.
Tomorrow, we have minigolf with our friends Mindy and Jamie--I've taken to calling it "Mindy-golf". On Sunday, Eva's bro is coming to help erect a fence. The slow but steady transformation of our backyard continues apace.
And I'm sleeping in. Until at least six if I can help it.
Sigh. "I'm sorry, it's all gone. We sold out this morning."
"Where do I get a raincheck?"
Umm, try the Weather Network? "I'm sorry, we don't give rainchecks; it's one of the ways we keep our prices down."
"What are you substituting then? [grabs a 1.89-litre carton] I want this for $2.00."
And I want you to GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE..."Once again I apologize. The Tropicana you're looking for has been on sale since last Saturday. We've sold through nearly 10,800 units. And we ran out of stock--for the first time!--about ten minutes after we opened this morning. And there was a limit of four per family per day on it for most of the ad. We don't substitute products, for the same reason we don't give rainchecks." In other words, lady, you're shit outta luck.
"Well, do the other stores in town have any? Can you call them?"
Let's see, I'm alone here, there are three skids of product to be worked, our system upgrade is belching up glitches requiring my attention every so often--like right now!--and...CUSTOMER SERVICE...CUSTOMER SERVICE...put a smile in your voice, Ken!
"Sure I can, but I'm pretty sure they ran out before we did." Damn, that smile was more like gritted teeth.
And sure enough, both stores were out of stock. So that customer went away disappointed, leaving me in peace for about twenty seconds before the next person said
"Excuse me...do you have any Tropicana orange juice?"
Work me into a lather. Rinse out my brain with soap. And repeat. And repeat. And repeat...
I understand. I do. When something's advertised in the flyer, it really should be there until the end of the sale. And there should be world peace, and a chicken--on second thought, make that a turkey--in every pot.
Every grocery store flyer I've ever seen, from every chain, states somewhere "all items while supplies last". Right next to "we reserve the right to limit purchases to reasonable family requirements" or something similar. It seems like either (a) nobody else bothers to read those parts or (b) they think that edicts like that only apply to other shoppers.
I know customers don't care--nor should they, really--but those Tropicana orange juices that were on sale for $1.00? Each one of them cost us $1.90. A little quick math will tell you we're losing our shirts on this item. In my heart of hearts, I'm actually rather glad it's finally gone. Aside from the fact I can't walk six paces without somebody accosting me on the last day of the sale.
Disclaimer to the above: At my particular store, we make every effort to remain in stock as long as possible, nothwithstanding our warehouse: if they are out of stock, so are we, and there's not a damn thing I can do about it. My customers are at the very end of a supply chain that extends for many links and, often, thousands of kilometers. That chain is only as strong as its weakest link--which you can be assured is rarely ME.
---------------------------------------------
Whew. Now that that's out of the way...
We had a system upgrade overnight last night. As an In-Store-Trainer, it fell to me to make sure the new system was backwards-compatible...that everything functioned properly before we opened the doors for business this morning. Which means I had to get out of bed at 4:10 this morning. Stipulated: I have always been a morning person. But 4:10 bears a suspicious resemblance to the middle of the night.
As it turned out, I almost didn't need to be there this morning. Thanks to the excellent team we have in place, much of my work was completed before I got there. I spot checked all manner of items, corrected several minor glitches, and then remained "on call" all day, scurrying hither and yon, making sure people knew their new responsibilities, fixing minor scan errors, and telling the multitudes that no, we don't have any Tropicana orange juice.
A fun day. A fun week.
Tomorrow, we have minigolf with our friends Mindy and Jamie--I've taken to calling it "Mindy-golf". On Sunday, Eva's bro is coming to help erect a fence. The slow but steady transformation of our backyard continues apace.
And I'm sleeping in. Until at least six if I can help it.
Sunday, August 13, 2006
High volume...
I'm about to enter one of those hectic weeks.
At work, a major upgrade of our computer system is slated for Thursday overnight. This necessitates all manner of work beforehand, only a fraction of which I currently know how to do. Luckily, I have resources upon which to draw...
Also at work, we are currently running what is billed as the biggest sale of the year, featuring--you guessed it--turkeys at $1.00 a pound. Turkeys, in August? Apparently so. There were over fifty people waiting for the doors to open Saturday morning...it was the busiest day I've seen since Easter.
There is a limit of two turkeys stated clearly in the flyer, so of course that just meant families split up and went through separate tills. (What in the holy hell do people need with four or more turkeys, anyway? In August?)
This wasn't the only item flying out the door, not by a long shot...we also had Tropicana juices on sale for $1.00 (the 946 ml size--and don't ask how many people thought they could get a 1.89-litre carton for $1.00!) Then, of course, chocolate milk and buttermilk on for $1.00. This item turns people into ravening monsters no matter what time of year it's on. Neilson Dairy didn't exactly help me out on this sale. I was shorted all my low-fat chocolate milk on Saturday...what's more, nearly every single one of the 1440 units of regular chocolate milk were half full. I had to arrange for a second delivery, which arrived early Saturday evening. I take nothing for granted when it comes to this tinpot dairy, so I was able to rely on the stock I had brought in Thursday for most of the day. Still, I had run out of saleable stock by the time the truck came.
Want more? Our store brand waffles were on for $1.00/pack...Head Office advised us to order heavy, which was a joke: our walk-in freezer was stuffed wall to wall to wall to wall and floor to ceiling with turkeys.
Add in the chaos in other departments: three pounds of clementines or five pounds of new potatoes for $1.00; Kraft Dinner at 2/$1.00, and on and on and on, and it made for one hellish day.
It's shaping up to be a hard slog. This blog will probably fall by the wayside somewhat. My apologies in advance to my faithful readers.
At work, a major upgrade of our computer system is slated for Thursday overnight. This necessitates all manner of work beforehand, only a fraction of which I currently know how to do. Luckily, I have resources upon which to draw...
Also at work, we are currently running what is billed as the biggest sale of the year, featuring--you guessed it--turkeys at $1.00 a pound. Turkeys, in August? Apparently so. There were over fifty people waiting for the doors to open Saturday morning...it was the busiest day I've seen since Easter.
There is a limit of two turkeys stated clearly in the flyer, so of course that just meant families split up and went through separate tills. (What in the holy hell do people need with four or more turkeys, anyway? In August?)
This wasn't the only item flying out the door, not by a long shot...we also had Tropicana juices on sale for $1.00 (the 946 ml size--and don't ask how many people thought they could get a 1.89-litre carton for $1.00!) Then, of course, chocolate milk and buttermilk on for $1.00. This item turns people into ravening monsters no matter what time of year it's on. Neilson Dairy didn't exactly help me out on this sale. I was shorted all my low-fat chocolate milk on Saturday...what's more, nearly every single one of the 1440 units of regular chocolate milk were half full. I had to arrange for a second delivery, which arrived early Saturday evening. I take nothing for granted when it comes to this tinpot dairy, so I was able to rely on the stock I had brought in Thursday for most of the day. Still, I had run out of saleable stock by the time the truck came.
Want more? Our store brand waffles were on for $1.00/pack...Head Office advised us to order heavy, which was a joke: our walk-in freezer was stuffed wall to wall to wall to wall and floor to ceiling with turkeys.
Add in the chaos in other departments: three pounds of clementines or five pounds of new potatoes for $1.00; Kraft Dinner at 2/$1.00, and on and on and on, and it made for one hellish day.
It's shaping up to be a hard slog. This blog will probably fall by the wayside somewhat. My apologies in advance to my faithful readers.
Sunday, July 23, 2006
ONE case frozen peas, ah-hah-hah-hah-hah!
It's been a week.
My store has gone corporate, which is supposed to mean nothing to me now that the changeover has happened, but it sure meant something in the lead-up. Sobeys required a full inventory, and it was supervised by what seemed like battalions of Head Office personnel.
The inventory was scheduled for Friday night at 6:00. If there's a worse time to hold an inventory, I can't imagine what it might be.
Like most grocery stores, our flyers run Saturday to Friday. Whenever possible, I try to start setting up the next ad on Wednesday or Thursday to save myself a brutal Friday night. In this case, I had little choice: the ad had to be fully set up before the inventory.
The grocery store freezes while inventory is taking place. Customers can still shop the store; a reading is done before and after to determine sales. But all stocking of shelves comes to a halt: you can't run the risk of something being counted twice or not counted at all.
I had to make Friday's warehouse order as small as possible--not an easy thing to do, when it has to last through your busiest day, Saturday, and well into Sunday afternoon. The reason this order had to be so small is simple: I had no guarantees when it would arrive. Normally it comes in around one in the afternoon, but it has shown up as late as seven in the evening on occasion. My problem: depending on its arrival time, it either had to be fully worked...or remain untouched until after the inventory was completed (in other words, Saturday morning)--so that I could "count" it by referring to the invoice rather than tearing it apart piece by piece.
As it turned out, the warehouse truck pulled in at four o'clock, which gave me nowhere near enough time to work even a small order. Especially since I was so far behind...
I mentioned that the inventory team counts the shelves. They leave the walk-in cooler and freezer to us...to me.
The dairy cooler presents few challenges: I can usually count it in less than an hour, all told. The freezer is a different story.
Before I tell you why, let me tell you this: I'm pretty good at my job. Not great, but pretty good. I can usually estimate sales on ad items with reasonable accuracy. Especially when it comes to dairy products. Rarely do I get "hung" with vast quantities of sale products come the end of an ad. When I do, though, it's almost invariably a frozen item.
I'm not sure why this is. But about every third ad, I'll find myself with six or eight weeks' worth of something. And occasionally, I really overestimate demand on a product and find myself waiting impatiently for the next time it's advertised.
So my freezer can get pretty jammed.
Having known this inventory was coming, my team was able to get quite a lot to shelf. Even better, we had worked together to "mark" the inventory in there so that my "counting" consisted of writing down what had already been counted (for the most part). Yet I was still in there over two hours. The temperature in my walk-in freezer averages 0 F or -18 C; add in the two fans and it feels considerably colder (my acutely developed temperature sense would suggest a windchill factor approaching -40...which is the same on either scale.)
It's cold, in other words.
I'm not bitching--really, I'm not. Clad in only pants and a sweater, with no gloves (the better to write with), I only needed a few quick breaks. I handle cold with aplomb; it's heat I can't stand.
But the mechanics of writing in a freezer can get frustrating. Pens freeze almost instantly, of course, and I find markers difficult to write with, so I'm reduced to using pencils--the lead in which I snap effortlessly, several times an hour.
Once the cooler and freezer are counted, I have to go around my department with a pad of Post-It notes, writing the regular price of all sale items and affixing it over the sale price tags. This confuses most of our customers, but it has to be done: everything must be counted at regular retail. It gets especially aggravating for customers when I come to what are called "competitive match" items"...in my department, this means milk, butter and eggs. These are items on which we match the price of our competitors (and they match ours, too: the price of milk is the same wherever you go in this city, at least among the big chains.)
Although we sell our bagged 1% milk at $4.19, that's not the regular retail. The regular retail on four litres of 1% milk is $5.09. (And that's nowhere near our cost...we lose a lot of money on bagged milk.) But customers get very upset because they think they're going to pay $5.09 for their milk and you have to defuse dozens of them in the course of an evening. Posting signs asking customers to "disregard Post-It notes" doesn't help. This may come out wrong, but it's heartfelt and true: posting any signs, saying anything, never helps. People absolutely and steadfastly refuse to read signs. They'll notice price tags, oh, sure--an error of two cents is often treated like a Mideast flare-up--but words? Fuhgeddaboudit. And it's not as if our clientele is mostly immigrants, either: they speak English perfectly well. They just don't read it.
So it's over, now. All that's left is the aftermath. Our store number changed, so the Sobeys warehouse--who you'd think knew this was coming--suddenly has no record of our orders. You know, that kind of thing.
ARRRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHH!!!
There. I feel better.
My store has gone corporate, which is supposed to mean nothing to me now that the changeover has happened, but it sure meant something in the lead-up. Sobeys required a full inventory, and it was supervised by what seemed like battalions of Head Office personnel.
The inventory was scheduled for Friday night at 6:00. If there's a worse time to hold an inventory, I can't imagine what it might be.
Like most grocery stores, our flyers run Saturday to Friday. Whenever possible, I try to start setting up the next ad on Wednesday or Thursday to save myself a brutal Friday night. In this case, I had little choice: the ad had to be fully set up before the inventory.
The grocery store freezes while inventory is taking place. Customers can still shop the store; a reading is done before and after to determine sales. But all stocking of shelves comes to a halt: you can't run the risk of something being counted twice or not counted at all.
I had to make Friday's warehouse order as small as possible--not an easy thing to do, when it has to last through your busiest day, Saturday, and well into Sunday afternoon. The reason this order had to be so small is simple: I had no guarantees when it would arrive. Normally it comes in around one in the afternoon, but it has shown up as late as seven in the evening on occasion. My problem: depending on its arrival time, it either had to be fully worked...or remain untouched until after the inventory was completed (in other words, Saturday morning)--so that I could "count" it by referring to the invoice rather than tearing it apart piece by piece.
As it turned out, the warehouse truck pulled in at four o'clock, which gave me nowhere near enough time to work even a small order. Especially since I was so far behind...
I mentioned that the inventory team counts the shelves. They leave the walk-in cooler and freezer to us...to me.
The dairy cooler presents few challenges: I can usually count it in less than an hour, all told. The freezer is a different story.
Before I tell you why, let me tell you this: I'm pretty good at my job. Not great, but pretty good. I can usually estimate sales on ad items with reasonable accuracy. Especially when it comes to dairy products. Rarely do I get "hung" with vast quantities of sale products come the end of an ad. When I do, though, it's almost invariably a frozen item.
I'm not sure why this is. But about every third ad, I'll find myself with six or eight weeks' worth of something. And occasionally, I really overestimate demand on a product and find myself waiting impatiently for the next time it's advertised.
So my freezer can get pretty jammed.
Having known this inventory was coming, my team was able to get quite a lot to shelf. Even better, we had worked together to "mark" the inventory in there so that my "counting" consisted of writing down what had already been counted (for the most part). Yet I was still in there over two hours. The temperature in my walk-in freezer averages 0 F or -18 C; add in the two fans and it feels considerably colder (my acutely developed temperature sense would suggest a windchill factor approaching -40...which is the same on either scale.)
It's cold, in other words.
I'm not bitching--really, I'm not. Clad in only pants and a sweater, with no gloves (the better to write with), I only needed a few quick breaks. I handle cold with aplomb; it's heat I can't stand.
But the mechanics of writing in a freezer can get frustrating. Pens freeze almost instantly, of course, and I find markers difficult to write with, so I'm reduced to using pencils--the lead in which I snap effortlessly, several times an hour.
Once the cooler and freezer are counted, I have to go around my department with a pad of Post-It notes, writing the regular price of all sale items and affixing it over the sale price tags. This confuses most of our customers, but it has to be done: everything must be counted at regular retail. It gets especially aggravating for customers when I come to what are called "competitive match" items"...in my department, this means milk, butter and eggs. These are items on which we match the price of our competitors (and they match ours, too: the price of milk is the same wherever you go in this city, at least among the big chains.)
Although we sell our bagged 1% milk at $4.19, that's not the regular retail. The regular retail on four litres of 1% milk is $5.09. (And that's nowhere near our cost...we lose a lot of money on bagged milk.) But customers get very upset because they think they're going to pay $5.09 for their milk and you have to defuse dozens of them in the course of an evening. Posting signs asking customers to "disregard Post-It notes" doesn't help. This may come out wrong, but it's heartfelt and true: posting any signs, saying anything, never helps. People absolutely and steadfastly refuse to read signs. They'll notice price tags, oh, sure--an error of two cents is often treated like a Mideast flare-up--but words? Fuhgeddaboudit. And it's not as if our clientele is mostly immigrants, either: they speak English perfectly well. They just don't read it.
So it's over, now. All that's left is the aftermath. Our store number changed, so the Sobeys warehouse--who you'd think knew this was coming--suddenly has no record of our orders. You know, that kind of thing.
ARRRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHH!!!
There. I feel better.
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
Both sides of the turnstile
"I want to mention one of the obvious symptoms [of a sick culture]: Violence. Muggings. Sniping. Arson. Bombing. Terrorism of any sort. Riots of course--but I suspect that little incidents of violence, pecking away at people day after day, damage a culture even more than riots that flare up and then die down..."
"I think you have missed the most alarming symptom of all...Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms such as you have named... but a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot...This symptom is especially serious in that an individual displaying it never thinks of it as a sign of ill health but as proof of his/her strength."
--Friday (written 1982), by Robert Heinlein
The Toronto Transit Commission went on strike this past Monday, for the fourth time since 1989. This time, there was no warning. People who neglected to listen to the morning news were treated to locked subway stations and busses that never arrived.
Needless to say, this is illegal.
I started in with my standard anti-union rhetoric, which by now I've worn to a threadbare line of patter. They knew how much the job paid when they took it...this holding the public hostage is an outrage. They should fire 'em all and let EI sort 'em out.
Then I heard the union's justification for the wildcat strike, and it kind of rocked me on my heels. TTC drivers and fare collectors, they argued, are unsafe. They are routinely threatened with assault, spit on, called filthy names, and increasingly punched and kicked. Last week, it was announced that drivers would no longer insist on the correct fare being paid, as every fare dispute had the potential to boil over into violence. This was helpfully plastered all over the Toronto Sun, essentially informing the public that they could ride for free. Must have pissed off the people who had bought Metropasses.
A driver wrote in to that very paper today, asking a very good question:
As for the "wildcat strike" and walking off the job: If every time you went to work you risked aggression and brutality and your bosses repeatedly refused to protect you or act to prevent the attacks, would you still come back to work day after day?
Well, no, I wouldn't.
We're living in Heinlein's Crazy Years, and many public service jobs ought to have "risk of aggression and brutality" written into their descriptions. When I worked nights at 7-Eleven (itself no island of calm and serenity, let me tell you), I used to shake my head at the thought of driving a cab through the wee hours of the morning. I had security cameras, a panic button, space to maneuver. A cabbie, at that time, might have had a panic button of some sort, but (s)he had precious little ability to avoid attack, and cameras in taxis were unheard of.
No, you couldn't pay me enough money to undertake that particular profession.
The same goes for bus driver, at this point. Nearly everywhere in Canada, public transit is stigmatized. (Vancouver being a notable exception: in that city, even lawyers take the bus without complaint.) People tend to reinforce whatever beliefs are held about them, and so many patrons of public transit are ignorant and potentially aggressive. I have witnessed many fare disputes, some of which have gotten quite ugly, and somewhere in the back of my mind I dread the day a knife--or a gun--is pulled and used. Given the deterioration of the culture around me, I figure this is only a matter of time, and I hope to God I'm invisible when it happens.
You see this deterioration everywhere. I deal with the public day in and day out and I hardly ever hear the words "please" and "thank you" any more. Much less "you're welcome", which has all but dropped out of the English language, to be replaced by "no problem" or an incoherent grunt. Store employees are treated as walking directories, not human beings, and cashiers are lambasted with all manner of rude behaviour. In the retail world, the customer is always right...and he knows it and exploits it ruthlessly.
So it turns out I have some measure of sympathy for TTC employees, and I understand why they felt they had to walk off the job.
I still can't condone the action, mind you. Notwithstanding the cost to the economy and the monstrous inconvenience to some 800,000 riders, a wildcat strike in protest of unsafe working conditions is just plain illogical. Consider: you're living in fear of the public whom you serve. So you go out of your way to piss every one of your customers off? How does that make sense?
The sad thing is, although an illegal strike is the wrong answer, I'm not sure what the right one is. The safety concerns are well-founded, but the measures the union insist on are ultimately pointless. Cameras? They might help identify a thug after he's hurt or killed somebody. Or they could be shot out. Hell, given the gang culture that rules the streets in some parts of Toronto, you might actually see a killer mugging gleefully for the camera. After all, what's a life worth? According to our judges, as little as three years of probation.
Barriers around drivers? A horrendous cost, plus they'd just isolate the driver from the passengers and only encourage a laissez-fare--pun definitely intended--attitude.
So-called "smart cards" simply exchange one form of currency for another and do nothing for driver safety.
The sheerest irony was that this wildcat strike occurred on a day when there was a heat alert, a smog advisory, and a humidex warning...just the sort of day you'd think we'd be encouraging transit use. Perhaps that was the point. But forcing people to walk or bike through soupy air isn't just inconvenient: it could be life-threatening.
Just like driving a bus?
Now the city's talking about suing the union to recover lost revenue, the union's talking about doing this again, and the Toronto bus-riding public is caught in the middle.
As usual.
"I think you have missed the most alarming symptom of all...Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms such as you have named... but a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot...This symptom is especially serious in that an individual displaying it never thinks of it as a sign of ill health but as proof of his/her strength."
--Friday (written 1982), by Robert Heinlein
The Toronto Transit Commission went on strike this past Monday, for the fourth time since 1989. This time, there was no warning. People who neglected to listen to the morning news were treated to locked subway stations and busses that never arrived.
Needless to say, this is illegal.
I started in with my standard anti-union rhetoric, which by now I've worn to a threadbare line of patter. They knew how much the job paid when they took it...this holding the public hostage is an outrage. They should fire 'em all and let EI sort 'em out.
Then I heard the union's justification for the wildcat strike, and it kind of rocked me on my heels. TTC drivers and fare collectors, they argued, are unsafe. They are routinely threatened with assault, spit on, called filthy names, and increasingly punched and kicked. Last week, it was announced that drivers would no longer insist on the correct fare being paid, as every fare dispute had the potential to boil over into violence. This was helpfully plastered all over the Toronto Sun, essentially informing the public that they could ride for free. Must have pissed off the people who had bought Metropasses.
A driver wrote in to that very paper today, asking a very good question:
As for the "wildcat strike" and walking off the job: If every time you went to work you risked aggression and brutality and your bosses repeatedly refused to protect you or act to prevent the attacks, would you still come back to work day after day?
Well, no, I wouldn't.
We're living in Heinlein's Crazy Years, and many public service jobs ought to have "risk of aggression and brutality" written into their descriptions. When I worked nights at 7-Eleven (itself no island of calm and serenity, let me tell you), I used to shake my head at the thought of driving a cab through the wee hours of the morning. I had security cameras, a panic button, space to maneuver. A cabbie, at that time, might have had a panic button of some sort, but (s)he had precious little ability to avoid attack, and cameras in taxis were unheard of.
No, you couldn't pay me enough money to undertake that particular profession.
The same goes for bus driver, at this point. Nearly everywhere in Canada, public transit is stigmatized. (Vancouver being a notable exception: in that city, even lawyers take the bus without complaint.) People tend to reinforce whatever beliefs are held about them, and so many patrons of public transit are ignorant and potentially aggressive. I have witnessed many fare disputes, some of which have gotten quite ugly, and somewhere in the back of my mind I dread the day a knife--or a gun--is pulled and used. Given the deterioration of the culture around me, I figure this is only a matter of time, and I hope to God I'm invisible when it happens.
You see this deterioration everywhere. I deal with the public day in and day out and I hardly ever hear the words "please" and "thank you" any more. Much less "you're welcome", which has all but dropped out of the English language, to be replaced by "no problem" or an incoherent grunt. Store employees are treated as walking directories, not human beings, and cashiers are lambasted with all manner of rude behaviour. In the retail world, the customer is always right...and he knows it and exploits it ruthlessly.
So it turns out I have some measure of sympathy for TTC employees, and I understand why they felt they had to walk off the job.
I still can't condone the action, mind you. Notwithstanding the cost to the economy and the monstrous inconvenience to some 800,000 riders, a wildcat strike in protest of unsafe working conditions is just plain illogical. Consider: you're living in fear of the public whom you serve. So you go out of your way to piss every one of your customers off? How does that make sense?
The sad thing is, although an illegal strike is the wrong answer, I'm not sure what the right one is. The safety concerns are well-founded, but the measures the union insist on are ultimately pointless. Cameras? They might help identify a thug after he's hurt or killed somebody. Or they could be shot out. Hell, given the gang culture that rules the streets in some parts of Toronto, you might actually see a killer mugging gleefully for the camera. After all, what's a life worth? According to our judges, as little as three years of probation.
Barriers around drivers? A horrendous cost, plus they'd just isolate the driver from the passengers and only encourage a laissez-fare--pun definitely intended--attitude.
So-called "smart cards" simply exchange one form of currency for another and do nothing for driver safety.
The sheerest irony was that this wildcat strike occurred on a day when there was a heat alert, a smog advisory, and a humidex warning...just the sort of day you'd think we'd be encouraging transit use. Perhaps that was the point. But forcing people to walk or bike through soupy air isn't just inconvenient: it could be life-threatening.
Just like driving a bus?
Now the city's talking about suing the union to recover lost revenue, the union's talking about doing this again, and the Toronto bus-riding public is caught in the middle.
As usual.
Sunday, March 05, 2006
Consumer interlude..."But Wait, There's More!"
Because there's a word for things that don't consume. That word is "dead".
Back when I was single, I used to avoid infomercials like the plague.
Didn't matter what the product was, or how enthusiastically it was being huckstered. My attitude was pretty simple: if traditional retailers refused to stock it, it was ipso crapto a waste of time and money.
I felt the same way, truth be told, about things like Avon (despite the fact my mom was a rep for a time), Regal (for no reason whatever except it seemed sleazy to me) and Mary Kay (because, obviously, I have a penis).
Ditto anything else sold door-to-door or at house parties. If the product's that good, why can't you buy it somewhere, uh, reputable?
One ex-girlfriend was involved for a short time with something called Vector Marketing. She sold CUTCO knives...one month, she was the number 3 salesperson in Canada. (Didn't take much: I think she sold four sets that month.) I was quite hesitant to endorse this choice of occupation, but the quality of the product spoke for itself--at least, the training manual, from which I could quote at length after seeing a few of her presentations, spoke for itself. These knives purport to be better than Henckels at half the price.
Of course, back in those ancient days, a consumer resource like Google didn't exist. If you Google CUTCO knives, one of the first things you find is this site, which pretty much shreds the training manual, the company, the product, and anything else connected to Vector Marketing.
That's not to say, necessarily, that the products are craptacular. Since it was my fiancee selling these things, people in my family felt some obligation to buy them. Still uneasy despite the glowing presentation, I continually checked in with these family members in the ensuing months and years, especially after the engagement and relationship went up in smoke: was your money well spent? Nobody ever said boo. Did they think boo, and were too polite to say it aloud? No idea. But here's a quick digression to illustrate my point:
My first piano was made by New Scale Williams, Toronto, in 1904. It had glass feet and weighed the better part of a ton. That thing accompanied us through three moves, one of them a real slog down a flight of stairs in freezing rain, and never needed so much as a tuning. Imagine my shock when I read, online, that the quality of that particular model was supposed to be iffy at best.
Even stranger: we owned a black Hyundai Stellar for quite a while. Dubbed the "poor man's rich car", it was made long, long before Hyundai became a paragon of quality. We started to hear horror stories about Stellar not long after we bought the thing. Never had a problem with it.
So it's not beyond the realm of possibility that some individual sets of CUTCO knives are pretty good.
My wife has a fascination with many things television-related, among them infomercials. And damned if I haven't been sucked in to a few of them, especially now that you can actually go to any decent sized mall, find a store called Showcase, and fondle these products yourself.
There are a few items that have particularly caught my eye: the Little Giant Ladder, the Swivel Sweeper, and the Pet Groom Pro. I'm not sure about the reliability or value of any of these things, but they really look good, don't they? Like things that might actually be useful.
Regal went bankrupt a few months back, to my dismay. I've found over the past few years that Regal was the one place I could find a plethora of little products that served a real purpose, stuff traditional retailers didn't bother with. Every time a catalogue landed in our mailbox, I'd be champing at the bit to get a look at it. If only kid Kenny could see me now. He'd probably shake his head in disgust.
So Regal's back and better than ever: among their new, more upscale, and expanded product offering are a number of things "as seen on TV", among them the Swivel Sweeper which was previously only available by shelling out Yankee greenbacks. There's something on nearly every page that passes muster, at least in this house.
Buy! Buy! Buy!
Because, as George Carlin says, a house is nothing but a big pile of stuff with a roof over it.
Back when I was single, I used to avoid infomercials like the plague.
Didn't matter what the product was, or how enthusiastically it was being huckstered. My attitude was pretty simple: if traditional retailers refused to stock it, it was ipso crapto a waste of time and money.
I felt the same way, truth be told, about things like Avon (despite the fact my mom was a rep for a time), Regal (for no reason whatever except it seemed sleazy to me) and Mary Kay (because, obviously, I have a penis).
Ditto anything else sold door-to-door or at house parties. If the product's that good, why can't you buy it somewhere, uh, reputable?
One ex-girlfriend was involved for a short time with something called Vector Marketing. She sold CUTCO knives...one month, she was the number 3 salesperson in Canada. (Didn't take much: I think she sold four sets that month.) I was quite hesitant to endorse this choice of occupation, but the quality of the product spoke for itself--at least, the training manual, from which I could quote at length after seeing a few of her presentations, spoke for itself. These knives purport to be better than Henckels at half the price.
Of course, back in those ancient days, a consumer resource like Google didn't exist. If you Google CUTCO knives, one of the first things you find is this site, which pretty much shreds the training manual, the company, the product, and anything else connected to Vector Marketing.
That's not to say, necessarily, that the products are craptacular. Since it was my fiancee selling these things, people in my family felt some obligation to buy them. Still uneasy despite the glowing presentation, I continually checked in with these family members in the ensuing months and years, especially after the engagement and relationship went up in smoke: was your money well spent? Nobody ever said boo. Did they think boo, and were too polite to say it aloud? No idea. But here's a quick digression to illustrate my point:
My first piano was made by New Scale Williams, Toronto, in 1904. It had glass feet and weighed the better part of a ton. That thing accompanied us through three moves, one of them a real slog down a flight of stairs in freezing rain, and never needed so much as a tuning. Imagine my shock when I read, online, that the quality of that particular model was supposed to be iffy at best.
Even stranger: we owned a black Hyundai Stellar for quite a while. Dubbed the "poor man's rich car", it was made long, long before Hyundai became a paragon of quality. We started to hear horror stories about Stellar not long after we bought the thing. Never had a problem with it.
So it's not beyond the realm of possibility that some individual sets of CUTCO knives are pretty good.
My wife has a fascination with many things television-related, among them infomercials. And damned if I haven't been sucked in to a few of them, especially now that you can actually go to any decent sized mall, find a store called Showcase, and fondle these products yourself.
There are a few items that have particularly caught my eye: the Little Giant Ladder, the Swivel Sweeper, and the Pet Groom Pro. I'm not sure about the reliability or value of any of these things, but they really look good, don't they? Like things that might actually be useful.
Regal went bankrupt a few months back, to my dismay. I've found over the past few years that Regal was the one place I could find a plethora of little products that served a real purpose, stuff traditional retailers didn't bother with. Every time a catalogue landed in our mailbox, I'd be champing at the bit to get a look at it. If only kid Kenny could see me now. He'd probably shake his head in disgust.
So Regal's back and better than ever: among their new, more upscale, and expanded product offering are a number of things "as seen on TV", among them the Swivel Sweeper which was previously only available by shelling out Yankee greenbacks. There's something on nearly every page that passes muster, at least in this house.
Buy! Buy! Buy!
Because, as George Carlin says, a house is nothing but a big pile of stuff with a roof over it.
Sunday, December 11, 2005
A little something with your groceries?
I am currently watching a rather alarmist Marketplace on CBC. Its subject: food safety in supermarkets. The overwhelming impression you get from this program is that shopping at your local supermarket will make you ill and maybe kill you. There is a litany of mouse droppings, unwashed hands, improper handling and storage of food. Store after store, province after province, coast to coast, they document a truly astounding number of health violations.
I'm eighteen minutes in, and they haven't named one supermarket yet. I've watched very carefully, but they've screened their show even more carefully. I can't identify a single chain, either from decor cues or glimpses of store-brand products. Rather gutless, don't you think? To make all these accusations without naming names? It's like asserting that one-third of all NHL players dope up.
The show did clue me in to Toronto's rating system, which I had thought only applied to restaurants. It is mandatory in Toronto (and Peel Region) to prominently display a colour-coded card at the front door. Green means the place has passed; yellow means there are problems currently being fixed, and red means the store has been closed due to health violations.
Armed with this information, I searched the database for all Price Choppers in the area. Green across the board.
To be honest, this surprised me a little. I've heard some horror stories, you see. I reviewed the history of each individual Price Chopper and did find four yellow cards issued in the past two years. When an establishment is issued a yellow card, they get one week to bring themselves up to code. These PC stores had done so: there were no repeats.
I wondered if perhaps our competitors had fared any worse. I sure hoped so. But no: all Food Basics and No Frills show green, and only a few stores have ever seen a yellow card.
Many customers have remarked on the cleanliness of our store. And well they should: we take great pride in it. Are we perfect? Of course not. Things come in with the products. I've had a mouse run out from the middle of a pallet of eggs. Spiders have crawled out from banana boxes...once, something that looked awfully like a black widow (but probably wasn't). Birds occasionally come in to shop...once they get in, it's beastly hard to get them out.
I'd actually like to see Toronto's rating system expanded to cover the country. I feel pretty confident in saying we'd pass easily.
I'm eighteen minutes in, and they haven't named one supermarket yet. I've watched very carefully, but they've screened their show even more carefully. I can't identify a single chain, either from decor cues or glimpses of store-brand products. Rather gutless, don't you think? To make all these accusations without naming names? It's like asserting that one-third of all NHL players dope up.
The show did clue me in to Toronto's rating system, which I had thought only applied to restaurants. It is mandatory in Toronto (and Peel Region) to prominently display a colour-coded card at the front door. Green means the place has passed; yellow means there are problems currently being fixed, and red means the store has been closed due to health violations.
Armed with this information, I searched the database for all Price Choppers in the area. Green across the board.
To be honest, this surprised me a little. I've heard some horror stories, you see. I reviewed the history of each individual Price Chopper and did find four yellow cards issued in the past two years. When an establishment is issued a yellow card, they get one week to bring themselves up to code. These PC stores had done so: there were no repeats.
I wondered if perhaps our competitors had fared any worse. I sure hoped so. But no: all Food Basics and No Frills show green, and only a few stores have ever seen a yellow card.
Many customers have remarked on the cleanliness of our store. And well they should: we take great pride in it. Are we perfect? Of course not. Things come in with the products. I've had a mouse run out from the middle of a pallet of eggs. Spiders have crawled out from banana boxes...once, something that looked awfully like a black widow (but probably wasn't). Birds occasionally come in to shop...once they get in, it's beastly hard to get them out.
I'd actually like to see Toronto's rating system expanded to cover the country. I feel pretty confident in saying we'd pass easily.
Friday, August 19, 2005
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.
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.
Thursday, July 08, 2004
Tales from aisle 10
I work at Price Chopper. It's a low-end grocery store akin to No Frills or Food Basics, the difference being that (at least at our location) it's clean. You won't find cockroaches trundling across our produce.
Now, our store is located in an upper-middle class area. We don't see any difference in volume on "welfare Wednesday". I've heard horror stories about customers in Toronto-area Price Choppers who throw vegetables around the store, who try to haggle with everyone for everything, and who have actually been caught on camera dropping, say, a cherry on the floor and then repeatedly trying to trip over it so they can sue.
I saw enough of that kind of behaviour at 7-Eleven to last me several lifetimes, thank you very much. Luckily, we don't get that kind of customer in our store very often.
I have, however, accrued some stories over my three plus years as a Dairy/Frozen Foods manager. Looking back, you laugh. Or cry. Or snarl.
Two things you ought to know about me, first, before I launch into these tales: One, my customer service skills have been nationally recognized. Two: Nearly every day, somebody does or says something that makes me want to (a) give their head a brisk shake or (b) cordially invite them to engage in repeated acts of self-intercourse. With tools.
On my very first day, a woman returned a 2-liter carton of milk, saying that it was leaking. I clapped a mental hand over the mental mouth of my own personal mental sarcastic bastard--hereinafter referred to as MSB--who was trying to mutter something like "how did you not notice this leaking carton of milk somewhere between the counter and the cash, or the cash and your car, or the car and your house, or..." and helpfully scooted back to my milk counter for a replacement. Upon its presentation, the women asked me "Is this one leaking too?"
MSB: Yeah, lady, I carved a big hole in the bottom of this one just for you. Go away.
At least twice a week, somebody asks me where the carts are. I helpfully point out the line of carts outside the store, which, by the way, is usually something like a hundred feet long, while MSB is wondering if this idiot actually *drove* here with eyesight that bad.
Yesterday: "Do you sell bread?"
Now, I had to actually clap *duct tape* over MSB's potty mouth for this gentleman. It was an effort, let me tell you. "Yes, sir, the bread is next to the bakery in the back-left-hand corner of the store." MSB: "Mmmmphs mrmmd? Mmm phryy..."*rrrrrrippp!--he's gone now, what was that? "What's bread? I'm sorry, I've never heard of that product. Try the hardware store down the street."
Then there's the people--and they are legion--who rant and rave about our store's policy on grocery bags. Five cents is what we charge per bag, and you'd think it was fifty dollars, the way people carry on.
Now look. This is MSB talking, but listen to me anyway. You can go to a Loblaws (or a Sobeys if you're really desperate) and pay an extra thirty or forty dollars for the exact same groceries. Or you can pay fifty cents for ten bags and shut the hell up. Your pick.
Likewise: "This is ten cents cheaper at Basics!" "I'm sorry, ma'am, we simply can't be cheaper than everyone on every item all the time." (So go spend fifty cents in gas--not to mention half an hour of your time--to save a dime at Basics, okay?)
And let me tell you something that MSB and I are in total agreement on. If I *ever* actually catch somebody putting fresh pork behind the mushroom soup, or ice cream on the bread rack, or any such thing, I will personally drop them in our cardboard baler and flatten their ass. You never actually see it happen, but every morning, there it is: a bag of milk in with the frozen vegetables, or thawed vegetables in a milk crate. Aside from the asininity (is that a word? It is now) and the astonishing level of laziness, what really gets me is the logic chain. "Okay, I'm shopping, I'm shopping, hmmm, I don't really want these frozen popsicles, I'd rather have this lettuce!" CLUNK! There, fuckwad, you've ruined the popsicles *and* a bunch of lettuce. And I'm sure you're *just* the sort of dinkus who complains loudly whenever prices go up to cover the absolutely ridiculous amount of product that gets thrown out because of people just like you.
What I *really* want to do is go home with these pustules and randomly scatter the contents of their freezers throughout their houses...under the bed, under the couch cushions, oh, wherever I felt like it. Then maybe they'd get the point.
Okay, summoning up every ounce of self-restraint I have, folks, if you're ever in a grocery store and you decide that you don't really want something--particularly a perishable something--please, please, PLEASE bring it to any employee you happen to pass--including a cashier--and s/he'll thank you gratefully and sincerely, and then put it away. Okay? Please.
We used to have a regular we dubbed "Discount Dan". His trick was to rip coupons off reduced merchandise and affix them to whatever he felt like paying less for each day. You can actually be arrested and charged with fraud for doing that. After several weeks of it, I decided to fall back on 7-Eleven training. I shadowed Dan. Closely. Like two paces behind him. Through six aisles.
Haven't seen him since.
There's a woman I see every week, though, and while MSB had a field day with her at one time, I've come to respect her and feel quite sorry for her, too.
She spends--I shit you not--three or four *hours* every week buying her groceries. Every week. Each individual item must be absolutely perfect. She can detect cracks in eggs that you can't see with an electron microscope. Her eyes detect individual dust *molecules*. And by now I'm positive she can recite prices for every item in the store, because she's forever trying to find price discrepancies. I can't begin to tell you how annoying it used to be, to have her constantly interrupting whatever I was doing to ask if I had any milk with a shelf life longer than six weeks, or if I could please find some Omega-3 eggs that *weren't* cracked, or if I could please dance on the pin of her head.
I'm very ashamed to admit it took me a couple of months to understand that this woman--who really is very courteous and friendly--has a mental illness. Obsessive-compulsive disorder. (She's since confirmed it, to me and as far as I know, me alone.) I make an effort now to talk to her whenever I see her--partly as penance for all the bullshit that MSB used to spew silently. And you know what? Although it still takes her an hour to get through my department, she hardly ever asks me anything any more.
So ends this dispatch from the dairy aisle. Thank you for shopping at Price Chopper, the smart choice. Come again soon.
Now, our store is located in an upper-middle class area. We don't see any difference in volume on "welfare Wednesday". I've heard horror stories about customers in Toronto-area Price Choppers who throw vegetables around the store, who try to haggle with everyone for everything, and who have actually been caught on camera dropping, say, a cherry on the floor and then repeatedly trying to trip over it so they can sue.
I saw enough of that kind of behaviour at 7-Eleven to last me several lifetimes, thank you very much. Luckily, we don't get that kind of customer in our store very often.
I have, however, accrued some stories over my three plus years as a Dairy/Frozen Foods manager. Looking back, you laugh. Or cry. Or snarl.
Two things you ought to know about me, first, before I launch into these tales: One, my customer service skills have been nationally recognized. Two: Nearly every day, somebody does or says something that makes me want to (a) give their head a brisk shake or (b) cordially invite them to engage in repeated acts of self-intercourse. With tools.
On my very first day, a woman returned a 2-liter carton of milk, saying that it was leaking. I clapped a mental hand over the mental mouth of my own personal mental sarcastic bastard--hereinafter referred to as MSB--who was trying to mutter something like "how did you not notice this leaking carton of milk somewhere between the counter and the cash, or the cash and your car, or the car and your house, or..." and helpfully scooted back to my milk counter for a replacement. Upon its presentation, the women asked me "Is this one leaking too?"
MSB: Yeah, lady, I carved a big hole in the bottom of this one just for you. Go away.
At least twice a week, somebody asks me where the carts are. I helpfully point out the line of carts outside the store, which, by the way, is usually something like a hundred feet long, while MSB is wondering if this idiot actually *drove* here with eyesight that bad.
Yesterday: "Do you sell bread?"
Now, I had to actually clap *duct tape* over MSB's potty mouth for this gentleman. It was an effort, let me tell you. "Yes, sir, the bread is next to the bakery in the back-left-hand corner of the store." MSB: "Mmmmphs mrmmd? Mmm phryy..."*rrrrrrippp!--he's gone now, what was that? "What's bread? I'm sorry, I've never heard of that product. Try the hardware store down the street."
Then there's the people--and they are legion--who rant and rave about our store's policy on grocery bags. Five cents is what we charge per bag, and you'd think it was fifty dollars, the way people carry on.
Now look. This is MSB talking, but listen to me anyway. You can go to a Loblaws (or a Sobeys if you're really desperate) and pay an extra thirty or forty dollars for the exact same groceries. Or you can pay fifty cents for ten bags and shut the hell up. Your pick.
Likewise: "This is ten cents cheaper at Basics!" "I'm sorry, ma'am, we simply can't be cheaper than everyone on every item all the time." (So go spend fifty cents in gas--not to mention half an hour of your time--to save a dime at Basics, okay?)
And let me tell you something that MSB and I are in total agreement on. If I *ever* actually catch somebody putting fresh pork behind the mushroom soup, or ice cream on the bread rack, or any such thing, I will personally drop them in our cardboard baler and flatten their ass. You never actually see it happen, but every morning, there it is: a bag of milk in with the frozen vegetables, or thawed vegetables in a milk crate. Aside from the asininity (is that a word? It is now) and the astonishing level of laziness, what really gets me is the logic chain. "Okay, I'm shopping, I'm shopping, hmmm, I don't really want these frozen popsicles, I'd rather have this lettuce!" CLUNK! There, fuckwad, you've ruined the popsicles *and* a bunch of lettuce. And I'm sure you're *just* the sort of dinkus who complains loudly whenever prices go up to cover the absolutely ridiculous amount of product that gets thrown out because of people just like you.
What I *really* want to do is go home with these pustules and randomly scatter the contents of their freezers throughout their houses...under the bed, under the couch cushions, oh, wherever I felt like it. Then maybe they'd get the point.
Okay, summoning up every ounce of self-restraint I have, folks, if you're ever in a grocery store and you decide that you don't really want something--particularly a perishable something--please, please, PLEASE bring it to any employee you happen to pass--including a cashier--and s/he'll thank you gratefully and sincerely, and then put it away. Okay? Please.
We used to have a regular we dubbed "Discount Dan". His trick was to rip coupons off reduced merchandise and affix them to whatever he felt like paying less for each day. You can actually be arrested and charged with fraud for doing that. After several weeks of it, I decided to fall back on 7-Eleven training. I shadowed Dan. Closely. Like two paces behind him. Through six aisles.
Haven't seen him since.
There's a woman I see every week, though, and while MSB had a field day with her at one time, I've come to respect her and feel quite sorry for her, too.
She spends--I shit you not--three or four *hours* every week buying her groceries. Every week. Each individual item must be absolutely perfect. She can detect cracks in eggs that you can't see with an electron microscope. Her eyes detect individual dust *molecules*. And by now I'm positive she can recite prices for every item in the store, because she's forever trying to find price discrepancies. I can't begin to tell you how annoying it used to be, to have her constantly interrupting whatever I was doing to ask if I had any milk with a shelf life longer than six weeks, or if I could please find some Omega-3 eggs that *weren't* cracked, or if I could please dance on the pin of her head.
I'm very ashamed to admit it took me a couple of months to understand that this woman--who really is very courteous and friendly--has a mental illness. Obsessive-compulsive disorder. (She's since confirmed it, to me and as far as I know, me alone.) I make an effort now to talk to her whenever I see her--partly as penance for all the bullshit that MSB used to spew silently. And you know what? Although it still takes her an hour to get through my department, she hardly ever asks me anything any more.
So ends this dispatch from the dairy aisle. Thank you for shopping at Price Chopper, the smart choice. Come again soon.
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