h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I work at KMart, and while I'm not sure if you understand the horror of this as I think they're only an American business, don't think I'm kidding when I say that it is hell. We sell food, clothes, home furnishings, electronic equipment, hardware, gardening equipment...anything you can imagine. And people take advantage of this, often akwardly towing 2 overfull carts and then saying that they couldn't find a tag but they're sure it was $9.99. I CAN'T RING IT UP WITHOUT A UPC. Why do customers find this impossible to comprehend?! Then I have to page the department, describe the item and then stand there staring apologetically at the growing line of customers waiting impatiently while I wait for them to call back with a code for me. I haven't yet found any games to help make this go by any better, and if any come to mind, feel free to share.

I used to work at KMart too. You're right, it is horrible--especially if you can get the old timers to tell you what the benefits *used* to be...Try working in the fitting room with only two people covering all of the clothing, and no camaras. I once found over a dozen UPCs wrapped up in a shirt. You'd think it would cost the company less to budget enough hours to have someone in the fitting room the entire time than to have so much merchandise stolen every day. Of course, this probably makes too much sense to be comprehensible or implementable...

Never expect executives in a retail company to use anything which even approaches logic. I used to work for Bradlees, a northeastern US chain which closed last year.

Not too long before I left the company, some brain-dead half-wit exec decided that a really good way to combat the flow of merchandise out of the back rooms of some of the New Jersey stores was to enact a new rule that every store in the chain had to lock their upstairs stock room doors after 5PM (which is when the person on the receiving dock went home). They also decided it would be a really good idea to bar everyone but the actual dock person and the management from signing out the keys to the back room.

It is at this point that I should describe our store. It was originally built as a "C" store (US retail chains have several classifications for the size of their stores, like KMart has the Big K, Super K Mart, etc. - each classification has a particular set of merchandise they carry and each one gets the same floor plans, etc.) that did far better than the company expected, so they upgraded it to a "B" store, but with no change in square footage. This meant getting really creative with the planograms every time there was a change because we always had less floor and shelf space than what the plans called for, and also finding ways to maximize every millimeter of storage space we had in the stock room.

At this time I worked the night shift in the stock room. One day I came in and found out I wasn't allowed to have the keys anymore and upstairs was locked. Unfortunately, the shoe stockroom was upstairs. So every time the person working in the shoe department needed to go upstairs to check on a size or get stock to replenish the floor, she had to call the manager on duty to open the door to the stairwell. This store carried a lot of bolt-together furniture. Since downstairs space was at a premium and we had a really small stockroom, a good amount of the stock of really big pieces was upstairs. Seeing as these pieces were really big, there was generally nothing save the display on the sales floor. So, every time someone wanted to buy a piece of furniture, I had to call the manager to come and unlock the door. Every time I needed to take the trash out, I had to call the manager, since someone had decided a year earlier that we had to keep the trash locked up to keep people from stealing it.

The bright spot was that the upstairs stockroom was accessible from the layaway stockroom, and the layaway clerk could let whoever needed access in through the layaway department. Unfortunately, as a cost-cutting measure, the company had previously decided that there only needed to be a clerk back there one month of the year and for the other eleven, layaway transactions would be handled at the customer service desk, with the actual items being shuttled back and forth between the desk and the layaway stockroom in the back.

I don't know how many people out there have ever worked in one of these stores, or been a customer who has waited for the manager to show up in one. For those who haven't, if you're lucky enough to get the manager to show up the first time you page him, you're only waiting five minutes or so, but wait times of fifteen to thirty minutes are not uncommon. So, all the money we saved on the merchandise that wasn't being stolen out of our store in the first place (we often had district-best shrink figures in a pretty low shrink district), we spent on employees standing around waiting for managers to show up to unlock places that we needed to get into often over the course of a night. Or else it disappeared with the sales lost from people who got fed up waiting forty-five minutes for someone to get a piece of furniture out of the stockroom.

Anyway, a fun thing to do when presented with an annoying customer tying up the line through his stupidity is to try to get the other customers to turn on him. With the proper carefully-chosen words, looks and gestures, you can put on the appearance of politeness while getting the other people in line to say things to or about the customer (loudly) that you can't if you want to keep your job. This works especially well when someone brings a full cart into the express line. I once had a whole line of people having a very loud conversation about how much of a moron some guy with a full cart in the express line was.

I always LOVED it when a customer would intervene and let his fellow customer know what a complete (insert appropriate term here) he/she is. As a retail employee, especially manager, you are the target for everyone's pent up aggression, why, because you can't fight back. I did find that if your vocabulary happened to exceed your obnoxious customer it was possible to walk away with the satisfaction of knowing that you've insulted them, even if they will never figure it out.
On the topic of planograms, I particularly enjoyed (EXTREME sarcasm there) when in the mid 1990's a certain cereal manufacturer advertised in large letters on every package, "NEW!!! BIGGER BOX!!!" The actual ounces of product remained the same, but the box was indeed bigger. Imagine my delight at shifting the entire 4 shelf, 24 foot section of their product to accomodate said bigger box.