Sale Conspiracy Theories

[Dreamstalker]

So Salepocalypse 2.0 is in the home stretch, and as such we've blown through our allotment for a lot of items (we only have about 40 active SKUs left). Cue tantrums about OOS products...none of us have been accused of ye olde bait-and-switch yet which is a bit impressive.

SC of a certain ethnicity I'm very familiar with from my previous job shoves the sale flyer in my face, nearly causing me to drop a case of tomatoes on my foot
SC: "I look for this chocolate! I not find!"
At this point in the sale I don't even have to look at the flyer, which I'm sure annoys her even more.
Me: "We're out of that and I don't know if we'll get more."
SC: (now she speaks great English) "That's funny. I was looking for another product last week and that was also out of stock. Very curious." (said in a vaguely "there's something funny going on here and I will find it" tone) SC looks expectantly at me, possibly assuming I will either agree with her or say something that she could interpret as promising it will arrive tomorrow. I'm not taking the bait and just stare back until SC turns away.

I'm telling J about this later in the back room and his response is "I like our regular customers, but really hate some of our sale customers."
Me: "No joke, they remind me way too much of some of the scammers I had at my old job. Same accents and same attempts at word games, too."

Maybe I'm expecting too much of people or I know more about our inner workings than they do, but if you know a store gets stock erratically, when you see something you want on super-sale wouldn't you grab it right away?

[TheWolfEmperor]

It's even worse when it's an online sale. Some thing might be on sale or simply a different price online but that doesn't always apply to the stores.

Sometimes we can price match things but that's at the department or assistant management's discretion.

[Trixie]

It's quite obvious that you are hiding a whole pallet in the back and you'll put it out after the sale is over just to make more money.

I've had customers take it so personal when we don't have the one product they want on the shelf. I had a customer get annoyed because we didn't have cheap dish soap she wanted and was "too cheap" to spend the 20 cents to get another one.

[AdamAnt316]

An aphorism I posited during my time at the Bent Staple was that "Cheap products attract cheap people." Every so often (especially Black Friday), the flyers would advertise a series of bargains (laptops, printers, thumb drives, etc.) which we would only get a handful or so of in stock. Naturally, they would disappear within the first few moments we were open on the first day of the sale; I'm sure that the Corporate Overlords figured that people looking for the sale ltem would opt to buy something that was still in stock (and more expensive) instead.

WRONG!!!

People would come up to us all day (and for days afterwards) asking about the sale items, get aggravated when we told them that they weren't in stock (surprise, surprise) and storm out empty-handed. Sometimes, they demanded that we check with other stores to see what they had, but (again, big surprise) they didn't have any left either, even if the inventory computer told us that they might. I can (somewhat) understand people asking about them on the day of a regular sale, but was baffled by people asking about the loss leaders days after Black Friday had passed, since we never got any more of the big sale items back in stock.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

An aphorism I posited during my time at the Bent Staple was that "Cheap products attract cheap people."

Can confirm; I always used to say the swamp turned into Th' Inbred Carnival (aka the local Walmart) when it was running one of its Lowest Prices of the Season sales.

[Dreamstalker]

We figured it was only a matter of time before the Discount Rats' rabid cousins found us. Although we don't pre-announce sales in any big way...mainly on the website, we don't have anything like a regular circular. The non-price sale signage doesn't go up until the day before/morning of.

I suspect a large number of these SCs were masquerading as normal from day one and the claws only come out during a sale (but once that has happened, you can peg them from fifty yards away). Like being nice as pie during normal business would excuse acting like trash during a sale...but once they start acting like trash they can never again completely hide it.

*now part of me is tempted to buy up as much sale chocolate as I can in the first few days the next time, and then when the really awful SCs inevitably yammer for it on the last day I can charge them quadruple "due to increased demand"...it would never work, but an awesome thought*

[csquared]

*now part of me is tempted to buy up as much sale chocolate as I can in the first few days the next time, and then when the really awful SCs inevitably yammer for it on the last day I can charge them quadruple "due to increased demand"...it would never work, but an awesome thought*

Wouldn't work. They would demand that you honor the sale price and give them a discount for what you did.

[notalwaysright]

At the fabric store the problem was that there was always a sale, yes some sales were better than others but some fabric was on some sort of sale nearly all the time. Flannel and fleece are easy examples. So you'd get the people mad because we were out of a fabric they saw in the flyer or on the website, people mad that they bought fabric for 40% off last week and now it's 50% off. People mad because other people were buying full carts and slowing down the line. Basically it didn't matter, people were mad about something.

The big "conspiracy" customers brought up was how they could "never use" their coupon. In some respects that was true, like I mentioned a lot of stuff was always on sale. But some things were rarely on sale like the basic craft section which included things like glue, tape, glitter, feathers. I wanted to say, yes the marketing people put out coupons so you'll come into the store and find something to use the coupon on. Find, meaning to wander the store buying extra junk. That's the way marketing works. To try to get the customer to buy stuff they normally wouldn't. Every big chain store does it, if this is a surprise to you I'm sorry to burst the bubble but stores don't really want you to save money, they want you to spend money.

[Nunavut Pants]

Wouldn't work. They would demand that you honor the sale price and give them a discount for what you did.

No, they'd demand an extra discount over and above that "for the inconvenience."

[Mental_Mouse]

It's worth remembering that conspiracy theories are expressions of paranoia, which in turn is based on supreme egocentrism -- to a paranoid, everything is about them, and if something bad happens, it has to be someone purposely persecuting them.

[Ironclad Alibi]

Every time I see this thread, I want to read the name as "Stale Conspiracy Theories."

[Dreamstalker]

That works too like I said I heard pretty much the same at my old job. Here, SCs do tend to get a bit more creative with the 'logic'...and we're given a decent amount of leeway in shutting them down because J doesn't want to deal with them either.

A fair percentage of our clientele has a bunch of degrees and/or money and is of the mindset "poor stupid retail worker" and make no secret of it...yet they themselves are too stupid to know when they get put in their place (sometimes by more than one department; that can get fun especially if everything is within earshot of everyone else).

[EricKei]

We've had to edit a post to remove some Fratching material. If it happens again, the thread gets locked.

Also, someone decided to meta-mod and call them out in-thread. Please don't do that; that's our job. If you see a problematic post, Report it and move on. Nobody else but the mods will know the report was made. (For the record, as this showed up in another post: Using words like "I don't wanna go into Fratching, but <blatant Fratching>" doesn't get ya off the hook).

[KellyHabersham]

It's worth remembering that conspiracy theories are expressions of paranoia, which in turn is based on supreme egocentrism -- to a paranoid, everything is about them, and if something bad happens, it has to be someone purposely persecuting them.

Reminds me of someone whom I encountered some years back, on a music-related messageboard. He had some crazy idea about a conspiracy trying to get only a particular brand of bagels sold in the grocery store he went to, and it was "unions" who were responsible for this. (not sure if it was supposed to be a union for the store employees, or the company who made the bagels)

[drjonah]

The three conspiracy theories I always heard were

1)We were hiding sale merchandise so the employees could buy it all up themselves
2)We were hiding sale merchandise because it was on sale and we were hiding it until the sale was over and then we would put it back out.
3)We were hiding it because not only was it on sale, but there was a big coupon in the paper for it

The third one always makes me laugh because where I work now, when there's a sale like that, the warehouse sends us a ton to cover the demand. We WANT it gone and not clogging up our magical 'the back' lol