Other Customers Might Want to Buy Those Also

[purplecat41877]

On Friday, one of the checkers got a customer who was buying a whole bunch of deodorant and shampoo. Another checker believed that the customer was planning to sell them on the black markets since he was using coupons so he could buy them for practically nothing. The second checker called the store director at home and filled him in. When the second checker told the customer not to return to the store, the customer told him that he should keep his mouth shut if he wanted to keep his job.

I used the computer to print out the receipts from the deodorant/shampoo customer. The following day, the second checker told me that the store director was pleased with how I printed out those receipts.

[telecom_goddess]

well that's a new way to go about it.....

[protege]

Maybe not the black market...maybe the customer owned a store, and was currently out of those items? Sometimes shop owners do that when they're out of certain items, and the delivery truck hasn't arrived yet.

[sstabeler]

Doubt it, especially with the attitude of the purchaser.

[jiarby]

I do not understand why a store cares what a customer wants to do with the products they buy.. or why they care how many they want to buy.

You open a business to buy products at a low price, then resell at a higher price to consumers. Your goal is to sell them all. As many as possible. As fast as possible.

If you do not like customers using coupons then stop accept them.

You guys listed a product for sale. The manufacturer created a coupon to increase their market share and/or build product awareness. The store has agreed to work in cooperation with the manufacturer and accept these coupons. The store gets paid for the coupon. You get less money from the consumer, but get reimbursed by the manufacturer. No loss to the store.

Why do you care what someone does with their deodorant?

"He's gonna resell them for a profit"
So what... that's what YOU do!

"If he buys them all then we will be out... "
That is the objective. The goal everyday is to increase sales... So why complain when someone wants to buy what you have for sale?
If you run out it is not the consumer's fault that bought them all. It is the store's fault to not anticipate demand and stock appropriate levels of merchandise. Retail sales is about capitalism... not socialism. It is not the store's responsibility to make sure everyone gets to buy deodorant at the special price.

[RavenStarr]

It's possible he could be donating them to needy people.

I'm not understanding the whole black market concept on selling deoderant... Last I heard deoderant was still legal.

[evilhomer]

There's a lot more to the black market than illegal items. These items are sold to small independent stores. These are cash transactions and the taxes that should be paid for them never are. I don't have the time or energy to find the links, but I've seen numerous shows that detail the problems that this creates.

Jiarby, you make a good point. On the one hand, he's just trying to make some money, he's not stealing, he's just using what is available. Good for him, I wish I thought of it first. That's the one hand, on the other hand... first, his line of "if you want to keep your job" makes it sound like he's an asshole. Hey, it's perfectly legal to be an asshole, I'm a card carrying member of the club myself, but, he's an asshole, there's a strike against him right off the bat.

Second, he is clearly manipulating the system. There's a glitch in the system that lets him pull this off. The goal is to sell the product to a large amount of people, getting them to try and like it, thereby creating repeat customers. The whole stock going to a single person means that this goal was not met. This is why you typically see limits placed with coupons and in store.

Third, the store's goal is not to sell all of this product. The store's goal is to get large amounts of people into their store. They make periphial purchases while there, creating instant profit for the store, and the hopeful residual effect of generating repeat business. The store is making little to no money on these sale items. The whole goal is to generate spin-off business. Not only is the store not getting the instant spin-off, there's also a negative effect created because I know for a fact that I'm pissed off when a store is out of a sale item on the first day; I make a point of avoiding these stores when it's a recurring problem. This is to say nothing of the poor souls working in the store who now have a week of whining screamers complaining about the product being sold out.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

I'm not understanding the whole black market concept on selling deoderant... Last I heard deoderant was still legal.

Baby formula is legal too, and it's commonly sold on the black market.

It's usually stolen and then re-sold to people who can't afford to buy baby formula at retail prices. Or it's sold to drug users who use it to cut cocaine.

As evilhomer mentioned, the sellers don't collect taxes which by law they are supposed to.

Black market doesn't necessarily mean the product itself is illegal; it may mean legal product is being sold in illegal ways.

[chainedbarista]

he could have been a hoarder; one of those people who stock up on everything imaginable and store it in their basement/barn/lead lined cement bunker. the type they show on a reality show about weird compulsions or such.

[Shalom]

When I worked at an independent pharmacy, I'd go into the Tree of Dollar near my house and buy a dozen pregnancy tests, six boxes of yeast infection cream, fifteen tubes of hydrocortisone, ten tubes of athlete's foot ointment, and so on; about $45-50 worth in total each time. Hey, why should I pay two dollars and change wholesale for something I can get for a buck retail?

They never even blinked. I told them straight out that I was buying the stuff for resale, and doing this because they were cheaper than my wholesaler; the only response I got from the cashier was, "Bring your resale cert next time, we'll take off the sales tax for you, and if you want you can sign up your store on our website to buy directly." Didn't faze them in the least, I was obviously not the first to do that. I figure if they didn't want me buying in bulk like that, they'd limit quantities.

Of course I never totally emptied the shelves; I figured that would be rude. Plus they generally had more up there than I needed at that time anyway.

[LillFilly]

We had a guy going around to our salons buying anything they had from certain salon brands on-sale; they told me that apparently, he runs a 'salon' but cannot call it such, or get those products from the distributors, because he's not licensed. Unfortunately nothing we could do as it wasn't any of our business, and our salons had to make the decision to not sell to him.

[dawnfire]

It's possible he could be donating them to needy people.

I'm not understanding the whole black market concept on selling deoderant... Last I heard deoderant was still legal.

i've heard of kids huffung aerosol deodorant

[MoonCat]

It is the store's fault to not anticipate demand and stock appropriate levels of merchandise.

Well, you generally don't anticipate that one individual will clean out your entire stock of a certain product on any given day.

[Aethian]

On one of TLC's shows it had on a few days ago called Extreme Couponers there was a guy who had called the store ahead to let them know he was coming. When he got there they were ready and he walked out with over 1700 dollars worth of stuff for just over 250. 150 of that was in cereal that he paid a whopping 40 cents per box for because of coupons and a sale price on it.

All of those were donated.

He bought over 1000 toothbrushes that with coupons came out to something like a nickle a piece. Those were also donated.

60 bath washes....donated.



Not all that people buy in bulk are going to be reselling the items. Yes some are and the attitude of that 'customer' was not one that I saw on these other couponers.

But why ask the guy to leave and never return?

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

I support the OP's manager 100%. That guy probably isn't somebody you want coming in and cleaning you out on a daily basis.

Thanks to him, the store could be cleaned totally out of the shampoo and deodorant on the coupon. Even though they still made money on his purchases, or at least lost no money, they may have lost business from other people wishing to buy those items, and going to another store instead to purchase them, and maybe never returning.

I'm a big believer in limits on coupons. Especially in areas like laundry detergent and paper products which are generally sold at a loss. At least that way a decent number of people can buy the product, and while they're at it maybe they buy other stuff that does make the company money. Plus I'm one of those wretched souls who has to deal with the pissing and moaning from shoppers when the stuff they made a special trip to buy is gone. There's nothing I can do to get that merchandise back in other than hope it arrives on the next truck.

You also can't predict to any reliable degree which items will sell quickly or won't, or will sell out in one transaction to a couponer or reseller. Suppose you do try to allow for this and bring in massive quantities of stock. What happens if the product doesn't sell? It sits around the store leaving no room for the next items coming in in massive quantities.

It is no business of the store's what somebody does with the merchandise they buy from it. It's their business to make profit, since this is capitalism, not socialism. Profit matters. If it didn't, stores wouldn't be graded on gross margin as a measure of their performance.

The manager probably thought he couldn't make as much money selling mass quantities to the couponer as he could selling smaller quantities to other shoppers, and asked the couponer not to return. That's his call. I happen to agree with it.