Wally World in trouble

[moparwash]

Once upon a time....

There was just Tide....now at the store I counted at least 10 different versions....when they come out with toothpaste scent Tide, Im done....just like with Oreo's....once upon a time there was Oreo.

 

[vacerator]

Dave,

there's nothing at all bad about what you do. Many of our best managers had little or no formal education.
You manage people. That is a skill set acquired from good parenting, and social interacting.
You're taking care of your family. First order of business, then the store, or in reverse.
As my former employer once told me myself; "You're a good mensch". That man made me feel appreciated.
Mike.

 

[warmsecondrinse]

Back when Rubik's Cubes first enthralled the world I was a cashier at Sears. Corded, handheld scanners had just come out. They scanned wrong more often than not and it was literally much faster (proven repeatedly by duels among cashiers) to enter info by hand. Our supervisors understood this and there was no problem. However, at least once per week some other manager would come by and explain to us that we were somehow confused and didn't understand that the scanners were actually faster and if we would just try them we'd see for ourselves.

 

Repeated demonstrations (causing huge lines said managers seemed not to see) to the contrary failed to make any impression. The point is that these managers never stopped insisting that the cashiers were the problem even though they themselves were unable to get the scanners to work.  And of course there was never any kind of explanation of HOW we cashiers were the problem.

 

Back then the first kind of managers (who knew the scanners didn't work) were the norm and the second were a small, loud, obnoxious minority. Now it seems to be the reverse.

 

Sounds like you're in the first group. Be proud!

 

Jim

 

P.S. I should mention that those of us who had prior cashier experience were unanimous that the registers Sears had were by far the best designed registers any of us had ever used. We had to enter 3 or 4 sets of numbers PER ITEM and our fingers flew on those! I doin't remember the name but they had a crescent, Jetson-esque design. 

 

[lordkenmore]

>Tide Free & Clear Coldwater.

>Glad to see am not the only one missing that product.

I, too, wish it were more readily available. I never used it, and--as far as I know--I only know of the existence by having heard of it on the Internet. But I'd be curious to try it.

It's puzzling why it's not carried in the US. They have no problem coming up with 5 billion other types of Tide, so why not carry something they are already making for another part of the North American market?

 

[tomturbomatic]

Jim, I remember those terminals in the pods that Sears set up so that there was no one in the departments to help customers find stuff and the stores were far from self service.Were the bar codes not bold enough for the scanners or was there some other problem? I, the late 70s, I used to go to the Sears near me in the late afternoon when there were few crowds and few sales people so most of the pods were covered with vinyl pod condoms.

In an earlier experiment in bar code reading, Rich's in Atlanta entered the Discount Store Age with their chain Richway in the late 60s. They used VERY sticky bar codes on items and the stores practically gave away merchandise from poor scanning. The real nightmare came when the weekly sales pages came out. Every item that was to go on sale had to be counted then new sales labels had to be affixed to the items so that they would ring up at the sales price. When they went off the sales price and back to the regular price, all of the items had to be recounted and restickered with the regular price. Needless to say, they did not have adequate computer technology to enter item codes to get counts to to program sales prices (some term called PLU) and customers ruined some plastic items with rubbing alcohol and knife blades trying to remove the stickers. It was sad. Then the oil shock hit the economy and many things took a hit like people losing jobs and Richway and Treasure Island chains closing.

Does anyone who was in retail then remember the price freezes to battle inflation? We had to keep lists to be able to prove to customers that prices had not risen during the price freeze. The only thing it did was to prove that the government cared, although its actions were misdirected and ineffective. With the price of oil going up, the price of everything had to go up. I never believed that the vertical monopoly that was the oil industry did not fleece us but good. They did not have price freezes because they had clout in the government; hell they owned most of the government.