Mindless Boring Work...and big waste of money

Ya gotta love working for a store that's part of a corporation. We're convinced that anybody working in corporate has never set foot in one of the stores...ever.

We've recently rolled out the "Big Relief Price Cut" (sounds like a good bowel movement) in which "corporate" decided to mark down several items in the store. They made a huge deal about the markdowns, then when it happened it was only about 500 items and they were all generic, and the savings was less than a dollar. SO a few months later they decided to roll out "wave 2", even MORE items marked down and now they've added some name brands. Since some customers complained that they had difficulty identifying the marked down items (ya know those big red sale tags just don't do it), they sent us about 4,000 of these big red dots that we're supposed to clip to the shelf at every item that's marked down. Spent 2 days doing this. Of course now our store looks like WalMart, I was waiting for the giant yellow smiley face to come get me.

Of course corporate says there's not enough money in the payroll to actually give employees a living wage, however they can spend thousands of dollars printing these silly dots to hang on the shelves. Heck, put that in my paycheck and I'll personally tell the customers what items are marked down, but it just irritates me to see the company wasting all this money on junk when the employees can't afford to even shop there.

On another note, today I answered a price check call for some napkins. The customer got red and blue solid colored napkins and claimed they were on sale because they were 4th of July product. They're actually not because we sell solid colored party goods year round. When I told the customer that the solid colors are year round and not included, she got angry and demanded a manager, who promptly gave her the sale price. Now...we're constantly told to watch "shrink" (items that leave the store for lower than selling price), yet when a customer claims something's on sale, they give it away. Once again, waste.