The things in my head go 'round and 'round

Ah, it is that time of year once again where folks gather their dollars together and head out into the malls and shopping venues of the world ready to spend money that they might not really have to spend.  All to make themselves feel better, following the siren call of Madison Avenue telling them that they have to spend during this time of  year because it is that American Way.  Spend, spend, spend.

But my goal here is not to inspect and discuss finances.  My goal here is to show you the way not to be an asshat as you are shopping.  This should be an easy task, but some of you out there are making it a tad difficult.

Some tips.  If you run into friends in the stores, don’t stop in the middle of the aisle to talk about your lives.  Move out of the freaking way.  There are people who are trying to get by.  Kids helping you shop are cute.  When everyone has the time to stand and watch your precious one pick your grocery selections, but at holiday time no one has the time to do this.  Get moving, will you?  If you see someone working in an aisle, such as filling the shelves, don’t try to get as close to them as you possibly can.  They will be standing up at some point in time and need a modicum of room to do so.  If you are sitting in their back pocket when they do stand you will get moved.  And if you do, don’t get all pissy about it,  you shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

We keep talking about this, but even though it isn’t necessary to dress for shopping it would be nice if you left your ugly pajama bottoms at home.  Along with those ugly slippers. 

Just a few tips, I know that there will be more as we go. 

L8R.

If I haven’t mentioned it before, I am on vacation. Let’s let that sink in for a minute.

This is what a North Carolina vacation looks like.

We have been coming to the same area of North Carolina for the past 7-8 years. A small island called Oak Island, just south of Wilmington. You can find a reasonably priced beach house pretty much any time you need. And if you want to live a little frugally, you can get a house off the ocean pretty cheap.

This is Toki Doki on the North Carolina Shore.

The area is beautiful. Of course, any place that you are on or near the ocean is beautiful. In my opinion, of course.

Tourist areas are pretty interesting to me, being that I work in retail. Being on the opposite side of the counter can be amusing. There are some folks who just do not want to be doing what they are doing down here, but they are kind of stuck. Like the guy who runs, and I assume owns, the convenience store on the island. He is there early in the morning, and up until 6 at night every day. If you ask him how he is doing he says the same thing every time. “Living the dream”.

At least he says that every time that I see him, and ask how he is doing. If you look real close when he says it, though, you will see that his eyes are dead. He is just saying the words. And I can understand that. What I can’t understand is why he just doesn’t sell the business and get the hell out. The store is worth a good bit of money. A cool couple of million at least. He could retire on that, as he is pretty near retirement age. But he keeps coming in day after day. The store closes for the winter, so maybe he just works the few months of the summer and puts up with us tourists so that he can do what he wants over the winter.

Vacations. Vacationing. Being the opposite side of the counter. We are going to keep visiting this theme this week.

Stay tuned.

In a wild, and wacky move that has the financial, and automotive worlds freaked out Walmart has announced that it will be buying General Motors.

Supposedly, once the deal has gone through, Walmart will be shutting down all of the assembly plants for a period of time. When the shops are opened back up, the jobs in them will be on the income level of a greeter at a Walmart store. No union, as per Walmarts policy of not wanting unions in any of their stores.

This very cool news. Now you will be able to buy a car out in the garden center. Wonder if they will be having some really good deals?

April 12th is Easter. For those of us in Retail is equates to a Second Christmas.

Yeah. A Second Christmas. Why? I have no clue, other than we want to sell you a whole bunch of things for your kids so that you can feel superior to your friends. Who also want to buy a bunch of things for their kids so that they can feel superior to you.

And it is all couched around Jesus of Nazareth raising from the dead after being crucified by the Romans.

Are you getting a fuzzy feeling here?

Anyway, with the madness that is going to be ensuing in the next couple of days I thought that it would be appropriate to go over some rules of the road. Retail etiquette as it were.

We have discussed this same subject in the past. As a matter of fact one of the folks who commented talked about Easter. But is seems that some of you have forgotten what we have discussed.

Such as:

When entering a store, keep walking. Do not stop right inside the door to organize your coupons, dig through your purse for something, start looking through the circular. Keep walking. It is an entry way, and others would like to enter.

Passing gas is a part of life. We all do it, no big deal. Until you rip one when I am right beside you stocking the shelves. That is just not cool.

There have been numerous discussions about not clogging up the aisles. Keep moving. The middle of the aisle is not the place to have a chat with your friends. Find someplace else to do that. There are other people who need to get through. Get out of their way.

I am sorry that prices are what they are, and I apologize that you have lost money from your retirement. It isn’t my fault. I didn’t do it. So don’t unload on me about it. I have to pay the same prices you do. Learn to economize. I have had to, so maybe you should also.

Waiting for the last minute to shop is so last year. The holidays come every freaking year. You can plan for them. There are numerous ways you can keep track of when they are coming up. If you are reading this, you obviously have a computer. Use the calendar that is on it. There are many calendar applications on the web that are free to use. Use one of them. It isn’t funny to be scurrying around just before the store closes. We want to go home too.

If you have not trained your husband/boyfriend/baby-daddy how to shop don’t send them to my store. Send them somewhere else. I don’t have the time, or the patience to deal with them. And cell phones don’t help, because they will be looking at what they think you want, I will walk up and inevitably will be handed the phone so that I can give them what you really want. I am not your personal shopper unless you want to pay me $30 an hour, with a 2 hour minimum up front.

Ok.

So there are a few things that you can work on over the next couple of days that will get you up to speed with the current Retail Etiquette. Any questions?

Keep them to yourself.

Ahhh the middle of winter…..

Football is over. Nothing to watch on TV unless you are into sports that are akin to watching your toe nails grow. You know what I am talking about. NASCAR, bowling, golf, basketball.

So we go shopping. At least on the days when the temps are above the zero. And we get to experience retail etiquette face to face.

Such as the times that people make comments about my always having to work weekends. That is always fun.

And in this day and age, it is always amazing to me when a parent calls me about a job for their kid. This is a serious breach of retail etiquette. Unless you are a family memeber of mine. Nepotism is alive and well in my universe.

Common sense, you would think, would have a place of importance in retail etiquette. You would be wrong.

So there a few things to think, and discuss. Let me know if you have any others.

namaste

Here in the eastern part of the United States we have coin counting machines in some of our business’. They are mostly placed by a company called CoinStar. Banks here in the eastern part of the US don’t like dealing with coins. So if you go into your local neighborhood banking establishment with a bag full of coins they most likely won’t take it.

Yeah. They won’t take money.

Of course, the supermarket chain I work for frowns on taking coin. If someone brings in coin all wrapped up in the nice, neat little coin wrappers we have to open the wrapper and count the coin to verify the amount. Makes for really good customer relations when the customer is someone of Grandparent age. Makes them feel embarrassed. And that usually isn’t a good thing.

So, after a circuitous route, we are back to the CoinStar machine. Which isn’t free. You are charged 9 cents on the dollar to have this machine count your coins and spit out a voucher that you can then use for your groceries, or simply cash.

Sounds easy enough, now doesn’t it?

That is the beauty of it all. Because the CoinStar machine has a monitor that tells you what to do, and tells you what IT is doing while it is counting your coins. And it even tells you when it can’t count you coins. With all of this information going on, you would think that I would never have to deal with customers at the CoinStar machine.

You would be wrong.

People put the darndest things in with their coins. Found a .22 shell in the machine just yesterday. Was really glad that it didn’t go off. We regularly find slugs, washers, jewelry, paper clips, lint, and the like jamming the machine. And of course the person who is standing there never has a clue as to how whatever foreign object got into the machine. Must have been the Other Guy. That mysterious “Other Guy” who screws up everything.

Wish I could find him and tell him to knock it off.

Moving on. Our CoinStar broke yesterday. A message came on the screen telling everyone, and anyone who WOULD PAY ATTENTION that it was out of service. I had to fish 3 different peoples change out of the machine because THEY DIDN’T PAY ATTENTION. Rather disconcerting. Today we got a new machine, but unfortunately because it was shipped by a company that employs gorillas it is not working. And it has a message on the screen saying that it is out of service. Just a few minutes ago I got a page to come to the Customer Service Desk to help a customer with the CoinStar. I walked up, the customer asked is the machine was out of order. I said yes. They shot me the hairy eyeball and stalked out.

Why don’t people pay attention?

The case can be made for the woman not knowing the machine was out of order. How could she know, unless she called in and asked? I can understand that. I do commiserate with her. But why call me up just to ask if the machine is out of order, when it is clear from the information the machine is giving her that it is indeed out of order. Or did she think that that was a ruse? A cruel trick to be played upon customer after customer as they came in to exchange their base coins for paper money. A cruel trick that we employees would chuckle and chortle about as they left the store in frustration.

Hardly.

She was just another pissed off person who wanted to share her pissed-off-edness with me. I get a lot of that. Everyone wants to share their unhappiness with me.

Thanks, but really. I am trying to cut down. I have enough of my own.

Just a thought.

Namaste.

Let us talk retail.

Yeah. I think that it is time.

When you look at a grocery store what do you see? Four walls that hold all of the things you like to eat, or someplace where you can act like and idiot and get away with it?

Hmmm?

A grocery store is just a larger version of your refrigerator. Keep that in mind as we talk.

A grocery store is layed out so that the perimeter is where you are going to spend the most amount of money. Get used to that fact, it doesn’t change. I want you to make some forays into the center of the “box”, but I don’t want you to spend a lot of time there. I want you to spend about 55 -65% of your time there. I want the rest along the perimeter. Because that is where I make the most money.

The center of a store is cans, and boxes. They don’t need refrigeration. The perimeter is produce, meat, deli, seafood, and dairy. They need refrigeration. Hence the refrigerator analogy.

Yesterday my store had a power outage. No power. But we had lights, and we could run the cash registers. Why? How? Because we have a generator. And we need that generator to run the computers so that we don’t lose the information that they have in them. We do not, and most retailers do not, have a generator that will run the refrigeration. That generator would be too huge, and expensive. The one we have just for the lights, and computers is the size of a 400 cubic inch v-8 engine. Like from a cadillac. Go open the hood on your grandfathers car and you will get the idea.

So. Having lights tends to confuse people. They think that even though I am putting plastic over the meat, and the dairy, and every other refrigerated case, that they can push me out of the way to get what it is that they want.

Not so.

Everytime you open a door to a refrigerated case, and the power is not on, you are losing cold air. Cold air that won’t be replaced. BECAUSE THE POWER IS NOT ON YOU IDIOT!!!

Maybe the next time YOUR power goes out, I can come to your house and stand in front of your refrigerator with the door open. Think that you might like that?

And when I tell you that the power is out, don’t act like you haven’t been hearing the announcements that we have been making for THE PAST 30 MINUTES, YOU IDIOT!! It just makes you look silly. Especially when you ask what is going on, all I do is smile, and point to the ceiling where yet another annoucement is taking place telling you that we are sorry but due to losing power we ask that you not open the freezer doors.

Let’s recap. Power on…all of the lights on, and no plastic on the dairy, meat, seafood, and produce cases. Power off…not all of the lights are no, someone is making an announcement about the power being off, and keep your mitts off of my freezer doors.

Thanks. Glad we straightened that one out.

Namaste.

* It is 7:30 in the morning. Who could you need to talk to on that damned phone.

* If you are never going to allow people to be on the balcony, why was one built on the corporate office? Or are you trying to keep people from jumping?

* If you had to sit all day in a food safety seminar you would never eat at another restaurant.

* Washing your hands IS the way to better health.

* My ass is numb.

* My brain left around lunch time.

Namaste.

Tyler over at Building Camelot has been doing a product testing on razors. He has been using the Gillette Fusion and the Schick Quattro. I told him that they both suck.

First off, you have razors with 4 blades. That is like pulling a lawn mower across your face. And for me, and my head? I have tried both of them long ago, and they both dug furrows in my scalp. I am talking trenches you could have planted corn in. Not good.

I use the Schick Xtreme disposable. Why disposable? Because they cost less than the replacement blades. Period.

That is all that needs to be said about that. Because when you shave your head and your face on a daily basis, you ARE the expert as to which blade to use.

Take note of that Schick Corporation. Unsolicited praise.

You are welcome.

Namaste.

And here I go taking on the coporate giants once again. Though the first time I talked about a major corporation I was being very positive in my assessment of their product.

Of course, I happened to be going for the all important suck-up-send-me-some-free-stuff side of the issue.

It didn’t work.

Now, though. This time I am pissed off yet once again.

The story….

Here in the Great State of Pennsylvania we have this quaint law that states that every car on the road has to be annually inspected. Whether it needs it or not. This is to, ostensibly, guarantee the all of the cars on Pennsylvania roads are safe to operate. All of the lights work, the brakes work, and that they have adequate tread on their tires.

Yeah right. In reality it is to keep the shoddy garage mechanics in a job. Case in point.

My truck needed tires to pass inspection. I called Sears and ordered the tires I needed, and arranged for an appointment. I was told that no appointment was needed. Just show up at 7:30. I did, signed all of the paperwork needed, and went back to a waiting room with crappy tv reception, no clock, and tool sales literature to read. After a couple of hours spent walking with geriatrics (you can read about it here) I was told that my tires would not come off. Thinking that the tire guys were nuts, I took my truck and new tires home and started trying to get a local mechanic to deal with this. So that I can get my inspection sticker so that I don’t get a ticket for not having one.

Tell me that all the state agencies don’t get a swig at this trough.

I have a garage up the street from me. Called them and arranged a day and time. Went to the garage at the appointed day and time, and found out that they were closed. Called them later that afternoon to find out the next time I could come in, and all I got was “sorry, something came up”.

I did finally get my tires on, so today I went back to the garage that told me that I needed tires so that they could complete my inspection. And the reason I didn’t have the original garage do the tires is that they don’t do tires.

I can understand that.

Tires seem to be a real pain in the heinie for everyone in Pennsylvania. Especially those of us who need new tires, and have to look for some poor fool that will actually put them on the vehicle.

All of this in the spirit of keeping the residents of Pennsylvania safe from one another. Because given our druthers, we all would drive around in rusted out heaps that would endanger not only the surrounding populace, but ourselves.

Because that is the way we roll.

Namaste.