mad anthony

Rants, politics, and thoughts on politics, technology, life,
and stuff from a generally politically conservative Baltimoron.

Thursday, June 24, 2004

Can I help you? Yes, please be the laziest employee in the world..

I'm a big fan of buying stuff cheap, and I've noticed the thing that helps me most with accomplishing this is lazy store employees. For example, Target is known for marking stuff down in their systems, and stuff that's on sale is well-documented on deal discussion boards like fatwallet. I've bought 5 ipods for $200 back when they were normally $400, a portable DVD player for $150 that I resold for $300, and 2 playstations with lcd screens that I bought for $40, threw in a $10 adapter, and sold for $120 each. They were all tagged at higher prices. The playstations were tagged at $110, and the clerks were surprised when they scanned for $37 - they insisted on calling a manager. The conversation between the manger and the clerk consided of the manager asking "is that the right item? Is that the price in the system? Then sell it to him for that price.

My most recent experience - Rite Aid had shampoo that was buy one get one free. There was a buy one get one free coupon in the paper. When the clerk tried to ring it up, it wouldn't take. She called the manger over, who at first said she didn't think it could be done. I pointed out that the sale thing was store and the coupon was manfacturer. She then goes "well, I don't care, they pay me for them anyway" and I walked out with $10 worth of shampoo for the sales tax.

People complain about lack of service at stores, but I get most of my benefits out of lazy clerks who just want their paychecks while doing as little work as possible

1 Comments:

At 3:10 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

What do you think the store manager would have done if she was not "lazy? Would she have called up the Rite-Aid home office?? Would she have refused to honor the coupon? If she had not been "lazy" does that mean she would have kept you waiting at the counter while she did something to correct the situation?

Perhaps she was just making a judgement call about a relatively unimportant situation and at the same time make a customer happy.

 

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