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ISeeCuckedPeople posted:Has shoeless always sold lovely off-brand shoes? I remember them selling brand name before...But last time I stepped in it was all lovely offbrand stuff. At least in the 1980s-1990s, Payless was nothing but own-brand stuff like Pro-Wings, Spot-Bilt, Honchos, some other brands I forget. In the early 21st century, they bought or licensed some brand names that had some recognition (Airwalk, Keds) but I feel like they sold those licenses off again in the past ten years or so. I feel like I can say with some confidence that for most of the past 40 years the Payless Shoesource model was quite literally buying pairs of Nikes/Reeboks (or whatever the equivalent in other shoe markets is) and taking them to factories and going "how closely and how cheaply can you make something look kind of like this without getting us sued?" There was a long protracted lawsuit about whether or not it was okay to just rip off Adidas shoe designs so long as you add or substract a stripe.
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Apr 29, 2017 04:11
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Reveilled posted:But that only seems to be a shitload easier if the corporate office doesn't already manage all the prices across the country and keep track of every two-bit town's cost of living (of which sales taxes would be a part). So what I'm asking is, does that not actually happen in the US? Does a loaf of bread from Walmart cost the same pre-tax in The Walmart in North Bergen, New Jersey as it does in the Walmart in Freehold, New Jersey, or the Walmart in Rawlins, Wyoming? a) at Walmart b) in grocery but to address a few things here: I currently manage a (sort of) retail space, and any basic POS system (Square, Shopify, Shopkeep) can track all of the state and local tax rates. It's bundled into a package we pay under $100 a month for as a free feature, so tracking tax rates couldn't be an issue for a large chain. In terms of "does stuff cost the same in every locality", it depends on what the chain wants to do. I spent all of high school and college (and a bit of grad school) working for big book/music retailers, which is different than food in that it's less regional/non-perishable. With food Wyoming might be buying milk or bread from an entirely different supply chain than the stores in NJ. But with books and CDs, the cost to the store was standardized across the board, though we had little to no control over what books or how many copies we were getting shipped from the central offices. If you ever get bored you can go to any big chain store and plug in a bunch of zip codes into their "weekly ad" section, they're usually pretty standardized (especially Walmart's) but that's part of the reason most of the sites most of the big chains will ask you for your ZIP before showing you in-store sales. I assume any system for deciding how much to charge for items at big chains now is done using some sort of complex proprietary system, but at least back in the early 2000s some chains had a very basic one. Back when I worked for the now-defunct Hastings (Your Entertainment Superstore!) I was in charge of putting out the new books/music/etc. on Monday night for New Release Tuesday and because Hastings was not a very well run company, they would just send or fax us a big list every week that basically amounted to: "If there's a Borders and Barnes and Noble within 10 miles of your store, the new Harry Potter is 40% off" "If the nearest Borders *or* Barnes and Noble is within 25 miles of your store, the new Harry Potter is 30% off" "If there isn't a Borders, B&N, or Best Buy within 50 miles of your store, the new Harry Potter is 20% off" "If there are none of any of those chains within 100 miles of your store, the new Harry Potter is 10% off" It was even more complicated than that, even if there were only 4-6 price points the chart had at least a dozen permutations at some points. All three of those chains (and Target and Walmart, which were also sometimes part of the matrix) were aggressively expanding in the early 2000s, and in my college town we went from having a nearby Borders and far flung others to having all five of those other chains within ten miles over the course of my four years of intermittent Hastings employment. At no point did the Hastings front office do the minimal legwork to just like declare we were in Price Fixing Zone 5A and transmit the prices from their central office, we had to follow the chart, make the signs, then put the prices into the system by hand. Did I mention Hastings went out of business? Imagine a less dumb version of that and I'm sure that's what anyone still is business is doing on a much more complex scale to decide how much your bread is pre-tax.
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Sep 9, 2017 14:14
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I feel like there are a bunch of different conversations around "sales tax" but to provide a few more reasons why most places don't include sales tax in the cost of their products in the US: Especially in places with non-rounded tax rates (ours went up to 8.875% from 8.375% awhile back) your choices are to either make all of your prices $5.44 or $8.71 or $14.14 or just sell the things at $5/$8/$13 and eat 8.875% of the sale, which given that we're a small storefront for a non-profit makes no sense, and for most local businesses would be a significant hit; we're only marking things up 50% (from $4 wholesale to $8 retail) so eating the sales tax would be close to 20% of the money we actually make selling anything. Even if you did the ugly-rear end "Now On Sale, Two for $21.78!" sales fix so your customers can know exactly what they're going to pay for things, unless there's an enforcement mechanism all that's going to do is make your products seem ~10% more expensive than anyone not including sales tax into their products. This is doubly true for selling things online, though so far (most) states don't put the onus on the seller until their online sales footprint is over a certain (pretty huge compared to us) footprint, but for someone larger but not Amazon/Walmart/Target sized that could be/might be an issue already, and I suppose it's not that hard if you're a good sized business to just set up a code to show that your book will be $15 in these states, $15.75 in others, $16.14 in others, $17.02 in yet others, I don't know if that would really help consumers or be the sort of thing that tanks a small company because LOOK AT THEM OVERCHARGING HARDWORKING TEXANS, IT'S PROBABLY BECAUSE THEY HATE TRUMP or something goes viral. Also in general a lot of these sort of 'consumer protection' regulations are counter-intuitively supported by big businesses because the amount of time it takes (for instance) McDonald's or Target to work out their compliance to these rules can be handled by a tiny fraction of their workforce in their central office, but would probably eat up days or weeks for our staff of 1 1/2 people. I would personally love to see sales tax get wiped away because it's regressive but for the time being, people having to do the math for themselves in the status quo is probably as good as it'll get. It's like how I used to (and still do) resent tipping being factored into the price of all food service, but I still tip ~20% because it is what it is and I don't want to gently caress over the people who didn't make the rules.
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Sep 9, 2017 21:01
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JustJeff88 posted:I don't understand this because it doesn't change the prices or the margins, it's just transparency that changes. If it were law, and it would have to be because otherwise nobody would bother, then it wouldn't force anyone to change their margins or pricing structure, it would simply let you know to the penny your out of pocket cost for item X, Y or Z. The only thing that might change is that if I sell item X for $9.99 and my competitor has to sell it for $11.99, having full cost transparency does make the price difference look slightly more daunting. Nevertheless, it's still just being more direct. If the sales tax is 8.875 in my locality, I'm still going to pay $10.88 in the former case and $13.05 in the latter. The only change is the honesty. If there were a law to include sales tax into the marked price, then yeah, everyone would have to have the price as marked. That would cause headaches for retailers in multiple tax zones, but it would be a burden shared across the board. The margin thing I was talking about comes up for us when we do pop-up sales at events (our own or ones where we're given a table), people are way more likely to buy a book or badge or shirt or whatever if it's some even number, because they can just hand us a dollar or a twenty or whatever. We also don't want to bring a whole cashbox to them, so we go ahead and eat the tax there (and I set up site-specific discounts in our POS so we sell a $15 book for for $13.78 + tax so it comes out to $15.00 even in our records so nothing looks weird in our records when we get audited annually, which is a thing non-profits get so we don't get our non-profit status revoked). We consider that the 'cost of doing business' because we're going out into the community and it's promotion for our organization beyond the pure earned income, but if we extended that to every day business and sold our stuff for [even amount, tax included] it would hurt us. And yeah, we could easily include the tax on all of our price tags and shelf tags, basically no one else in the city (or the state, or to my knowledge in the United States) does it. I'm sure a few people would think it was great that we were being fully transparent, but if you're the only place in town being fully transparent I would guess that there would be more people annoyed at our 'higher prices' than pleased by our honesty. Maybe most importantly, I don't know where other people live, but outside of young children who come in with pocket change, I've never witnessed someone get confused or upset that their $5.00 book ends up costing them $5.44, and in the rare situation a kid is crestfallen that they have $X.00 even and want to buy something that's $X.00 plus tax I just cover it myself, which is an incredibly small luxury of being basically a sole proprietorship. When I worked at big box stores in high school and college and that happened you'd just sort of sit there awkwardly until either someone ponied up the extra change from their adults or someone behind them in line or you'd have to hope you didn't gently caress anything else up in your cash drawer because if you were +/- $5.00 for the day you could get written up.
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Sep 10, 2017 03:12
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What's your position on retailers advertising one price for an online item and then adding shipping in afterwards? Theft, fraud, rape, or worse?
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Sep 10, 2017 04:49
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atal posted:I mean, if you can't possibly fathom the idea of changing how you price an item - and some of the incredibly defensive replies seem to indicate that you can't - then how do you expect to engage with an industry in crisis? I am not defending any of those things, but those are all things that are completely out of my control as someone running a legitimately small storefront brick-and-mortar neighborhood business, and they're honestly probably out of control of 99% of retailers, though I'm sure you could argue that Amazon or Walmart could and do lobby on these matters. In terms of things to criticize failing retailers for, "not being able to change a complex web of thousands of laws that have been in effect for decades" seems rather unfair. I also think (understandably) that this whole thread looks at things through the lens of enormous conglomerates, not individual retailers. If there were less complex sales tax laws then sure, I could set my prices based on tax-included rates and figure out something. It would take work to change things over, but it wouldn't be the end of the world, especially if it were a one-time shift. If I were legally obligated to change the price on every item in the store every time the tax code changes, or when there's a tax free weekend, or setting up a table at an event one county over, this would become pretty burdensome. It's easy to wave away "lol it's Target they'll survive they've got thousands of employees" and that's great, but most businesses do not. I've actually been fined by the NYC Department of Consumer Affairs because of a regulation stating everything you're selling has to have a price tag or shelf tag, and on the day they came in some of our shelf tags were missing/had been knocked down. I was able to get the fine reduced to a warning, but had I not it would have cost me somewhere around $300. There are a few exemptions given for "small" businesses (under $2m annual sales, which we would kill to have 10% of) but in general these laws are applied uniformly. If some sort of law were to be passed to make including sales tax accurately into every listed/marked price everywhere, what sort of enforcement mechanism do you guys foresee? If it's a low level fine (under $1000) it would be painful for small businesses to get hit with a fine, but absolutely meaningless for Best Buy if they wanted to lie and entice people away from competitors into their store for the [some gizmo]. If the fine were large enough to deter a company with $40,000,000,000 in annual sales from using deceptive practices, a missed 'sales tax adjustment' would absolutely obliterate most businesses if they hosed up. I am sure this sounds like whining, and to be clear I would love it if we abolished sales tax on a national level but this sort of "nut up or shut up, this is why you're all going out of business, because you loooooove sales tax and are too lazy to do some arithmetic" talk is nonsense. Also, Amazon charges me (and anyone living in states where they have physical locations) sales tax, all online merchants do, sales tax isn't killing anyone. I've literally never heard someone over the age of 12 who lives in the United States make any sort of complaint about the confusing or deceptive practice of list prices being "plus tax". Sales taxes existed when retail was booming in decades past. The retail industry is like a patient who comes in with a collapsed lung and a broken leg and deep bruises and a concussion (and appears to have been driving under the influence right into a wall, which is why it's in the shape it's in) and this sales tax thing is like coming into the emergency room and going UGH THAT SCAR ON YOUR CHEEK FROM CHILDHOOD IS DISGUSTING YOU KNOW YOU COULD GET IT REMOVED, MAYBE THAT'S WHY YOU'RE IN SUCH ROUGH SHAPE.
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Sep 10, 2017 15:50
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In my experience working at big corporate retail across a bunch of different companies, there was a pretty direct correlation between "employee discount/employee treatment" and shrinkage. My understanding is that loss rates vary all over the place within chains, but the Barnes and Nobles I worked at were generally well run on a local level and the employee discount was solid (with quarterly weekends where you got an even bigger discount) and we did had a pretty good shrink rate. Meanwhile, I worked briefly in the late 1990s at a Sam Goody where we still had to look up SKUs on microfiche, make special orders on carbon paper, weird limits were put on our employee discount, and they did poo poo like straight up patting every employee down when they clocked out/left the store. That store had a ridiculous problem with theft. In general, the more draconian the measures taken by chains to crack down on employees because of the assumption they were stealing, the more stealing took place. Also I don't believe anyone is actually posting about this in good faith, but in terms of entitled consumers my perception has always been "not all white consumers are entitled assholes, but almost all entitled rear end in a top hat consumers are white consumers." Case in point, this past Saturday my store clerk was running late and so I was opening the store up at 11am, the posted time in every possible place you can post hours for the store to be open. Since I wasn't planning on doing all the opening stuff, I started a little late and by the time I flipped the sign to "open" a woman shoved her arm through the door as I was trying to bring a sandwich board out to the sidewalk with a refrain of "ARE YOU ACTUALLY OPEN BECAUSE YOUR SIGN SAYS OPEN BUT NOT ALL OF YOUR LIGHTS ARE ON ALSO WE'VE BEEN WAITING OUTSIDE FOR AN HOUR MY ENTIRE FAMILY IS OUTSIDE FOR AN HOUR WHY ARE YOU JUST OPENING NOW YOU SAY YOUR HOURS ARE AT 11 BUT I SAW YOU INSIDE FIFTEEN MINUTES AGO PUTTING THINGS OUT WHY WEREN'T YOU OPEN WE WAITED FOR AN HOUR THAT IS BAD CUSTOMER SERVICE and then like three adults and five children came in, wandered around, knocked some stuff over, didn't buy anything and on the way out the aforementioned woman went SORRY TO INTERUPT YOU BY TRYING TO BUY SOMETHING. This sort of thing (mainly the "if I can see someone inside, why are you closed?" thing) happens with some regularity, and it is always a white family. There are lots of absolutely delightful white customers too, and there are certainly rude/'bad' customers of all races and creeds. But the particular entitled lovely "what are posted hours? What do you mean you don't carry some incredibly obscure thing that makes no sense for you to carry? You want me to get on the R TRAIN just because I want an officially licensed high quality replica Master Chief mask? Uggggggggggh are you sure you don't have this thing somewhere in the back? Uh huh? Can you get your manager to check? You are the manager? Why don't you carry this thing? Well okay! Good luck with that!" customer all fall into a certain category.
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Sep 13, 2017 01:41
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:Whoa can you talk more about the microfiche? How did that even work? 1) We'd have to figure out what that was if we didn't know (we had a couple of equally outdated "Rock Encyclopedia" type things floating around) and then when we determine you want, say, Elvis Costello's Armed Forces, you just pull out the Bu-Cr sheet of microfiche, stick it into the machine, scroll to Costello and try to find Armed Forces. Assuming it's there, you write down the distributor code and the UPC or whatever onto a sheet of carbon paper and fill the rest out so that we have the customer's information when they come back in 4-6 weeks to pick up their CD. 2) That's if it goes smoothly, whoever converted everything to microfiche was pretty terrific at putting half of Elvis Costello and the Attractions albums under C for Costello, half under E for "Elvis Costello and the Attractions" since it's a BAND name not a person, and a few under "Attractions w. Elvis Costello" for reasons I could never fathom. I bring him up specifically because by the late 1990s Rhino was in the middle of doing "deluxe" re-releases of most of Costello's albums, but Columbia's older mid-1980s CD versions were still listed even though they were "out of print" and we still had cassettes and LPs listed, so reading one line off would get people things they absolutely didn't want. This was the first "deluxe CD reissue" boom in general, and old albums from [insert star of the 1960s/1970s] would have their deluxe reissues hidden in the like "March 1996 Update" sheet, not the one where you'd expect it. It was a mess. Also Best Buy, Borders, Barnes & Noble, The Wiz, and several other retailers had already gotten way better at the special order system, and Amazon/online sales were a nascent thing, so more often than not when we finally got special orders in and I'd call out to let someone know that their Edith Piaf box set had arrived for them to pick up, they'd take no small pleasure in going "oh, I already got it from Best Buy, they delivered it faster and it was CHEAPER TOO" and then we'd have an Edith Piaf box set sitting on the shelf for most of a year because there was no mechanism to return stuff save for an annual "we ran through a spreadsheet and are telling you to send back this list of stuff". This also happened when there was some sort of relatively unexpected breakout hit (I can't remember which specific one it was, let's say the Fugees) and there was a very slow centralized process that sort of went "we'll send you new stuff once a month and we expect you'll sell 10 of these, 5 of these, 3 of these, and we'll adjust that based on your sales every quarter" that also made projections based on artists' previous albums. Which meant we were drowned in like... the second Hootie & the Blowfish album, or some algorithm that never figured out that not every Motley Crue album would go platinum in perpetuity, but also left us completely flatfooted for breakout albums/debuts. There was a situation where we could not keep the [Fugees album] in stock during the holiday season, we had like a literal waiting list of a hundred or so people who wanted the album, so we got special dispensation to special order 200 copies of the album. Someone in the warehouse misread a 1 as a 7 on our hand-written order forms, and so at great expense we were rush-shipped 200 copies of Mister Big's Lean Into It just in time for the 1996 holiday season. They were not returnable. We couldn't fit them in storage. We spent the entire month of December (and into the spring) with a giant wall of a one hit wonder from a decade previous dominating the space behind the cash register. We did not get any more copies of the Fugees album until the New Year. Some retailers richly deserved to die. Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Sep 13, 2017 |
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Sep 13, 2017 16:25
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call to action posted:edit: lol at the "all white people are entitled" thing, maybe that has to do with the weird record store or Media Play you're working at. next someone will come in and tell us about who 'canadians' are and how much they tip
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Sep 13, 2017 18:33
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Almost all of my retail experience (both as a clerk/manager/whatever and as a consumer) up to and including last weekend is in the New York City metro area, I don't keep close demographic tabs on everyone who I've ever served/observed at a store but I'd like to assure the thread that not everyone I've ever seen in a retail environment is white. I live and work in areas of Brooklyn where white people aren't even the majority of residents, or majority of people I see on a day to day basis, but they comprise the vast majority of this specific facet of annoying customers. There are also all sorts of other issues that come up with (generally) non-white consumers from other cultures who believe they can haggle at a Costco or split open a multi-pack at Rite Aid and hold up the line arguing that they only wanted ONE, why can't you ring up just one? or a host of other things that do not include everyone in a demographic group, but when they manifest they manifest themselves overwhelmingly inside one demographic group. What you two will read from this: kill whitey
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Sep 13, 2017 19:15
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Also assuming they're part of a fandom, in my experience most kids are already subscribed to/follow Facebook/Twitter/YouTube/Old-Timey-Blog/whatevers dedicated not only to unboxing but announcements and press releases and convention showcases of the next Lego/Marvel/Star Wars/Nintendo/Shopkins/Minecraft/whatever they're into products, and are aware of them months before they even come out. Granted I'm talking mostly about "older" kids 10-16, but I wouldn't be shocked if the age gate for that keeps getting lower. There's also a lot of cross-generational brand-type things in there, and even if the kid is too young/screenblocked/not-tech-savvy enough to do that, when birthdays or the holidays roll around a lot of parents will be sort of queuing those things up to show the kids to figure out the best present for them. None of which requires going to an actual physical store.
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Sep 19, 2017 23:17
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Kthulhu5000 posted:So many retail stores feel like shopping in a warehouse, or in some office park suite, or they just seem overly pretentious for the area they're in. Hmm, yes, nice and shiny bookstore...right across from an obviously faded and never updated Arby's restaurant, and right next to some no-name tanning salon that never seems to get any real business.
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Sep 28, 2017 21:01
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I guess from my perspective I'm not really sure what you think "small independent businesses working together" can do? We absolutely have something that is a neighborhood chamber of commerce under a different title, and local businesses cooperate for community events and street fairs and "summer strolls" and other activities throughout the year. We partner and promote each other when possible. None of this gives us the power to prevent chains from renting in our area, or cycles of "wait a minute why are there five [sushi/coffee/taco/sports bar/wine bar/salons] opening up in a ten block area this spring?" or whatever else, because we don't have the ability to "bully" building owners or whatever. This isn't something I take lightly as a consumer or a retailer, and I'm not really sure what you're saying other than "shopping sucks, ordering online is better" outside of I guess "you can try to be really really really cool by some ineffable definition, maybe then it's okay" which might in fact be the reality, but it's also a lot of words to say that. Ironically the majority of the things we sell in my brick and mortar location are unique to that brick and mortar location (and our website) and one of my projects this month is to integrate all of those listings to show up on Amazon.
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Sep 28, 2017 23:45
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Baronjutter posted:Just buy raw materials in bulk and craft your own items, avoid the whole shopping and manufacturing middle men. Anything but foraging and/or plundering is for chumps.
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Sep 29, 2017 22:47
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In terms of self-reflection on clothing shopping, I was going to say that if anyone had pointed out my general model of garment purchasing (going to stores, trying on things making note of things I liked/did not like, purchasing my favorites, then when I need a new pair of shoes or some new work shirts or jeans or whatever just ordering the thing I like online because I know how it fits/looks) and how I actually like having the option to use both ecosystems. But then I realized what this really means is that I wear essentially the same poo poo year after year, so maybe no one else does it for that reason. Also Merrell finally discontinued the shoe I had been buying/rebuying for the past nine years, so that was the hidden pitfall. Vent 2 my rear end!
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Nov 12, 2017 01:47
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Not Fooling Anyone is a pretty great website compendium of all of these sort of Dimple Donuts/Veggie Castle/etc. locations.
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Dec 22, 2017 03:58
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Ganson posted:Heh veggie castle. Is White Castle dead yet? My single experience was getting some sliders at one in Chicago and then having explosive diarrhea for 6 hours.
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Dec 24, 2017 16:09
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Chiming in as someone who has sourced a bunch of enamel pins, patches, glassware, shirts, paper goods, etc. for a non-profit organization, you can put in the legwork and get reasonable stuff made locally in the US for a lot of products, but even when you find a company that costs a little more and touts their American Business bonafides you're liable to order something and then get a notice a week later that your order is being dropshipped from China or Pakistan. This has been exclusively my experience with enamel patches and pins, more than any other weird thing I've tried to make. There are definitely places who can manufacture these items in the United States, but for those two specific items everyone I've spoken to has minimum orders that are completely untenable (like 5000+ of the same design) for most people who would be seeking out custom items.
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Jan 16, 2020 17:00
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TyroneGoldstein posted:The problem is, they never use anything but those same signs. There's like one major company that handles all the closures in NY and surrounding areas and it's a giant red flag that there's going to be insane markup. But then they dragged the rugs over to Circuit City and CompUSA, as if it made any sense to have fancy rugs on clearance next to a bunch of CD copies of Bejeweled.
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Feb 9, 2020 23:11
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