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Just In Time ordering on the retail level is a great idea because it moves warehousing from retail stores where square footage is obscenely expensive and product is handled on a per-case or per-unit basis to intermediate warehouses in the boonies where square footage is extremely cheap and product is handled on a per-pallet basis. It brings down storage and handling costs and encourages a robust internal supply system and raises a company's income on a per-retail-sqft basis. Just In Time ordering on a warehouse basis is the dumbest poo poo ever and relies on both your suppliers and potentially multiple freight carriers between your suppliers and your intermediate warehouses to be fast and efficient with their production and transport of your goods when they have precisely no financial incentive to do so, or more often a dramatic financial incentive to do the exact opposite. When I was with Publix we went to Just In Time ordering for stores in 2007 and everything got a lot better immediately. We started getting fewer trucks per day spread over more truck days and we were generally never without product for more than a day or two and customers were happy. Then we went to Just In Time for the warehouses around 2010 and everything immediately went to poo poo, with product out of stocks lasting for weeks and a single misprojected promotion resulting in hundreds of stores being entirely out of sale product for the full ad week and dramatically increased shipping costs as we tried to expedite shipments from suppliers who did not give two shits about us. Customer satisfaction hit the lowest levels it ever had and we had to re-buy warehouse space at dramatically increased rates to correct course and the bonuses based on profitability were basically nonexistent for a full year. It took years to recover. Between the 2008 crash and the Warehouse Just In Time transition the company nearly ate it and had to dramatically scale back benefits and raises to get through (and they never went back to previous levels, natch) and they swore up and down that they'd never gently caress with the supply chain again. I quit in 2015 when it became clear that they were preparing to do it again, and from what I heard from people who stayed it was exactly the same the second time.
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Feb 20, 2020 19:16
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I grew up in South Florida, and in the late 90s the Coral Springs Mall shut down, became City property, and then was given to a charter school. The old Ross was knocked over and turned into a county library, but everything aside from that including the 8 screen movie theaterwas just renovation and can still tell the school was a mall inside and out. Now they've built a new City Hall in the parking lot and there's talk of demolishing the mall for a purpose-built school, but it's taken forever because I guess in the 80s malls were built like bunkers.
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Feb 22, 2020 14:30
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Detective No. 27 posted:I've had a great idea that would revitalize malls with little effort. A mall is not cheap to run, and a properly-functioning mall gives a built-in customer base for most businesses. The extra cost is worth it if you can swing it in a mall that works. But even in a nonfunctional mall, they have to pay for all the common space, but spread over fewer tenants, so it's not going to be cheap.
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Feb 24, 2020 07:29
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Liquid Communism posted:Just hearing and cooling the common areas is vastly expensive. Theres a reason outlet malls are open air. Heating, cooling, maintaining the building, cleaning and maintaining doors and windows, cleaning and maintaining the food court furniture, maintaining the lighting, maintaining and cleaning the bathrooms, all the (basically mandatory) seasonal events and decor, advertising, staffing the information desks there are a shitton of expenses to running a mall that make it very, very bad to lose even a handful of stores. When I was in Movie Theater management our chain lost more than a few theaters to dramatic rent hikes in failing malls. If you build your contracts expecting 80% retail occupancy to cover 20k in monthly costs, dropping down to 72% means going into 2 grand a month in debt, and most of the malls we were in were closer to 50%.
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Feb 24, 2020 15:01
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Lord_Hambrose posted:Movie theater management seems like an awful job. I have some friends manage the nicer movie theater in town. A few years ago the company remodeled the whole thing with nice new reclining seats a few more IMAX screens. A little more expensive to get a ticket but not by much. I did it 2004-2007 and it wasn't bad. We were a regional chain in the Southeast and did pretty well financially, our biggest challenges were finding markets that Regal hadn't deliberately oversaturated, high employee turnover, and finding managers who were immune to the siren song of drug abuse. The money was good for what it was (general managers made $50k+ for herding teenagers basically) and Regal had slowed their expansion so we were generally profitable. We dissolved due to internal issues, I've told the story before but the tl;dr version is that we found some inconsistencies in the books, brought in a forensic accounting firm (less cool than it sounds) and found out one of the owners had been stealing for a long time. The other owners ousted him but couldn't find anyone to replace his investment in the company, and the infighting that resulted made another investor leave, and that made them insolvent and they had to declare bankruptcy.
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Feb 24, 2020 17:43
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Our owner was just walking into theaters around 2am drunk, and voiding dozens of ticket sales off the showings he thought were doing well (he didn't check beforehand, it was hard to) and pocketing the cash from the safe. He got caught due to a number of theaters in his territory having negative ticket sales for some showings, which caused the Board (that he was on) to call in forensic auditors. We didn't just lose him, they discovered a tremendous amount of theft and had to let go over a half dozen managers as well. This is part of what caused the rift between the remaining owners, and made the silent partner decide none of them had any business running the company.
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Feb 24, 2020 19:33
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Cicero posted:Eh? Not sure why you'd engage someone trolling as obviously as that, but here we are.
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Feb 27, 2020 12:59
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Motronic posted:How do gas stations make more money from that? Isn't that just a huge shifting of purchase time and now that everyone has a full tank of fuel and a bunch of cans full they simply won't be going to the gas station for a while? Former gas station manager here. Our tanks were 7500 and 15000 gallons. If gas was cheap, we'd order to fill the tanks. If gas was expensive, we'd order to replace what we sold. Any time a storm hit, we'd sell out the tanks at market rate and make a huge profit on that gas, then keep selling and buying market rate gas until the crisis was over, at which point we'd buy cheaper gas (the market for wholesale gas bottoms out a couple weeks after a crisis) to refill the tank. Basically if we were selling the bottom half of a tank at market rate basically any time we'd make good money, but when supply would get tight and market rate would rise we could sell the bottom half at 60 or 70% profit rather than the 25% we get for buying and reselling at market rates, and then only refill the bottom half of the tank when the market fell. The entire system was automated, and would only bid on fills if the market was at a fairly remarkable low, so yes, every sell-out event is very profitable for gas stations that buy from the market.
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Mar 1, 2020 19:47
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Goast posted:Was this a smaller independent station? Nope, Wawa. In Florida, so none of the sweet gas deals they've cut up north. We did the driving around recording gas prices, too, and could manually change our gas price if necessary, but yes it was handled centrally by the time I was was hired. We knew what the strategy was though, both because corporate loved cheerleaders and because the old, manual fuel system had never been decommissioned, and you could look at the value in the tanks, costs of deliveries, things like that. You couldn't order fuel anymore, as that was automated, but you could see everything, with histories up to a year. I've been gone awhile, and I know they're changing their systems out, I wonder if that's still visible to a store.
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Mar 1, 2020 22:45
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Decius posted:No, not moving has been linked to bad health outcomes. You can sit at work all day, but if you move in your free time, that's perfectly fine. Trying to co-link health with not sitting is just another insidious way companies want to This is a weird take, kind of biotruthy. All available research, including research by Harvard and The Mayo Clinic, indicates that hours spent sitting per day directly correlates with lumbar pain, poor cardiovascular health outcomes, and an increased risk for diabetes. Prolonged static sitting is not good, and as activities go it's one of the newer human ones so that's not super surprising. Also, the exercise and diet issues you mention (overconsumption of sugars and fats) are a product of the types of food made easily available to the consumer. It's true that we should all read labels and cook as much as possible and exercise more, but it's deeply disingenuous to claim that it's reasonably possible when a historic number of Americans are working multiple jobs to stay in poverty. All of those things require a time investment, and eating food with a better macronutrient balance requires more money no matter how much anyone tries to deny that. The cheapest food available is absolutely awful, but if it's all you can afford then it's hard to argue with.
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Mar 2, 2020 19:45
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Lambert posted:Please preach us more about the gospel of the standing desk and why retail workers don't deserve chairs. If we're being honest, retail workers should actually have to pay to be allowed to work, considering all the great exercise they're getting! The Mayo clinic said so! It's weird that you equivocate sitting all day being bad and standing desks becoming the norm, but they're not the same. Ideally you'd have an adjustable desk or a separate workstation where you could stand. The problem is butts in seats for hours, but I doubt that stationary standing for hours would be loads better. And I'm confused, I thought you were mad about people selling you desks under false health pretenses and now standing desks are oppression?
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Mar 3, 2020 03:03
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Customers are a huge part of the problem, yes, and a lot of changing that seems to be waiting for the entitled boomers to die.NerdyMcNerdNerd posted:My store has ergo-mats for you to stand on behind the register. Publix? Sounds like Publix. If not, Publix does the exact same poo poo, and the non-CS positions aren't tons better. When I was in grocery we were forbidden to climb the pallet racks, but there was only one walking stacker to access 16 racked pallets of product and we were judged on the number of products we put on the floor in a shift so literally everyone climbed the pallet racks. Shit Fuckasaurus fucked around with this message at 18:30 on Mar 3, 2020 |
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Mar 3, 2020 18:27
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Dr. Red Ranger posted:Supercenter Well step 1 is to get a job somewhere that isn't a Walmart.
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Mar 4, 2020 21:47
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Mister Facetious posted:Out of sheer morbid theory-crafting curiosity, what would happen if pharmacists formed a national union? Well for one thing the Republicans would have a scapegoat to blame for the sky high cost of medication. It wouldn't be true but that's never stopped them before.
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Mar 5, 2020 00:16
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There's also the very common practice of hiring a CEO to restructure, accumulating failures during the otherwise successful restructuring, then sandbagging the CEO with blame and ousting them as soon as the books are back in the black. As a CEO, restructuring is not safe. It's one of the only chances you have to create real structural change, and as such it's the best opportunity to get fired for loving up, especially if the changes that were implemented don't resemble your plan in any way. Look at HP, they've done it 5 times, smashing the company into the ground over and over in pursuit of record profits and self-destructing printers and laptops made of cling film. A good CEO knows there's money to be made in fixing problems, but a great CEO knows that prolonging problems is even more profitable, and looting the corpse once you're done is more profitable still.
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May 21, 2020 18:11
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silence_kit posted:Oh yeah, you’re right. Al+BFC=Ask/Tell? It fits the format, and if it wasn't there then there would be a steady stream of "TELL Me about buying a car" and minor variations thereof by people who don't read the stickies where it would tell you about the megathread. It's not perfect but I get it
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May 29, 2020 01:56
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Gap is Banana Republic and Old Navy, too. Middle class white people would be so mad if there was still a middle class.
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Jul 25, 2020 22:51
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AAA PC game prices always rise to parity with whatever the console games of the generation are going for. It was $20 in the 4th generation (NES) then hit $30-40 during the Fifth Gen (N64/PS1), and up to $50-60 by the Seventh Generation (Wii/PS3/360). Now we're creeping past $80. It's disappointing for a variety of reasons, but it is what it is. Indie games usually sell for less, and it's rare for a game to last more than a year before going half off on Steam. My solution is to just not play new games. My most recent purchase was Mad Max, for example, and it was like $12. I'm not sure whether the pressure for those price points came from developers, console manufacturers, or retailers, but my gut feeling is all three.
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Oct 23, 2020 03:36
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OneEightHundred posted:The biggest upshot for them is that they can give the Xbox favored treatment at one of the biggest console retailers at the start of a console generation war, which is the most crucial period in its lifespan. One of the biggest console retailers of the last generation, sure, but they're going to have less than 3000 stores by the end of the year, and many of those are in dying malls. Yeah, it's probably a good deal for Microsoft still, but they fell fast and hard since 2016.
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Oct 27, 2020 00:21
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Remember that the "shoplifting epidemic" was first publicized by Target, who later stated in an earnings call that shrink over the described period had in fact dropped. They also have the most advanced private forensic lab on the planet, as well as extremely advanced profiling systems in their stores, so they were not wrong for lack of data. They lied because they were closing some less-profitable stores and wanted to blame the communities for them. If anyone has even a single piece of evidence that shoplifting has increased, I haven't seen it. What I have seen are articles that don't cite their sources or cite sources that don't support the article conclusions, but that's annoying so I stopped reading about it. At this point we're in month 6 or 7 of this crying wolf, so I wouldn't be surprised if consumers who felt they were being shortchanged by not stealing have started doing so, and I completely support them in doing so.
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Oct 20, 2023 20:59
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I mean if you just want to talk about shrink in general and how it's not at all theft... I've had the misfortune of working at both Wawa (East US gas station chain) and Publix (East US grocery retailer) in a management capacity for years each. I've got stories. At Wawa we used a distributor called McLane. They're one of the biggest, You've likely seen their trucks. Anyway they serviced lots of different types of stores, including other fuel stations. We would routinely get product with a competitor's name on (7-11 iced coffee cans were the single most common incidence of this for some reason but we'd get cups and jackets and stuff too) which we had to throw out. Each truck crew had an allotted amount of shrink the company would tolerate through mis/non-delivery, but also had to complete their 9 hour route before their 8 hour day ended, so if you showed them a product that wasn't from your store they wouldn't take it back, they wouldn't even look at it, they'd say "file a claim". Wawa Corporate used to pantomime outrage over this at Goose Jam, their annual internal propaganda event. Reality was somewhat different. Wawa negotiated with McLane to set the amount of acceptable loss from their services, and paid less for every loss point they accepted. So they accepted quite a few.. Everyone knew that ~5-7% of the poo poo that was supposed to get from the warehouse to the store simply would not, and that was acceptable. It wasn't even theft, I'm certain (McLane drivers are timed and GPS tracked, it's a horrible job) it was simply pushing people too hard and not accounting for the inevitability of error. As a totally separate story, the Publix I worked at was next to a university. We tracked theft in non-food much more closely than food, because nonfood cannot expire and can be used as an indicator of a given store's overall theft. At the closest 3 Publixes to the university, the number one thefted product was makeup, and the common thread between all the people caught stealing it was that they could afford it. Not, like, "I can pay!" levels of affording it, no, "My attorney father is going to make your life miserable over this" afford it. Our loss prevention teams were trapped like rats because they were tracking our single largest confirmed theft category (still well under 5%) because Corporate told them to, but it was a waste of time in terms of stopping the problem because the second anyone mentioned making the company's day even moderately inconvenient from a legal perspective we'd let them walk. We wouldn't even pantomime banning them because those stores would see tens of thousands of unique visitors a day, and a banned customer who knows you cannot realistically enforce on them starts walking out the fire door with carts of poo poo. The poors who couldn't afford poo poo? Oh we ran them through the loving wringer of course. Needless to say, both companies are poo poo. As is McLane. And all the others.
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Oct 21, 2023 10:42
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Jaxyon posted:So I was just at Best Buy to replace a TV, and holy poo poo they have cut staffing to the bone. There was maybe 3 blue shirts in the entire place, at a very busy Los Angeles location. I had to wait at least 20 minutes to buy a product I knew 100% I wanted and just needed them to go grab for me. There was at least 2 other customers near me and we all just kinda stared at each other. This was my experience. I needed a USB wifi dongle, they're super common, super cheap, something that should either be on the floor like any other product or, sigh in a plastic box the cashier unlocks. No, in the back. So I wrangle one of the 3 associates to find one for me. He returns, no poo poo, with a Playstation accessory. I just left. This is near downtown Orlando, and the only reason they're not busier is because they've made actually purchasing things from them just witheringly difficult. Went across the street to Office Depot and it was on the shelf and they even had a human cashier.
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Oct 27, 2023 00:08
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How does this thread feel about stores locking products down? Just got back from Home Depot where I needed a single spool of wire to fix a trailer's wiring. Should have been quick and easy, walk in, grab the wire, do a self-checkout (because this store never has human cashiers, ever), then walk out. Nope. The wire is behind wire cage doors now. So I have to find a clerk, get them to ring the right employee who is of course half the store away from his department, then wait for this ancient crusty dude with better things to do to slowly hobble down two full aisles to unlock the cage. I could have bought the drat thing three times in just the time it took him to get to me. I get "why" they do it (ShOpLiFtInG) but this is my local store that I used for emergencies and things I couldn't wait for. I know it pretty well. They do have a shoplifting problem, but they also always have had an employee problem where there are either none around or none for whatever department. This is also obviously the reason that shoplifting has been such a problem. Rather than correcting the actual problem, they've now made their lack of employees my problem. Oh, and the prices on wire are triple the prices online, so it's not like they're "passing on savings" or whatever dumb poo poo. It's so frustrating and exhausting. I don't have time for this poo poo. Guess I'll be driving 7 miles to the nearest independent hardware store that's not similarly a shithole from here on out.
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Nov 11, 2023 13:50
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Discendo Vox posted:Structurally speaking, having additional staff wouldn't particularly solve the shoplifting of the products either. fwiw retailers (and, where relevant, brands) know that access restrictions really hurt sales of the product, so it's not something they do for fun or show (though of course they can be incompetent in execution). There are absolutely diminishing returns, but not at the point of a dozen or so people running a hundred thousand square feet of store. The only employees I saw the entire time I was in there were (1) the guy I found 2 aisles over and asked to unlock the door, (2) the geriatric man the first guy called who took 10 minutes to show up at the door, (3) the person running self-checkout, and (4) the person running the Customer Service desk, and I walked the full depth of the store. I needed paint as well, but there were people waiting at the paint desk with no employees visible, so I didn't even try. Comparing this to Publix where I briefly worked LP and there was never allowed to be a situation where less than 3 people had eyes on the registers alone. Even at opening at a store with slow openings, Customer Service started the day with a minimum of five people to make sure. I've seen that waver recently too, but it's reasonable to say that 5 people in a 1k sqft department is above the point of diminishing returns regardless. Home Depot has more and larger doors that are further apart, less camera coverage, and seemingly cannot even consistently hit one person per door in the front lane of the store throughout the day. Once person per door would still be one per ten thousand square feet in the front quarter of most of these stores. That's not just below the point of diminishing returns, it's below the point where anyone can even respond to a theft in any way. Also keep in mind this is Florida, where if human eyes didn't see the theft from picking up the product to walking out the door it's nearly impossible to prosecute and completely impossible to get law enforcement cooperation of any kind unless it's a smash-and-grab or qualifies for grand theft. I'm just as certain that theft is up at Home Depot as I am that the original root cause was self-checkout like it is literally everywhere else and now they're chasing ghosts rather than take it off life support. That didn't bother me before and doesn't now, but it does bother me that the company's idiotic devotion to chasing ghosts is now impacting legitimate customers.
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Nov 12, 2023 11:32
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Also the entire point of handing over pricing to an algorithm is that the computer takes the blame. The public isn't smart enough, generally, to recognize that algos are designed and may have a purpose other than what you'd think. Pushing off the thinking onto the computer means the C-suite can wash their hands of it entirely in the public eye, even though it makes it even more their actual fault.
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Nov 13, 2023 09:56
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Discendo Vox posted:None of this explains why they can't just raise prices, or just close locations. You're alleging a remarkable conspiracy here. It's not a conspiracy, and now that it's been put that way it does make sense. Raising the prices and seeing same-store sales shrink simultaneously drives a narrative that the company is out of touch and needs to adjust pricing practices. That's 100% undesirable to investors and would be considered a failure. Closing a profitable store will similarly spook investors. Trotting out a dog and pony show of locking things up and justifying it via false theft claims is fine for investors. Similarly, when it reduces the store's sales the investors will blame the customers, not the company. Once the store sales decrease enough, it's insufficiently profitable and they can justify closing. And who are you alleging is in on this conspiracy? The C-suite? In the US we call any conspiracy that remains inside the management of a single company "business", hope this helps.
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Nov 14, 2023 09:31
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Owling Howl posted:I think shareholders understand that raising prices will lower trade volume but there's instances where either lowerering or raising prices can result in higher profits. It's a fundamental and basic concept that everybody in sales work with. If closing a store would reduce net profit then shareholders are unlikely to be sympathetic. Shareholders tend to disregard liability nowadays, as evidenced by all the leveraged buyouts of public companies nowadays. Shed that and all that's left is the money the store makes that the shareholders don't want to lose. Even Target has seen shareholder pushback from their actions in the northeast, and it's impossible to say what they really believe but based on their response they're acting like they did not anticipate it. Bar Ran Dun posted:Small thefts aren’t claims. Shoplifting isn’t going to generate a stock throughput claim. A real organized large theft will like the ones that happened during the pandemic during the riots near the beginning. I didn't mean insurance claims, I meant the companies' claims that theft is occurring. I guess assertion would be more appropriate, but I feel like claim has a stronger connotation of illegitimacy which is appropriate given context. Target has massive camera coverage and automated customer tracking in their stores, if theft were actually occurring they could provide evidence of it in response to the shareholders bristling, but they chose to double down instead. You don't have to be a brain genius to understand that if a company with a huge security apparatus declines to provide evidence of claims of retail theft, something's mighty fucky.
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Nov 14, 2023 21:01
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Discendo Vox posted:They're asserting a multi-step process to mislead investors by avoiding taking fairly basic actions that they are already taking, to achieve the same ends, with zero evidence. The burden's not on me here. I know I've been over this before with this user regarding other claims. That's not how any of this works. If you're claiming the shrink that the stores are supposedly closing over occurred, it's on you to prove that. Your position doesn't become somehow self-proving just because you agree with a multinational corporation's unsupported public narrative.
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Nov 15, 2023 00:41
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I never claimed that theft wasn't occurring, just that it wasn't occurring to the degree the retailers claimed, and oh hey look at that post two up from yours where retail lobbyists retracted their claims of unprecedented theft. Also the claim that it's organized retail theft is ludicrous on its face, organized theft targets comparatively high-ticket, non-trackable, easily resold items like soaps, small electronics, and electronic accessories. Comparatively large, low value items with poor resale (like socks and underwear) aren't really exposed to that type of risk, which is why it's baffling that Target chose that particular hill not to die on, but to commit violent, obvious suicide on while blaming non-existent shoplifters. That anyone would choose to continue upholding that side of the discussion once the industry groups have abandoned it is beyond baffling.
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Dec 9, 2023 00:34
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BlueBlazer posted:It's really gotta reach some sort of breaking point soon. God I wish I was still naive enough to believe this. Not just about the pricing thing, about all of the rampant bullshit that's been going on for as long as I've been alive.
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Dec 28, 2023 05:59
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