Freleigh's frolic through the f***ed-up furniture flat

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Tonight seemed easy enough...

My job was to straighten the furniture in backstock, and then audit all the furniture.

My store sells furniture by building a display for each item we carry, and then putting it out on the floor with tags for each item. Customers purchase furniture by selecting the tag for the item they want, in the quantity they want, and then the cashier calls somebody to get it out of the backroom and load it into the customer's vehicle. The number of tags is always supposed to equal the quantity of that item we have in back. Having too many or too few tags is double-plus ungood. If there are too many tags, a customer will think we have the item, and won't find out that we don't have it until he/she is at the curb waiting to pick it up. If there aren't enough tags, the customer will assume we don't have the item and we will lose sales on it.

Well, about 75% of the furniture had either too many tags or not enough. I had a full roll of tags when I started auditing, and I went through the whole roll just by printing new tags for items that had too few tags in the display.

Funrtiure tag accuracy is supposed to be a big point of emphasis. The suits make a huge deal out of it, because furniture is very profitable. It's a good thing I caught all the inaccuracies before the suits did. They would've tore the managers a new one, and they in turn would tear all of us peons new ones.

[Crafty1289]

In a similar vein, I worked at a store where customers could access the store's stock levels from the internet, in-store displays, and any other store in the area. So you can guess there were quite a few instances where the stock level said 1, and there weren't any!

The system they had was to print on the warehouse picking slip the stock level, so every time an item was picked where the stock level was 3 or less, the picker would have to count the number of items, and report any discrepancies to the supervisor who would jump on a computer and sort it ASAP.

Your system sounds slightly more labourious!

[Becks]

At a place I once worked at (doing sub assemblies), the woman in charge of the stock room had a system.

Say you need xx amount of parts. She'd check the computer to see how many we had on hand, and it would say that there's yy available.

She would subtract the two numbers, and count out how many should be left on the shelf. The rest would stay on the shelf for the next time the parts are needed.

What's so bad about that, you ask? The only time the computer counts were accurate were right after the annual inventory. Often, the counts were low, so say if you needed 26 parts and the computer said 40, there'd only be 35 actually there. Does that make sense?

[Crafty1289]

annual inventory? sorry, annual?????

the place i work now does it 4 times a year! yes, every 13 weeks!

thankfully, the computer system (its called GlobalSTORE) is fairly accurate at doing inventory, so they let us do counts on the computer to update inventory over 4 weeks and print a valuation at the stock date.

[Argabarga]

I'm amazed that pharmacy inventory manages to get off all the time despite

-Daily random auditing
-Auditing everything as you go (if the computer says XX, but you notice it looks more like xx, you check it)
-Legaly mandated monthly inventory for certain drugs
-Anual store-wide inventory


And still, things go missing, or breed extras, can't figure it out

"double-plus ungood" +5 for the Orwell refference.

[Banrion]

annual inventory? sorry, annual?????

the place i work now does it 4 times a year! yes, every 13 weeks!

thankfully, the computer system (its called GlobalSTORE) is fairly accurate at doing inventory, so they let us do counts on the computer to update inventory over 4 weeks and print a valuation at the stock date.

The movie theatre I worked at took a full inventory DAILY!! Yes every single day 365 days a year. That included counting every cup, every bag of candy, every popcorn bag, calculating yields for soda and popcorn ingredients EVERYTHING.

[repsac]

Forgive me for asking this, but wasn't there a store at one time called "Service Merchandise" that worked along the same lines as freleigh's?

As I recall, you didn't buy anything on the floor, it was all display. You brought the item, or sometimes a tag, up front and checked out. Then you left the store and walked to a vestibule where your items came out along this little conveyor belt.

Anyone remember these?

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Forgive me for asking this, but wasn't there a store at one time called "Service Merchandise" that worked along the same lines as freleigh's?

As I recall, you didn't buy anything on the floor, it was all display. You brought the item, or sometimes a tag, up front and checked out. Then you left the store and walked to a vestibule where your items came out along this little conveyor belt.

Anyone remember these?

The displays and tags are only for furniture, TVs, and larger electronic and appliance items. Everything else is self-serve.

[Becks]

annual inventory? sorry, annual?????

Well, at that particular place, the numbers in the computer are ALWAYS right.

(It never made sense to me, either, but since I was pretty low on the totem pole, who was I to say anything that might make sense?)