What I sent to Rite Aid

[wagegoth]

I've gotten to where I just say, "No, thank you." And if they keep asking me, I just keep saying, "No, thank you." The question flow just peters out.

[ralerin]

@Ironclad alibi: They tested it before it went chainwide in 4 regions in California, North Carolina, New York and Kentucky. If you live near those areas, that's probably why.

The reason why it's being pushed so hard is because there's a contest where managers and employees can win cash prizes. Those 4 regions are excluded from it because they already did something similar while testing it. Therefore they have less incentive to push. As for the rest of us...

[Ironclad Alibi]

Regarding the loyalty cards, I haven't been asked about them yet at my local Rite Aid. Maybe my area has been excluded from the loyalty card program.

PS. Please don't tell them in case it's an oversight.

[fireheart]

My store has started us doing that, too. I just ask the customers if they're on the mailing list, and if they're not, I don't push it any farther. It's an irritating pain in the ass to have to ask EVERY CUSTOMER if they're on the mailing list, because God forbid, the one we forget to ask is a Secret Shopper and nails us for it.

same situation. and we've been threatened with writeups as well.
They come every fortnight in our case.
So far I've passed my last mystery shopper report, with the exception of forgetting to make conversation.

[KellyHabersham]

Not to take this thread off-topic or anything, but since this was a somewhat amusing experience involving being asked if I had a loyalty card......

Sometime last fall, Hot Topic apparently switched over from stamp cards to having a loyalty card like most other retailers......it's called something like "Your friend with Benefits". And when I'd gone there on Halloween, one of their employees was out on the sales floor trying to solicit sign-ups for this card........only when he approached me, it came out as "Would you to sign up for my "friends with benefits" card?" Funny thing was that this guy was really hot, but he couldn't have been older than sixteen.

[XCashier]

No matter what corporate tells me, given that my managers know how much of a PITA that can be, I just ask if they have the loyalty card. If they don't and mention that their SO has the card, I'll offer them one themselves. If they say no to any of my questions, I don't push it further.

My store has started us doing that, too. I just ask the customers if they're on the mailing list, and if they're not, I don't push it any farther. It's an irritating pain in the ass to have to ask EVERY CUSTOMER if they're on the mailing list, because God forbid, the one we forget to ask is a Secret Shopper and nails us for it.

[ralerin]

@Sarasquirrel-Yup, I got...10 cents raise last year because I worked at Aid of Rite for over a year. A 20 cent raise in total because I worked there 2 years.

A former sociology teacher told me that in Japan, there's a way less percentage between the workers and the president of the company (want to say it's only either 40% or 40,000 yen difference, it's one of the two), whereas here in the US, it's something like 90%.

Unfair.

[sarasquirrel]

As an Aid of Rite Employee:

Also, according to the company newsrag, the current CEO is leaving this summer to be replaced with some other schmuck who will take the company into "a different direction".

our CEO is leaving next year i believe and will be replaced by another goober look-a-like

our CEO (after a bunch of different stocks and whatnots) made $30 million last year

me? last year i think i made $21,000

i just got a 22cent raise!

[Geek King]

I remember when I first started as an intern (say about '96) the stock was up around 50, and my pharmacy manager would check the SYSM for the current stock position and chortle about how much money her 401k made. When I finally quit (around '02) it was down to about 2. Lots of people lost lots of money when that stock tanked.

Just a note here, folks. NEVER have significant portions of your retirement tied to stock in the company you work for. If something bad happens to the company, not only are you possibly out a job, but now your retirement is worth diddly as well. Bad, bad, situation to be in. Ask all those ex-Enron employees.

If you recieve a percentage match in company stock, by all means take it. But sell what you can as it matures* to keep your money safe.

*Check company guidlines for when you can sell said stock for full price. Usually 2-4 years after it is awarded.

[Shalom]

Then again, to afford said game, about half the California stores had to be sold off.

Maybe they shouldn't have bought so many of them in the first place.

(Warning: This is gonna be long. Stream of consciousness rambling by someone who's half asleep.)

I worked for Aid of Rite during the year of the Thrifty/Payless acquisition. I was a pharmacy intern in the Buffalo, NY area, and they were looking for what they called "babysitters" to go to Washington State and help out the pharmacists with the RADS computer system, which was being phased in in the newly acquired stores. Of course an intern cost 1/3 the wages of a pharmacist, so they sent as many interns as they could.

(Of course they forgot to inform the store personnel that I wouldn't be there on Saturday, who were panicking when they found out. They knew this when they sent me, no idea why they didn't say anything to the store. I still did some consulting with them by phone from my motel room after the Sabbath ended at sundown, but I didn't drive out there.)

I loved RADS, really I did. (Except of course when the satellite link went down, ugh...) I could make that computer system jump through hoops that most employees had no idea about. It had the entire post office database onboard (licensed from Pitney Bowes), and would spell-check addresses. Not only that, but if you were given a bogus address, it would tell you, no such street in that ZIP, or no such number on that street. Made it a lot easier to weed out phonies. Also it had the entire nationwide customer database online for any pharmacist to look up. (This was long before HIPAA, obviously.) This was a great improvement over TPL's old system, which had each store's database independent of the rest; the first day we went live, the store I was in found one doctor-shopper who was getting cash prescriptions for narcotics from no fewer than nine different Thrifty Payless stores in the region, and would never have been busted without that central database.

I was therefore the ideal candidate for handholding those employees who'd been handed this new computing system that was an entirely new paradigm for most of them. Remember that RADS ran on a mainframe system running VM/CMS, unlike their old CONDOR-based system; mainframes work entirely differently from PCs, as anyone who's used one can testify. Usually they have it set up that you have to fill in all the fields on a page, then you hit "Send" (where the right-hand Alt key usually is on the keyboard), or F10 if your particular terminal had no Send key, to send the page in its entirety to the mainframe; whereas on microcomputer-based (i.e. PC) systems you hit enter at the end of each line, and if you've gotten used to that it's not so easy to make the adjustment to the mainframe system. Also you can only type on a part of the screen where there's a field that's set up to accept input; if the cursor is elsewhere and you type even one character, your terminal locks up and you get an <*> error at the bottom of the screen (what they called a "squash bug" for some reason), then you had to hit ^R to reset it. Then, if you didn't hit "Tab" to get you to the next field, you'd just lock it up again as soon as you started typing. Obviously if you're unfamiliar with this there's much frustration. Worst of all, the "make it final" key in Condor was F4; in RADS that key meant "Lose everything and go back to the main menu", so they'd laboriously type in the whole prescription, then relax and by reflex hit F4. Oops. Much profanity was the general result.

Most frustrating thing was that even though as a pharmacy intern in New York State I could do anything a pharmacist could do, except supervise an intern, as long as I was myself under supervision of a pharmacist, in Washington State I was only considered a Tech-B, not having done whatever it was I needed to do to be a Tech-A which were the ones that did stuff. All that the Tech-B cert meant was that I was allowed to be behind the counter, but not to do anything useful whilst there: count tablets, touch the computer, pull meds from the shelf ... nothing. After a couple days of enforced thumb twiddling, I called the state board of pharmacy for Washington State and got myself registered as a pharmacy intern for that state: problem solved. I told my boss (who was also out there) what I'd done and he near shat himself laughing. He said he was also considered a Tech-B and as frustrated as I was (having been a pharmacist for 20-odd years by then); he said jokingly that he would try to get an internship permit for WA himself. No idea if he ever tried that, but if he did I would have wanted to be a fly on the wall of the State Board office when he asked them...

I do remember, we were instructed that we were strictly not to discuss our feelings about the company with the new employees. I'm sure Harrisburg knew quite well how much the vast majority of their original employees hated them, and they didn't want all the TPL pharmacists jumping ship en masse. (It happened anyway, not surprisingly; the West Coast management style was a lot more laid back and hands-off than the sort of micromanagement that east-coast RA employees had to deal with, and a whole lot of pharmacy managers who were used to making their own decisions resented being dictated to by people on the other end of the continent who hadn't been behind a counter since the passage of the Controlled Substances Act, if then.)

I also sometimes get customers in who give me reports about how crappily the company is doing according to different money magazines-I think it is SHOCKING that the customers know more about our monetary situation than us, the employees!

Oh, yeah...

I remember when I first started as an intern (say about '96) the stock was up around 50, and my pharmacy manager would check the SYSM for the current stock position and chortle about how much money her 401k made. When I finally quit (around '02) it was down to about 2. Lots of people lost lots of money when that stock tanked.

Also, according to the company newsrag, the current CEO is leaving this summer to be replaced with some other schmuck who will take the company into "a different direction".

Hopefully not the same direction one of his predecessors took; remember he got eight years in the clink for that...

[ralerin]

As an Aid of Rite Employee:

I HATE THE NEW CARD WITH A PASSION.

I HATE having to ask people to sign up for it, I hate having to coaxed into it by SM putting little signs on the registers and both S1 and Not So Awesome Manager to ask for it. Ugh, ugh, ugh. Please, RK, for the love of God: get anyone and everyone you know, across the country, to whine to corporate about the pushiness. I despise it and I want it stopped.

Probably just as well that you didn't have the receipt. I bet there's a code on there that would identify the employee.

Yes, there is. On a typical Aid of Rite receipt, there's a cashier number, which is a combination of the store number with the last 4 digits of said employee's employee number.

recently rite aid started airing commercials for their new savings card. and it sounds like the employees are being pushy. maybe theyre all worried about going under

In my opinion, yes, if they're making us push this card so freaking much. On the flip side, no, if they can offer discounts and such, not to mention the entire Game of Life thing with over $8 million in prizes they did last February. Then again, to afford said game, about half the California stores had to be sold off. I also sometimes get customers in who give me reports about how crappily the company is doing according to different money magazines-I think it is SHOCKING that the customers know more about our monetary situation than us, the employees!

Also, according to the company newsrag, the current CEO is leaving this summer to be replaced with some other schmuck who will take the company into "a different direction".

I know! It's like maybe they never even entertained the thought that maybe, just MAYBE, the customers don't want the shit! It's like it's the fault of the clerk that ther customer decided not to spend his money on whatever it is they are pushing. If the clerk just tried harder, if he was just a better saleman, the customer would come to his senses.

Mmmhmm. This, 100%. I really think corporate doesn't take that into consideration, at all. I've heard so much bitching about "Waaaah x thing is Y price!" only to be bitched at more because they need to have the card, and no, we don't have a store card so people can get the discounts anyway, they need their own card.

The corporate suits were hired into their positions straight out of business school. They have never had to start at the bottom and work with the public like us, and are completely out of touch with what customers think.

Are you talking about higher level corporate (CEO, President Executives, that sort of thing) or what I call "lower level corporate" (The District and regional managers). Because I know that our DM and RM worked for other pharmacies and retail stores before they got this job. Our DM is a good DM, what little I know of him.

We have something similar going on in regards to our bonus cards. Upper management wants us to ask every single customer in regards to it. Thing is, I won't do it if we're extremely busy as I want to get customers out of the store as quickly as possible so they don't have to wait in line forever.

Nobody's gotten on my case about it yet, and I'm not exactly the greatest about following the rules to a T.

Other times, I'll ask about it and give the standard spiel. If they say "not right now/some other time" or similar, I'll offer them the application to bring back later. If they flat-out say "no". I just drop it right there and go about the transaction as normal.

This too. Corporate wants us to harass the poor customers as much as possible-forcing them right there to fill out a form, forcing them to activate a card right there. Christ, one time S1 wasn't pleased with the way I was handling things and swooped into my sale with an 80 year old guy with a walker, scanned the card and made him sign for it right there-poor guy looked like he was already one foot in the grave and didn't quite know what was happening.

[underemployeed]

I try and head cashiers off when I hear loyalty card especially if I never really shop the store. I say, no I don't have one or want on either and make it clear that I am not intested in 20 questions. Considering we have to ask everyone for a card at my work. At Bass pro, I probably seem like a dick as soon as I get in line I say "Hello, No rewards card, don't want one, and no phone #" Only thing I purchase is ammunition with cash, it isn't their business how little or much I spend.

However where I work you can get free things, and if someone is coming in often enough that I recognize them I inform them that you do realize X and Y qualify for one of our buy 6 get 1 free clubs? Signing up is as simple as me doing this (swipe empty card). I have converted a few people to the program, especially since ours lets you get many of the perks without ever technically signing up for it. Sucks when the card gets lost but hey, they count as people using the card and make management happy.

I pretty much hate loyalty programs, only reason I use best buy is my mom bought a laptop and few months later i bought one. other than that there is nothing i buy there because of their markup.

For places like krogers, Ill agree with my older customers who respond to if they have a rewards card with statement "charge the right price in the first place!", maybe we should all make a note of filling out the comment cards companies have because the only way to stop plague of forced rewards programs is to let upper management know how annoying the programs are and it just offends customers.

[Iris Kojiro]

Sounds a lot like the Medicine Hat. We have something similar going on in regards to our bonus cards. Upper management wants us to ask every single customer in regards to it. Thing is, I won't do it if we're extremely busy as I want to get customers out of the store as quickly as possible so they don't have to wait in line forever.

Nobody's gotten on my case about it yet, and I'm not exactly the greatest about following the rules to a T.

Other times, I'll ask about it and give the standard spiel. If they say "not right now/some other time" or similar, I'll offer them the application to bring back later. If they flat-out say "no". I just drop it right there and go about the transaction as normal.

[RecoveringKinkoid]

Yeah, I have not heard back from them. I probably won't.

I sent a similar complaint to Belks some time ago, and didn't hear back.

I mean, really, what are they going to say to sugar coat that? Deny that they do it? They don't want to hear the policy is terrible and drives customers away.

Fuckers.

[Cat]

When I worked for a bookstore, we have "loyaty cards" we were forced to sell....when we got a new DM, she said that if we do not make out quota in a week we get written up. Second week, fired.

We asked out manager if selling cards was more important than books, then. She replied, "Looks like it." (Not her fault, she had a boss to answer to as well.)

There was a month long mass walk out after that