Little Blue Strips

[Cia]

I did inventory every night when I worked at Hardees. Nothing like climbing a mountain of frozen burger patties to make life interesting.

Yes, the patties were in boxes so no dirty little footprints were left behind.

[Ree]

We never do inventory either. Our store is set up into different locations and as long as each location is counted twice a year, we never have to do a store-wide inventory.
I will be so glad when the current counts are done, because I can't trust a single count. I spend most of my day looking for stock that doesn't exist, or trying to find storage for stuff that was ordered in, because the computer said we had none, but we do have it.

[Ryu]

my theater does inventory daily as well
i know they do it at night but not sure about morning
they also do it every week when theres a delivery

[Luna]

I hate inventory. This is the first time ever I work in a place where we do our own. Every place I've worked has always hired an outside company. The people would walk in and you'd take one look and think - oh dear gods, this is going to suck. They'd be cursing, picking their nose ( I WISH I were kidding!), complaining about the store setup when they haven't even started, couldn't read (wouldn't that be a requirement to scan???), tried to steal product...you name it. (Yes, several of the stores had inventory people arrested for stealing!)

The last inventory I did with music store hell had me nearly in tears. We had to walk around the store and double count 100% of what they scanned in a bin and sign off on it. I caught not one, but several of the inventory people counting let's say - 100 cds in a bin and they'd scan the first cd in the bin ONE HUNDRED TIMES. So my inventory would show I had 100 copies of an ah-ha album, but no one until about Clay Aiken where they would do the same thing for the next bin.

I had almost half of the inventory crew "fired" from the inventory. I called my DM in tears about how my inventory will be ruined and then I'll be fired b/c of high shrink. He didn't seem to care. He was sposed to be there but he called out sick on me - even though DMs are required to be there.

SOOOO glad I'm not there anymore. I'm getting angry just typing about it.

[Dark Psion]

Ours is coming too, but guess what we did away with this year?

Price stickers!

Yes, it was bad enough haing the write out the 6 digit SKU# for everything, but our next inventory is going to be a nightmare of UPC codes with all the stuff not in the right place and all the stuff in the storeroom upstairs. Add to that that they would not buy even one hand held scanner when they upgraded the computers. (Both people in the back room had to go and buy their own printers because they were so cheep.)

I really hope they decide to get an outside company to do the Inventory, but I forgot, they're cheep!

[DesignFox]

I have to do inventory this Sunday I sympathize...
At least it's not like my old job- we had to count everything by hand, and we had to do the year-end inventory on New Year's Day...

[Mike Taylor]

This happened quite a while back at the grocery store I work at, but I haven't been able to figure this one out. Every time I tell it to people, they get a puzzled expression on their face.

The store was doing inventory, and little blue strips of paper were all over the store showing what had been counted. It's a 24 hour store, so we can't exactly have it done when there are no customers.

A man came into my line to be checked out, and he asked me "What are all these little blue strips of paper for?" I said "Inventory." then he said "I'm never shopping here again!" My reply? "Oh, ok." He didn't say anything else after that, but I thought it was very very strange.

Makes about as much sense as the lady that snarled "Bite me!" at myself and a coworker when we pointed at that the product she was asking for, which was on the wall behind her.

[Mike Taylor]

Our inventory is coming up as well, but our store is so small that counting isn't an issue. The great thing is that WE do the counting ourselves. No hiring RGIS or Washington who seem intent on coming in, miscounting, making a mess, and screwing around. (This is NOT to disparage the crews out there who do a good job, but I've been saddled with some bad ones.)

[Amalthea]

Inventory...

We have an outside company who does it, and they SUCK!!!! They are not supposed to quantity anything, but zap every book and item separately. (Many times different books will look similar, such as books in a series, or items that are the same but with different patterns will each have a different barcode.) 3 years ago we had a major issue in the kids department because all of the counts for those slim little beginning readers books were wrong. (These books all look the same from the spine, which is like a millimeter thick and thus hard to read the title off of to tell that they ARE all different books, so some genius thought they were all the same and quantitied them). 2 years ago the big thing was that they had quantitied our whole display of book covers, so we had like 60 of one pattern, 10 of another, and none of all the others. Last year I was SO CAREFUL with my Bargain department, making sure I separated similar looking books in my backstock so they could tell the difference. But lo, my counts for the Slow Cooker Bible and the Cookie Bible were off (same series, both white, but HELLO, different title! And as I said, I didn't stack them TOGETHER...) My counts for a Civil War series were off. (3 books in the series, each one with a cream background, but each had large color panels around the title, gold for book one, red for book two, grey for book 3) Ditto the World's Worst Historical Disasters and the World's Worst Military Disasters, one black and green, one black and red. And despite being advised multiple times that with Bargain books you must scan the barcode on the sticker on the FRONT of the book and not on the BACK of the book, I had multiple error sheets printed out of "Non-Bargain books in the Bargain area" (they had scanned the wrong barcode) Not to mention that they are supposed to right everything once they're done scanning it, but several sections looked like SHIT when they were done, books toppled over, turned around backwards, etc. Such a headache. And for months afterward we are correcting item counts that are obviously errors that THEY made. (Where you can tell they mistook one book for another and quantitied them like they are NOT supposed to. Like another time when I found that they had counted all the hardcover AND paperback copies of one title as the same item, so it said we had a bunch of hardcover and no paperback) ARGH. Only 6 more months till I have to go through this again!!!

[Seanette]

Last time we had inventory, one of the workers used our microwave to nuke some popcorn and apparently stopped paying attention to it, because they burned it so bad the entire store reeked of burnt popcorn and the inside of the microwave was blackened.

The stink was at gag level in the pharmacy because it's right next to the breakroom.

Am I really *really* weird for thinking the smells of burned popcorn and skunk are quite similar? I know they're probably not the same chemical makeup, but to me they smell nearly the same.

[Luna]

Burnt popcorn smell is horrible!!! Just as bad as fart - but it doesn't go away and gets WORSE as the smell dissipates.

Back OT, did inventory yesterday and it wasn't bad at all. First time I ever worked for a place that you scan your own stuff.

I hear you on the book inventories. I hated when the outside inventory company would scan all th bargain books as new. All the WS & FF DVDs as all FF. All the series as one single volume...you tell them over & over - NO QUANTITY KEY. Scan each item individually. But they do it anyway.

[phillippbo]

When I worked at the c-store, we'd have one inventory a quarter, and apparently my DM's bonus depended upon them as he was there for every one. At any rate, the poison of choice for the inventories was RGIS, but unlike most other posts, I never had a problem with any of them other than their ultimate totals. (Maybe it was due to the fact that RGIS only had 3 people on hand, they were within sight of the DM and the SM at all times, and it only took like an hour and a half to count the entire store. Or maybe we were just lucky.)

It should be noted at this point that I was very lucky to work in the c-store that I worked in. It was off the main highway, and as such was more of a neighborhood store (we saw the same customers all day, every day). Because of this, shrink was almost non-existant at this location, believe it or not.

Without fail, at every single inventory the stock was off by several hundred dollars. Either we'd have much more inventory than we should have had (a positive gain - being "over"), or we'd have less (a loss, or shrink - being "short"). The DM always threw a hissy when we were short, but was happy as a clam when we were over. The funny part is that if we were short, say $500 in January, we'd be over by $600 in April, meaning a net gain of $100. Then in July we'd be short $800, but over by $1,000 on the next inventory, etc, etc. The micro-managing and short-term goals of the corporate office had carried over to the DM and he was unable to see the big picture: In the long run, our store was actually coming out just about even and shrink was nearly non-existant. I even went so far as to point this out to him one time and he still didn't see it. And this was a DM that had actually done my job once upon a time and was generally smarter than that. Oh well.

This non-existant shrink also meant that my counts were very easy, and I never had to count a single thing. All I had to do was count everything (like the cigarettes) once every few months. For my daily counts, all I did was subtract the previous day's sales, then fudge it by a couple of packs in either direction. In the end, my count (you know, the one where I didn't count a single thing) was almost spot-on while my manager's counts (who hand-counted everything every day, or so he said) was always off by several hundred.

I don't miss that place at all, but it was nice working somewhere that the word "shoplifter" didn't cross anybody's lips very often...

----EDIT----

As far as the blue strips of paper goes, weren't you aware that they were harshing the customer's chi? How insensitive of you to put up blue strips of paper when you KNOW that a customer's chi demands no less than yellow strips of paper. Why, I'll bet they were more than an inch wide and two inches long! Sheesh.

(Just kidding, of course)

[starglitter]

We had inventory today and surprisingly there were no SC's but rather SInventory People. They kept throwing fits because cashiers aren't allowed to do price checks so they had to go to the service desk.