How Many Confusing Promos In Your Store?

[RetailActress]

Let's compare!

I'll start. In my store, we currently have the following running, all simultaneously:

1. Buy One Turtleneck, Get the Second 50% Off.

2. Buy Two or More Pairs of Socks, Get 20% Off.

3. With a Purchase of $125 or More, Get a Free $38.00 Scarf.

4. With a Purchase of $75.00 or More, Get $25.00 Off.

5. With a Purchase of $75.00 or More, Get 20% Off.

Yes, you read the final two correctly. They are overlapping until 11/30. Nice planning, merchandisers! Let's have plenty of calculators at the checkout counters!

All of the above is driving us CRAZY.

R.A.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

PLOOIE!

This is the emergency broadcasting system. The sound you just heard was Irv's brain committing sideways. Please stand by while we scrape up what we can and do a quick mop-up. Regular service will resume shortly.

At my store, we have problems with the BOGO sales as well. The floor people don't always know which items are on the sales and which ones aren't, so people get to the checkouts, find out their items are not on sale, and give birth to livestock.

[prb]

Mwahaha,

Rep: $183 please
Customer: Okay, and I get this for free because my order is above $125
Rep: Okay, $150 please
Customer: What about the 20% off on socks?!?
Rep: Well, you have $150 of socks, so $120 please
Customer, Still above $75, 20% off please
Rep: $96 is your total
Customer: Less the other $25 promo?
Rep: $71 is the total for your $183 order

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

I've had enough confusion and clusterfuckery over the last 2 days to last an entire week.

Wanna know what my last 2 days at work have been like?

• Pull down all the Black Friday merchandise from the stockroom.
• Pull all the Black Friday merchandise out of the storage containers and the pre-load trailer.
• Unpack everything in the backroom. This means wrestling with 60-pound 65-piece dinnerware sets, trying to get them out of the cardboard boxes.
• Bring everything to the salesfloor.
• Create center-aisle displays of all the Black Friday merchandise. Be careful to leave 6 feet between each item or group of items.
• Stack and re-stack merchandise so it is properly spaced and leaving enough of an aisle on each side so at least one shopping cart can get through. (Ideally, corporate wants enough space on each side for two shopping carts. )
• Be sure to follow the planograms sent down by corporate. Everything has to be in its spot as diagrammed. Find out people have been "cheating" by moving things around and hope corporate won't notice Friday morning. (Why no, we have no idea what that speed table of Webkinz is doing up by the boot dryers when it should be between the crock pots and the Nerf dart tag sets. Look, a unicorn! )
• Stumble upon more Black Friday merchandise we forgot about. Move everything around some more.
• Unpack that stuff and bring it out.
• Now, confusion ensues over which items are Black Friday items, and which items will be on sale Thursday through Saturday, because the sheet listing all the items for both sales shows everything to be on the Black Friday sale, with no indication of what's on the three-day sale only.
• Use pending ads feature on scanners to determine what's on sale Friday only and what's on sale Thursday to Saturday.
• Rework displays. Take three-day sale merchandise off the floor displays and find someplace else for it.
• Go in the backroom, find more three-day sale merchandise we have a lot of.
• Unpack that stuff. Your hands should now be raw from handling so much cardboard, your arms should be scraped up, and you should be sporting at least one cardboard cut.
• Bring it out and place it on high-rise shelves at the top of the gondolas.
• Take down items improperly placed on high-rises by the salesfloor and autopull warm bodies, such as two Webkinz, two Mexican Train domino games, one doll stroller and two handheld garment steamers. Return these to the stockroom and backstock them.
• Now, pay attention to the prices for Black Friday items, because somebody at corporate pulled an Unbelievable Epic Stupid and activated the clearance event that marks down certain Black Friday merchandise after Black Friday has passed. As a result these items are showing clearance prices that shouldn't take effect until next week or sometime after.
• Check with management to make sure the clearance problem has been satisfactorily unfucked, and all the Black Friday items are back to regular price. Pull any Black Friday items still showing as clearance off the salesfloor and hold them in the backroom until they're repriced.
• Call a manager down and have them okay the displays and high-rises as built, or make changes as requested.

We do all this so we don't have to be running to the stockroom and back for merchandise as it's selling Friday morning.

Doing a truck tomorrow night will seem relaxing by comparison.

[AnaKhouri]

Oh, get this- we have 5 different promos running for a week each (as in, 5 promos this week, 5 different promos next week etc.) right up until Xmas. But that doesn't count the 3 promos that are running from now until Xmas. Plus the promo for when people renew their customer loyalty card between now and Xmas. And they are all ridiculously complex and restrictive. And we are having two sales- one a bargain books sale, one a total store sale- between now and then.

The higher-ups think all this stupid shit will make people shop more, but in reality it just pisses the customers and us off because they are so needlessly complicated.

[Catwoman2965]

I hear you...right now we have a coupon out there for 30% off your total purchase, both full price and sale. However, all SALE stuff is 40% off...so that cancels out the 30% coupon as they can't be combined.

we also have several BOGOs and buy two, get one free, etc. on a number of items.

None of them can be combined, EXCEPT for the % off for opening a charge.

Not too hard, except to keep track, but we DID have an SC the other night, who thought she'd be getting 30% (coupon) and then anothr 40% (sale) off sale stuff. Nice try; it says on the BACK "cannot be combined with any other offer" she tried to argue that a sale isn't an offer...um, they word it that way to cover all promos, sales, % off, and so on.

[Soulstealer]

Let's compare!

I'll start. In my store, we currently have the following running, all simultaneously:

1. Buy One Turtleneck, Get the Second 50% Off.

2. Buy Two or More Pairs of Socks, Get 20% Off.

3. With a Purchase of $125 or More, Get a Free $38.00 Scarf.

4. With a Purchase of $75.00 or More, Get $25.00 Off.

5. With a Purchase of $75.00 or More, Get 20% Off.

Yes, you read the final two correctly. They are overlapping until 11/30. Nice planning, merchandisers! Let's have plenty of calculators at the checkout counters!

All of the above is driving us CRAZY.

R.A.

That oddly sounds a lot like my victoria's secret catalog. Which reminds me I need to call them them up and get them to stop mailing me. I swear, I change addresses and they think it's once again okay to send me crap.

[StarsAreFixed]

1. 50% off all toys (WHY are they on the drapery floor!!! Get them somewhere else..)
2. 3 for 2 on some socks..but not ALL socks, careful.
3. 2 boxes of Cadbury's Roses for €10..no the Ferrero Rocher deal is OVER, stop annoying me! The signs are gone damnit.
4. 25% on your clubcard all weekend. No it says BACK, which means the value back in vouchers, it doesn't say OFF.

That is just my floor, the supermarket have a whole load more going on..

[cinema guy]

3 for 2 on some socks..but not ALL socks, careful.

Who needs 3 socks?!

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Who needs 3 socks?!

The Red Hot Chili Peppers maybe?

[wanderingjoe72]

The Red Hot Chili Peppers maybe?

Holy hella old pop culture reference Batman!

[slavetotheman]

That oddly sounds a lot like my victoria's secret catalog. Which reminds me I need to call them them up and get them to stop mailing me. I swear, I change addresses and they think it's once again okay to send me crap.

Change it to my address... win-win

[going gaga]

bad promos

Just a question which discount are you actually suppose to give people on the $75 purchases? 20 or 25? Or is it down to the discretion of the staff?


Are offers aren't too bad but it's the way they promote them, that is infuriating and confusing.
We get a script sent over the voice system. which although it says what the offer is, it's in a strange bizarre and above all misleading logic. It's so bad that if you didn't know which offer it was talking about, you wouldn't be able to recognise it.

You only know what it actually is when a member of staff has spent five minutes explaining all the fine print to you,

Lovely little things that get left out such as

To get this offer you have to come in and spend again on a different day, the initial purchase only enables you to get this offer ,

not everyone is in it,

and the previous one ( best one yet for this kind of misdirection)
Gave the direct impression we were giving large amounts of money (vouchers) with purchases.
Vouchers that they could then spend in store, how they liked on that purchase of coarse the answer to that repeated fallacy was no, no, no and please stop asking mam that's not what we are doing.Yes despite what that idiot is saying, we already already know, it's in the stores CD we can't turn it off.

[Nyx]

Oh Lord! What are they thinking? I can't even figure that out.

At my work we've got a whole new sale for Thursday through... well who the hell knows when? I can't figure it out, some things last three days, others a week. More than half of the ad I was to set tonight turns out to not be active until Saturday. I dunno, I just hope there are dates listed for all items in the ads the customers receive, 'cause there aren't any in the in store fliers.

[friendofjimmyk]

and give birth to livestock.

That's freakin' hilarious!