Buy one, get one, give Irv a hard time

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

As part of our sale starting today, we have kitchen chairs, barstools, bookcases, and maybe some other furniture items on Buy One Get One. The first one is regular price, the second is free.

For some reason, this has brought out the stupid in people. They just tag one tag up to the cashier and tell them "I want two." Because the second one is free, they don't think they need to bring up a tag for the second one. Result: the furniture tags get fucked up and there's more tags than items unless I remember to remove the extra one.

What's worse is the cashiers can't seem to figure out how this works either. Four times today they only rang up one item when the customer was actually getting two thanks to the BOGO.

Umm, no, sorry, you need to ring up two items so inventory doesn't get screwed up. When I go to count furniture tomorrow morning, the on-hands for those four items are going to show more than we actually have because only one item was rang up but two were taken by the customer.

Which means management will be calling on me to explain why our counts are off on so many items. I haven't yet found a PC way to tell them "That's because we'd be better off with actual monkeys running the registers than the register monkeys we currently have."

Humanity: I'm very disappointed in it.

[edible_hat]

Your terminology is confusing. Normally when I buy one of something, I get one... the one I paid for. How is advertising "buy one get one" different?

edit: having read the entire post, I see that it's what we call around here "buy one get one free" or "two for one"

[Voldine]

Your terminology is confusing. Normally when I buy one of something, I get one... the one I paid for. How is advertising "buy one get one" different?

edit: having read the entire post, I see that it's what we call around here "buy one get one free" or "two for one"

BOGO = BOGOF = Buy One, Get One Free. Cutting off the F makes the ads cheaper so some time ago it became general corporate policy to just call it a 'BOGO' sale rather than Buy One Get One Free, or the even more antiquated 'Two For The Price Of One' that was all the rage in the late 80's.

Two for the price of one was likely originally phased out because people in general were too stupid to realize that in order to see the savings you actually had to get two rather than getting just one and expecting it to be half the normal price.


Upon noticing your edit in the quote after not seeing it in the original post, I am quite shocked that there are still places that actually use the old 'two for one' thing.

[NightWatch]

When I worked in food service, it was carefully explained to us that when we had BOGO sales, we still had to ring in the free product to keep track of inventory. It was considered theft otherwise and we could get in trouble for not properly ringing in the order... Makes sense too, giving people food without accounting for it (even if it is free) is essentially stealing.

[DGoddessChardonnay]

When I worked in food service, it was carefully explained to us that when we had BOGO sales, we still had to ring in the free product to keep track of inventory. It was considered theft otherwise and we could get in trouble for not properly ringing in the order... Makes sense too, giving people food without accounting for it (even if it is free) is essentially stealing.

This is what we do at the Litter Box as well for Inventory purposes. Also how the pricing comes up in the computer is set so that each item scans at half price so that those customers who want only one can buy one and get it for half price.

Which IMHO kinda negates the whole idea of a BOGO sale to begin with. Might as well say "Half Off Specials" just for the sake of accuracy.

But then I don't know anything . . . I just work there.

[edible_hat]

When I worked in food service, it was carefully explained to us that when we had BOGO sales, we still had to ring in the free product to keep track of inventory.

The registers at my work do the same thing. When you scan the second one it adds another line saying "DISCOUNT -$XX.XX" One time my boss accidentally mistyped a special and it came up saying to give the customer the items for free and another $2.

[Rine]

I have the same problems with a few of the cashiers at my work. We frequently run BOGO sales on bed pillows.

One cashier rang one pillow up and bagged two. She proceeded to total out the order and I said, "hey, you only rang one up."

her: "Yeah, it's BOGO."
me: "You still need to ring up both of them."
her: *blank look* "But...it's BOGO...so the customer is paying for one item..."
me: "Yeah, but we need to keep inventory correct. She's buying two pillows, not one. The register will automatically take care of things."
her: *rings both pillows and the register zeros the second one.* "Oh...it worked."

Turns out she had always been doing it this way for five months, even though we always taught these new cashiers to RING EVERY ITEM no matter what.