Retail is a tough business, especially when the people running the show and calling the shots are so out of touch with reality. My company’s current plan is to sink a shitload of retail space into dollar days. My retail space. I have already dedicated 20′ of my space to this product and I can’t say the sales have been phenomenal, in fact lackluster may be a better term. So anyway one of the people from our main office comes into the store yesterday and is walking around deciding that we should cut 4′ off this section and we’ll just dump picture frames and well you don’t need that much space for this section etc… Then we will have an entire aisle for your dollar days. Ok, my question is this. My set gross profit percent is 35% for my HBC and 45% for my GM. If I am making less than that at inventory time then they fly into a tizzy and want an explanation. Well, this dollar day bullshit that we are getting in has a whopping 25% markup on it. So if I am to devote an entire 56 foot aisle to this shit what do you think is going to happen to my gross profit percentage? I may not be one of the wizards that work in my corporate office but I can damn sure tell you that my GP is going to drop. Also when you start cutting out items that have $3 to $5 rings on them and replace them with 56′ of items that have only $1 rings on each. Let’s see, 56′ multiplied by $1 = retarded. And I thought the customers were stupid.
The same one that was there yesterday sizing up my department getting ready to fuck it all up wanted to know why we still had 16′ full of summer products at full price. He said we should have marked that down a month or so ago. In case I had not bitched about this in the past on here I’ll give the history lesson now. Back in July, July 14th to be exact I emailed my corporate office GM guru and asked him if I could mark down my garden supplies by 25% so I could help move some of this product around. (We are no longer allowed to make any decisions such as this because apparently after working in the store for nine fucking years I have no clue how to do shit) He emailed me back and asked me what I had and the quantities of each and I emailed that back and then never heard shit from him after that.
So about mid July I assemble a list of all the shit I still own and the prices I want to go at and I send them to this dumbass. Well big surprise, no response which means I resend the email and just happen to copy a few of his superiors. Well apparently that’s what it takes to get a response out of him but the response I get was not an approval to mark down any product but a denial to mark down anything and said that no seasonal markdowns would be approved by him now or in the future. In fact he ends up sending me a list of suggestions of what I can do with all of this product to help sell it. For instance I can work all of my BBQ tools into the regular kitchen tools I have because they will sell throughout the winter at regular price. (Have you read my blog? it gets to -40 degrees here, not exactly grilling out weather). Another wonderful suggestion was to put the bamboo plate holders into the paper plates section because those sell year round, and in fact as I know… the holidays are the best time to sell these. Did I just fall off the fucking turnip truck or something? What the hell do you people smoke up at that corporate office because that is some of the most asinine bullshit I’ve ever heard, and that brings us up to yesterday when I was asked WHY I didn’t have my shit marked down. Luckily I had the email printed up and I was able to pass it along. I hope someone gets fired over this. In fact, I volunteer.