Waste and Stove Woes

 No stove. HeWho made an inquiry on the phone and was told Thursday. I am still not looking for it to be delivered. I think we may have to get an attorney to get the stove and our money for stove #3. Here's the part where you wonder if the attorney fees will be worth it.

Back in the 80's, lots of people wrote bad checks. Attempts would be made to collect the money, but only checks over $40 were worth pursuing. The company I worked for would not file charges against repeat offenders unless they exceeded that magic number on one check. People who employ this method of obtaining goods knew this and were careful not to go over $40. That would be like $100 nowadays.

The only thing you could do at store manager level was post the names of bad check writers for all to see. Like shaming them might work. Bad check writers had no shame, so it didn't work too well. You could also refuse to take their checks, then they would complain to the corporate office and we would be told to back down and take the check. The customer is always right, you know. 

Since no one is ALWAYS right, I dug in a little deeper and gathered 3 months worth of one person's bad checks and presented them to the big wigs to be considered as a loss for my store and demanded they consider all the merchandise as a loss and not count against my quarterly bonus as a manager. They did and I got my bonus, but there were over 200 stores, so losses due to bad checks had to be substantial.

This is why stores raise prices. They have to account for losses due to such activity and theft. Not to mention waste due to sloppy workers. Come inventory time and the losses show up. 

When I worked at the pharmacy, the pharmacy manager could never figure out why there was so much discrepancy in inventory. She was actually wondering aloud, not expecting an answer. I asked her if it affected her bonus each year and she told me it certainly did. So, I showed her the problem. You would think that being inside the pharmacy cage (as I called it) would make theft near to impossible. Not to mention all the cameras. A technician would have to be stupid to attempt to steal pills. Theft was not the problem.

The problem was waste. When the orders were coming in fast, the main objective was to get them done as soon as possible. This caused miscounting for one thing. You better believe that if you shorted a customer, they would be quick to let you know. But, if you gave them 5 too many pills, they never said a word. 

Next problem would be pills flying off the counting tray. Most pills are round and round things roll. I can't tell you how many times I went home and found a few odd pills in that ugly smock they made me wear. I would dilgently return them to the pharmacist, who would look at them and then toss them in the trash. They had to be tossed, you can't put them in a bottle and dispence them, they had left the pharmacy and I could have doctored them with something deadly. Of course my mind does not work like that, but best to err on the side of caution.

Then I showed her the front counter. There was a void where counter met wall and in that void we found over 50 pills that had been spilled, or flew off the counting tray. I told her she needed a way to catalogue all the pills that had to be wasted due to whatever caused them to be there. Though those pills had not left the pharmacy, who knew how long they had been there. The expiration dates are on the bottles you dispense from. The prescription label tells the dispence date and rule of thumb is to toss them if they are over a year old.

It adds up. The narcotics were carefully counted by two employees every time that locked drawer was opened. Totally different situation, since scheduled drugs had to be accounted for.

Don't know why this popped into my head today. I put this down this morning to run errands and just picked it up again. I have no idea what direction I meant to go in, but there you go. A lesson in retail waste!