[TomsToyChest]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Peteparker

So both of the TRU's in Albuquerque had only three Marvel Universe figures left on the pegs, and both said they had no idea when they'd get more.

Then they had a sale, where it was buy two, get one free. So I bought all 6 left, thinking I could easily swap whichever ones out I wanted once they got filled in again. I also hoped that since I bought out their stock, they'd honor the sale and give me a raincheck, like tons of other stores do.

So of course, they don't do rainchecks, and one TRU said they'd honor the sale if I exchanged them later, and the other didn't have anyone available to say (I honestly figured it was a lock after one said so).

When I saw the latest wave come in, of course neither store would honor the sale. The best they'd do would be to return all the figures I had previously bought and sell me new ones at the current price. I was pretty pissed, but happy to have found a Cable and X23 at the time.

I later thought about it, and I wonder, does anyone know if buying out the remaining stock forces the store to reorder/replenish? If you could float the cash for a week or two, it might be a way to flood the store for a bit. Of course, then you're stuck with all the ones you bought and returned plus all the new ones they get in that you don't want...

Any experience with these tricky tricks?

This isn't the first time I've run into something like this. To call it "tricky" is being polite to say the least.

The last job I had working retail, a new manager had just been hired and called a meeting. His idea of store policy was to separate the customer from his dollar as fast as possible by any means necessary. Bait-and-switch was also encouraged by the powers-that-be, so in other words have low stock of the sale item, sell it out and then say, "We're out of the sale item but we have this comparable item", which of course wasn't on sale. Needless to say, customers got pissed about it, which I don't blame them for.

Then there are practices like spiffs in some retail stores like Service Merchandise or as I discovered in the past few years, HHGregg. You're encouraged to sell certain items to consumers to get monetary bonuses on your paycheck. I caught wind of their participation in this practice when a sales clerk tried to steer my parents onto a small TV *really* hard. When I asked him if he was working for a spiff, he sheepishly said yes and his face turned pale like he had shit his pants. I told my parents we should leave and to my knowledge they never returned to an HHGregg store to buy anything.

There was a time when retail was a good job to have and a decent field to be in. Nowadays, it's just one facet of the ugliness of today's corporate America. I'm not sorry to be out of it but I am grateful for the knowledge I did get while working in it when making my decisions about what products to get as a consumer.