Why is it that every item sold in Big Lots is individually priced with a sticker? This seems to be an outdated practice for large chain stores. Everyone uses the UPC bar code these days. Why would they choose to label them all when every product already has a bar code they could scan? I’m pretty sure the price tags they use also have bar codes, so apparently they are already setup to scan them.
I once worked in a store similar to Big Lots. It was very difficult to keep things organized on the shelves above the price tag on the shelf. If the individual items were not marked the customers would have no idea what the price of the item was once it got away from its shelf tag or the shelf tag went missing.
Actually it’s pretty quick and easy to tag items. I worked in a temp job and I did this at a mom and pop type store. And it’s fun to shoot that gun and tag the items.
I think that the UPC is better suited for inventory control. This way the stores knows what’s going out and coming in.
But if you have a store like Big Lots where it doesn’t matter what goes out, because they’re not going to re-order based on what goes out.
In otherwords in a regular store, they need to know if 50 cases of peanut butter are used, so they know when to order more and are never caught short. But at Big Lots, they don’t have consistancy. They have overstock, so once that 50 cases of peanut butter are gone, they move on to something else.
The UPC saves an enourmous amount of time taking inventory which is time consuming. The tagging is relatively quick.
I haven’t checked out my local Big Lots yet for Christmas stuff. I think I’ll have to swing by there today.
Many states have Item Pricing laws, which require individual items to be tagged.
How interesting. I’d never thought of it that way.
Take a long hard look at the customers…ask yourself again why big clearly marked prices are a good thing.
Also, many of the items in a Big Lots type store have the original retail price printed onto the packaging. Putting their own “discount” price tag on it clears up any confusion, and reinforces the notion of saving money by shopping there.
I’m pretty sure that the original bar codes on the discontinued items are erroneous as far as showing up as the price Big Lots wants to charge. The items are there because they didn’t sell at the original price attached to the original bar code label, thus the need for alternate pricing and ringing-up procedures.
I know if I’m in a store and can’t find the price of an item, my policy is “no price, no sale.”
As far as I know, UPCs are linked to a retailer’s customized software which includes things like pricing. There’s not a huge, centralized database of UPCs and MSRPs, so I don’t see why Big Lots couldn’t still use the products’ UPC and have their own price setup in their system.
I’ve never been to a Big Lots but I’m familiar with the concept, so it seems like tying a bar code to a price isn’t effective since they’re constantly getting limited quantities of various products and it’s not worth it to program the stuff into a UPC database. Alternatively, since some of Big Lots stuff is re-packaged or cosmetically damaged, those products might be priced lower which would again make the UPCs worthless.
Wouldn’t that be easier and cheaper than having employees put a sticker on every item? You make a fair point about discounted items, though.
It could also make it more difficult for someone to buy something cheap at Big Lots then try to return it to some place like Wal-Mart for more than they paid for it. (No receipt means store credit usually, but still more than they spent originally.) Though why Big Lots would care about Wal-Mart or any other store is an open question.
Funny story:
When I was a kid and my mom took me to Big Lots on occasion, I figured out that they scanned the price stickers pretty quickly. I found a sheet of $0.99 stickers lying around somewhere and, as an experiment, peeled one off and stuck it on a PC joystick (confusingly made by nintendo) that was probably $15 or $20. I showed my mom that the joystick was only $0.99 and I put it in the cart.
Come check-out time, it rang up as 99 cents and nobody found that unusual.
OK, maybe not a funny story so much as a story of me stealing something, but it’s relevant, I tells ya.