DUDE! You emptied a Toys for Tots box and placed the items on the shelf for resale? What the fuck were you thinking?
I mean, I guess it’s plausible that a few toys might have made their way into the box without being paid for, but to empty the whole thing and restock the shelves with it is wrong on so many levels I can’t begin to decide what names to call you.
To empty the box suggests that you beleive Toys for Tots might be involved in some vicious conspiracy to steal toys and pack the Toys for Tots box with them.
If only God would give me the power to bitch slap people remotely.
I wonder, though, where the donation box was located. Was it in such a place where customers would encounter it after a purchase (say, after the cash registers but before the doors) or not?
Does this make sense to anyone else, even from a business standpoint? They give Toys For Tots money and get no publicity for it, then pull some crazy stunt like this that’s certain to make them look like cheap, uncaring bastards to the world.
The article doesn’t mention any Wal-Mart representatives besides the store manager, so I’m guessing it’s just a lone idiot who failed to take external factors into consideration when he did what he thought was best for the company. If a similar situation had occured with a different manager in a different store and he had just given the toys to the charity and written the unpaid-for items off, you’d have never heard about this story.
I just wonder why the manager didn’t check the items in the box against those in his inventory to see if any of the inventory was missing. With the mind-boggling variety of items Wal-Mart stocks, it seems fairly unlikely that the same brand and model of item would, in the same weekend, both be shoplifted by one person, and be paid for and dropped in the bin without a bag by another.
I was pretty disgusted when I read this too. The organizer was told that Walmart would replace anything she could prove had been in the box. That ended up being the three items she herself had bought and donated.
I don’t understand how this seemed at all like a valid move to the manager. They agreed to host the drop-off box–shouldn’t it have been their responsibility to place it so that they could monitor the donations? Let’s say even 10% of the toys were not paid for–that somehow excuses them re-selling the ones that people went out of their way to donate? Fuckers—how is that not theft?
Although this sounds pretty bad, I’m sure as soon as Wal-Mart, the corporation and not that particular store, sees what’s happened, they’ll step in and do something to rectify the situation. For all the things that they’ve done for their surrounding communities, I don’t see how they would just let something like this slide. And Brad Barritt, idiot manager supreme, will most likely get some kind of reprimand over it.
Yeah, I’m thinking with this publicity that the Wal-Mart corporation will likely donate a large sum of money to Toys-for-Tots for this particular incident (above and beyond their usual donations) and immediately can the idiot manager. That’s what should happen and I think it probably will with the word that is spreading about this fiasco.
Just to address this last part: What you suggest is impossible. Inventory accuracy in a large retail store is not nearly this precise. For one thing, you have to consider that the product could be in one or more locations in the store, plus multiple locations in the stockroom, plus in boxes en route to the floor. That doesn’t even consider the items in shopper’s carts, abandoned in various parts of the store, or sitting behind the service desk after being returned.
Also, physical inventory is only taken once a year, generally speaking, so were looking at several months worth of discrepancies and shortage, not just a single weekend.
That said, please understand that I am not defending WalMart in any way. Quite the contrary. Given the amounts of stock shortage that is already taken into account, the possibility of a couple hundred dollars in unpaid toys, tops, going to charity doesn’t even register on the scale. Annual shortage goals are typically around 2 percent of toal revenue. This was very poor decision making, from a moral, financial, and PR standpoint.
Several years ago I was in the habit of dropping a number of vegetarian items in the convenient food-bank box at a local Save-on-Foods each week- mainly alternate proteins, like TVP and dried mushrooms, that sort of thing.
Long story made short: after a while I got suspicious and started putting a small mark on the packages with a felt marker.
It only took a couple of weeks to find one of the items on the shelf again.
Since then, I always advise people to take their donations directly to the food bank, or write a cheque.
I read this story then visited Wal-Mart’s website to see if they addressed it at all. They didn’t of course. I guess they aren’t too worried about the PR problem.
They did have an on-line “Letter to Santa” form. So, Little Eats Crayons (age 30) asked Santa to donate all my presents to Toys for Tots because that mean, mean man stole them and resold them…
Do you think they’ll post my letter with the all other kids’?
I guess not. sigh
And people wonder why it is that I haven’t shopped at a Wal-Mart in 6 years or more…
Wal-Mart has an electronic inventory system like the rest of the free world. All they should have had to do is take a cycle (inventory) count on each sku in the box. Simple task…
They do have inventory accuracy beyond what JSexton suggested. They have blind recieving but are credited quarterly on their P&L a certain % for inventorie discrepancies during shipping. Also if their min press is that low their negative on hand inventory reports will reflect sales of skus supposedly not in inventory. Along with a cycle count on each sku and out of stock inventory is done in each department daily.
I do not work for Wal-Mart but I am a retail chain manager, there is a clear and decisive way to determine any inventory discrepancy without a hitch. Wal-Marts inventory shrink wouldn’t reflect this box of goods on the slowest period, especially during the last two major periods of the fiscal year.
A dweeb, huh? I hope you were referring to the WalMart manager in question, and not me. If I’m wrong about that, then let me know, so I can repost the following with coarser language.
Look, you sound pretty well-informed, intelligent, and polite. However, you also sound like you live in a perfect world. I worked for several years in Loss Prevention for Target. I know of what I speak. The world is not perfect, inventory gets lost, and it is not possible to take a pile of product and say, with certainty, whether it had or had not disappeared from stock in the last week. Even if a particular item didn’t show up as having been purchased, that doesn’t prove anything. It could have been purchased elsewhere, then taken to WalMart because of their conveniently located drop site for Toys for Tots.
And your statement about inventory being taken daily simply cannot be true, in my experience. A complete inventory is not even done by the store staff, in fact, an outside firm is brought in with fifty-plus people, and the process takes a good 12 hours. Even so, hundreds of mistakes are made, some of which get caught, and some surely do not. (Some also get caught too late to matter)
In other words, when a a physical inventory is taken by people who make their living doing so, there is a signifacnt margin for error, far larger than a barrel-worth of toys.
There are daily inventories taken that are either corporate listed by category or decided by the GM. These categories are usually decided by whatever reflects from a negative hand report. ( IE: Items that went through POS that have 0 in stock).
BTW< I meant the store manager, not you. I know it is not possible to take a pile of product and say, with certainty, whether it had or had not disappeared from stock in the last week. But there is product history as well. Surely you must know that, and being in LP you are also aware of how to narrow down theft, loss or whatever you want to call it to a pretty narrow margin, no?
I can say if there were a box of goods sitting in my store, I could figure it out. Maybe Wal-Marts inventory practice is sloppy. I know I have spoken to many Ex Wal-Mart folk, I was lead to believe its the same thing, only different.<shrug>
I am almost (checks to make sure he’s in the Pit) fucking speechless over this! What was this waste of space thinking? “Hmm, here’s a box of donated toys for underprivileged children. Better restock these, in case one or two of 'em’s not paid for.” I hope that Wal-Mart corporate puts this guy out on the street for his incompetence.
Lotsa people see the words “Snopes article” and then go thinking “ah, so it’s an urban legend” without checking out the link. In this case it’s not an urban legend (though it’s being spread around like one) and infac that dickhead at Wal-Mart did as very assinine thing.
Read that this morning… I remember being shocked over it. What kind of actions are those? Taking things out of the donation box to resell just because a few items may have been stolen? They could have been purchased at other stores and such. Other than that, I have nothing more to add, since this is looking more and more like a “me too” post. But I certainly hope Wal-Mart fires that manager.
Right, but that is not a physical inventory, only a listing of what the computer thinks should be in stock. It doesn’t reflect stolen or misplaced items at all.
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Only for a broad sense of the word narrow. <grin> Seriously, we’d have to really be focusing on a category of items to be able to be that accurate. This process takes time,not just in terms of hours in the day, but it’s a matter of tracking trends over the course of days and weeks.
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I wouldn’t call it sloppy so much as a matter of setting priorities. On the scale that WalMart and Target do business, it’s not worth spending that much time correcting a relatively small amount of stock shortage.
Well, I’m going to drop this, since I think we’ve hijacked the thread long enough. Besids, we’re pretty much on the same side as the OP, which makes it a bit silly to keep nitpicking inventory control practices. Cheers!