My wife works as a cashier in a grocery store. Today, they installed those anti-theft alarms that we are all so familiar with. The kind that set off an alarm when you try to exit the store with an item that hasn’t had it’s anti-theft tag removed.
Anyway, my wife was told that the company installing the alarm system did it free of charge. The way they make their money, supposedly, is that every time the alarm goes off, the alarm company gets like 25 cents. Does anyone know anything about this? Is it true? If so, that would explain why there are so many false alarms going off.
I doubt it. It is more likely that they earn their money by selling the tags themselves.
And if it were on the alarm going off, no way would they make money on 25 cents per alarm. That way, they might clear a few hundred bucks a year, in exchange for many thousands of dollars worth of equipment.
Why wouldn’t they charge for supplying and fitting the equipment? Doesn’t make any sense at all. Neither does them getting 25 cents for each alarm. Sounds like BS.
I’m sure amarone is right, if indeed they were installed with no charge. Just like the blood sugar monitor companies - give away the monitors cause it’s the strips they make their money on, anyway. The free monitor is to make sure you buy their strips, and not someone else’s.
Yes, the passive tags are the profit item (although some companies may also charge for the equipment.
We had to do a ‘source tagging’ job for one of our major customers recently and we couldn’t find any alternative supply for the tags - the only option was to buy them from the people who supply the rest of the kit - I think they worked out at about 3.5 pence per tag (at the volume we were buying).
A bookstore I used to work for bought those really annoying magnetic stickers to tag books with. I got yelled at one day for bending one, as apparently they were two dollars per sticker! (I was holding a roll of about a thousand or so of the things)
This sounds like another exaggeration/piece of misinformation given to employees. There is no way a bookstore could afford to put a $2 sticker on a $8 - $25 item.
actually, we generally saved them for items over the price of fifty dollars. (It was a big chain, and we carried a lot of computer and art books, both of which are hugely expensive, in the 75$+ range)
I’d agree with amarone; that may have been a bit of hype to prevent them being wasted, either that or somewhere along the line, somebody was making a huge markup (sounds obvious, but what I mean is that the stickers don’t have to cost that much)