I was just thinking back to learning about this in 5th grade. There was a drug store (I think it was Snyder’s or Woolworth’s) that had the price they paid for the item on the pricetag using the code BLACKSTONE. Here’s how it went:
Pricetag would show that the consumer would pay $1.59
Then it would have a code on the tag that would say: BLC
If you took the BLACKSTONE code and assigned a number to each letter, B=1, L=2 etc, you could see that the drug store paid $1.24 for the item.
I haven’t heard of any cool secrets like that in a while, so anyone have any to share?
My grandfather used to do something very similar in his story – a ten-letter phrase that indicated the price of the item. I still use it from time to time to make ID numbers more secure.
The system is still in fairly common use in Thailand. It’s not hard to decode: if you’re quoted 200 or less for an article with a three-letter code, the first letter stands for 1; once you find the 1, a similar process yields 2; the most common final letters will be 0 and 5. You can awe the sales clerk by solving the puzzle (even if you’re still unable to negotiate a discount :dubious: ).
I used to work at an Oshman’s / Sports Authority store, and I don’t remember any “secrets”.
About the only thing that wasn’t widely known, I suppose, is that a lot of time, they’d have a sale on something “while supplies last”, and we’d only get a token number of the sale item.
Airlines base their prices on average price of jet fuel multiplied by the linear mileage, divided by average passenger load. They multiply that by pi to get the first class fare. At -65 days, they discount that price by 20%. At -64 days, they take the average discount, multiply it by the inverse quadratic equation, divide it by the ground temperature outside, and then add on $5.00 just for the hell of it.
Contrary to popular belief, most retail stores don’t have a magical “back room” where miracles can be made to happen. “You don’t have this in a size 57 in purple in betamax format with mag wheels? Can you look in the back room?”
Sometimes, yes. A few weeks ago I was having trouble finding a shirt I like in my size. I asked an employee, and she went upstairs to look, and came down with several choices in my size. I’m glad I asked.
But I’ve worked in a few places where there was no back room. Customers would often insist that I look anyway.
This is why I always ask if it’s possible that there’s another in the back. I’ve worked retail where stuff came in and went straight out on the floor. There wasn’t much that stayed in the back; imagine how big a big-box store would have to be if they had more of everything in the back! IMO, corporate of such places try very very hard to tailor what comes in to what sells in a said amount of time; there’s breakdowns in that sort of system, of course, but that’s how it’s supposed to work.
Also IMO, they say that employees are the greatest cause of shrink because they can catch them. When you aren’t allowed to confront a suspected shoplifter in any way whatsoever, an awful lot of stuff is going to walk out the door, and that’s only the stuff you know about. Me? They could have searched my stuff anytime they wanted to.
When I worked in manufacturing we used a 5 letter date code from a 12 letter code word that was used on the label to tell us the manufacturing date without the customer knowing the date.
The code word was the first 12 letters of SOUTHERN PACIFIC. A lot code of OSNPB was produced on 2-18-09, the B denoted swing or second shift. If you were having a problem we could then pull the production records for that date.
We hid the production date in this way to avoid the perception that a product was ‘old’. The animal feed product had a production code and an actual expiration date. As long as the feed hadn’t reached the expiration date shown it was deemed within it’s shelf life. Might be a couple weeks away from expiring but the customer had no indication of the age, only that it hadn’t expired yet.
Not really a big secret since it’s out there for everyone to see, but in most big box chains, the date of the last printing of the shelf label is on the label itself. We constantly get customers complaining that we’ve been raising prices (I paid two dollars LESS last week!), and I then point out that the price hasn’t been changed for months.
If you look at the loaves of bread in the grocery store you will see that the little plastic clips or twist ties are in several different colors. This is how the bread delivery guy knows how to rotate the stock and when to pull old bread.
Each color denotes a day of the week. If you decipher the code you can always pull a fresh loaf off the shelf.
