This isn’t anything big, but…the last four or so numbers of the bar code of an item is listed on the price sticker on the shelf. This comes in handy occasionally, as when you’re looking to see if the price REALLY matches what’s next to it. Maybe it’s only the BLUE lamps on sale, not the yellow ones!
I’ve worked at the headquarters of a major grocery wholesaler (we supply about 1/4th of the grocery stores in the country). So I know a ‘secret’ about groceries: they are mostly the same from one store to the next. Even produce, meat, bakery, deli, etc.
For example, we supplied produce to most of the stores in our area. Stores from the cheapest big-box bag-your-own gigantic grocery store to the exclusive ones with fancy aisles and uniformed box-boy/valets who loaded the groceries into your car. All got the produce from the same warehouse. Yet I would commonly hear people say ‘I buy most groceries at store X, but I go to store Y for produce, because it’s much better there’. But it all came from the same warehouse, often on the same truck.*
Same with meat. That could vary some, depending on the butcher in the specific store (if there was one). But the meat that was pre-cut and already packaged in a styrofoam tray – that usually came pre-done, and was the same from store to store.
In smaller towns in rural areas, we often supplied all 2 or 3 grocery stores in the town. So no matter which store you shopped at, it came from our warehouses. (This was common, because we could offer the stores better prices than our competitors – we already had a truck going to that town. But the stores had different names, which was why we converted most of our trucks to NOT having our company name in big letters on the side.)
- It’s possible for a specific store to actually have better produce: the produce manager can spend the time to monitor the truck unloading, open each case, and reject ones he finds unsatisfactory. Some produce managers actually did that. But it depended on individual managers, and might be might as easily be one at the cheap bulk store as at the boutique grocery.
The produce might have come from the same truck. However, one store might get its produce daily, and the next just a couple of times a week. And one store might handle and store its produce better, and check it over more carefully. And one store might throw away the produce that has been misplaced throughout the store, while another one might just put it back in the bins, even if it does look rather wilted.
No, Lynn – if it comes off the same truck, it is all delivered on the same day. The routing of delivery trucks is very carefully scheduled & monitored. And no produce ever sits in a truck overnight!
Possible, but not very likely.
Crates of produce are unloaded and stored unopened in the cooler, and generally handled only once, when it is put into the bins. (Why would they want to make more work for themselves by handling it extra times?)
And I don’t think any stores ever put loose produce found throughout the store back into the selling bins anymore – just too much risk of legal liability issues nowadays.
The most common reason for a difference in produce quality is time-to-discard. For example: the produce manager in one store may look at the bananas getting quite yellow, but decide they can still stay on sale for another day. In another store, their produce manager may decide they are too ripe, and should all be pulled from the bins and discarded (or made into banana bread, if that store happens to have a bakery operation). But this is entirely dependent on the individual produce manager, and could happen at either the big bulk store of the small fancy grocery.
Ex US Foodservice drone here. We had stores that got daily deliveries, and stores that only got deliveries on specific days. You have no idea what goes on in both the source warehouse and at the destination. And we did have crates of produce of various types go out and come back and get turned around and sent back out to someone else the next day without being removed from the truck or just stacked off to one side on the dock.
[god I miss being able to buy stuff by the case at cost sigh]
I’m not surprised that both Aldi and Trader Joe’s are owned by the same group, since both have sub-par produce. I’d wager both use the same produce distributor and delivery frequency.
alright, obligatory hijack…
VIN stands for Vehicle Identification Number.
So, what you just said was "Vehicle Identification Number numbers are chock-full…
grrrrrr…
One does not go the the Automated Teller Machine Machine and enter one’s Personal Identification Number Number!
sorry, pet peeve…
carry on!
Settle down, bartleby, or you’ll be a candidate for a visit to the ER room. 
Thanks for reminding me of one of my favorite childhood books. Alvin would visit his friend Mr. Link, who was bedridden, and they would talk about secret codes. I don’t remember what condition Mr. Link had; perhaps he had been involved in cryptography during the war and was injured.
Pre-WalMart, KMart and their ilk, department stores would typically have one model of something, like a radio, on display. ALL the stock that customers bought was in the back room. Only if the model was discontinued and only the demo unit was left would it be sold from the display rack.
I used to work in a store like this (Famous-Barr in St. Louis). Many customers would visit each department, find what they wanted, and the clerk would write up an order that would be delivered along with the other stuff they purchased that day from other departments. Unless they had a chauffeur (and some did), the last thing they wanted to do was carry stuff to the car when it could be delivered to their door in a few days. So stock at the front of the department would have just been in the way.
The concept of stacking the product in the front of the store, in factory-sealed cartons for the customer to pick up, is relatively new in retailing. Once they started doing this, the back room ceased to be a warehouse; the warehouse was in front.
Egg cartons* are stamped with a 3-digit code giving the date of production. It’s just a counter that resets to 001 every January 1. You don’t have to be great at math or write a spreadsheet to do the conversion on your smartphone (like I did): just always look for the highest number** and you’ll be getting the freshest eggs.
*the ones I buy anyway. 
** except, of course, for just after New Year’s.
To easily find the sale items at any Target just look for the empty spots on the shelves.
The first retail place I worked – a garden centre… some 30 years ago – used the same method with the key FEARNOUGHT.
I haven’t though about that in years… 
I worked for a music store that did a full store inventory every 6 months. The method of inventory was to go through the entire store, look at the price tag of each item, and add up all the prices on the tags. Then compare the value of the in-store inventory price tags to the retail value of the items supplied to the store from the warehouse minus the value of all the sales since the last inventory. It should basically match, with some minimal variance allowed for mislabeled prices and shoplifting losses.
When the items came into the store as a shipment from the warehouse, a manager would put a price tag on each item based upon the inventory sheet accompanying the shipment from the warehouse.
I heard later that some of these lower level managers and their friends were walking out the back door with a ton of merchandise, but they were praised as great managers because the inventory would come out just fine.
If they wanted to steal an item that retails for $15.99, all they had to do was mislabel 16 low-selling items in the store by inflating the price tag by $1 each. Voila! Free stuff and an A+ on your inventory!
In the event someone happened to try to buy one of these mislabeled items, the product would ring up on the register as $1 less than whatever was on the label, so no manager was alerted or needed to override the sale. “Looks like you get $1 off today!” If the manager marked up items that don’t sell very fast, then the store sales numbers don’t get thrown off very much during the inventory process.
I knew of another guy who paid for his lunch every day by selling a product to a customer without ringing it up. Just put the cash in the drawer and pocket the cash after the customer leaves. If the customer bothered to ask about a receipt, he would pretend there was a computer glitch and ring it up properly.
By that same token, I work at the headquarters for a major retailer, as well - if you’re buying printer ink, buy the store brand. It’s literally the same product as the name brand (usually in the same facility, just put in different packaging), it costs you less, and makes us more. Win win.
There’s no back room where I work now. Literly every single piece of merchandise we have is either on display, on the shelf, or in a crate directly above it’s spot on the shelf. Even without using my smartphone I can tell if something in stock or sold out with a quick glance. With the smartphone I can tell how many we’ve sold, if there’s another display in the store, and if/when we’ll be getting more (I can also “request” more, but have no way of knowing whether it’ll be granted untill the truck arrives).
It doesn’t bother me if a customer nicely asks if we have more in the back. It does bother me when the customer refuses to believe we don’t have a backroom, starts calling me lazy, or complains about me “playing with my phone” even after I explain it’s a work phone which I’m using to see if I can order them more or at least direct them to another store. :rolleyes:
Most of the “retail secrets” I’m privy to are just ways for “customers” to scam us or steal and not get caught. Or what a rippoff most of our sales our. Or stuff like how to directly contact a manufactorer to try and place a special order (not viable unless you have a really freaking huge order, in which case you wouldn’t be going to a retail store at all).
Credit card numbers actually mean a lot to your bank. Even the security code is not random but is calculated through complicated algorithms involving your card number, expiry date, etc. Banks and other financial institutions imbed a lot of information on their documents, such as the routing codes at the bottom of checks.
And all those random numbers and <s at the bottom of the photo page in your passport (the Machine Readable Passport Zone) pretty much tell you everything on the page plus some check numbers thrown in.
Oh, and FTR, you can tell what type of credit card you’re using by its first number:
37 = AMEX
4 = Visa
5 = Master Card
6 = Discover
I worked at a pharmacy where a cashier did the same thing except with cartons of cigs :smack:. The one thing in the store that was inventoried every open and close. It ended with handcuffs.
That’s true of many other consumer items as well.
I actually learned this on a field trip of all things, but sugar in particular, is an item that literally is just bagged in different bags for different products.
In 4th grade or so my class went on a field trip to the Imperial Sugar plant in Sugarland as a kid, and noticed that in the packaging room, there was the expected Imperial brand bags going into the bagging machinery, but also Kroger, HEB and Randall’s (local Houston grocery chain)
All the same exact sugar, just in different bags.