Related pet peeve: when stores put their own inventory stickers on products, obscuring essential product information.
For example, my mother has medication allergies and she also takes medicine than has dangerous side effects if mixed with other stuff. Canada has pretty rigid laws about labeling the contents of food and medicine, so whenever we need to pick up cough medicine or something from the drug store we have to read the ingredients carefully.
Oh, except we can’t because those assholes pasted their inventory control stickers over the ingredients list of every single box. Open the box and pull out the bottle inside? Well the assholes thought of that too and put the same sticker over the ingredients list there too.
A large portion of “inventory shrinkage” is caused by the company’s own employees. This can be anything from merchandise for sale to office supplies. When I was a kid, I knew several kids who used company pens and pencils for school supplies, as their dads would simply bring home a carton of office pens rather than buy them. Every place I’ve ever worked had some system of keeping track of merchandise, and frequently those systems were clearly designed to keep things from growing legs and walking off, even though only employees had access to those items.
While the sticker doesn’t obscure anything vital in that page, it does make a remarkably ugly addition, and would take me right out of the story if I came across it.
Yes. This is even more annoying, because it could actually endanger someone’s health.
It could be worse. Again, while working at Zellers, I was instructed to unpack the 12-pack boxes of condoms and put these anti-theft stickers on them.
Apparently, some people are so scared of buying condoms that they’ll waltz in, steal a couple from a box, and leave. However, the problem wasn’t so out of hand that I was instructed to put an anti-theft sticker on eacn individual condom. Imagine THAT next time you’re in bed
In my experience, this generally isn’t out of fear or embarrassment. It’s because it’s easier to steal a couple of items out of an unsealed box than it is to steal the box itself. I used to work for a woman who would think that since she just needed a couple of nails, it was all right to take a few from the box in the store and put them in her pocket. She also used to buy batteries, put the new batteries into her appliances, and then put the old batteries back in the package, take them back, and get a refund, claiming that the batteries were no good. Same thing with light bulbs.
People like this woman are the reason why we have these damn hard plastic molded packages that are impossible to open.
