Nothing. Most didn’t notice it or if they did they probably thought it didn’t affect any of the employees they could see?
Some other managers went a bit overboard and liked to give the sales number, the extended service plan percentage of sales number, and the accessories percentage of sales number. Must have sounded bizarre hearing “Attention best buy staff, please dial extension two five four… Two point eight five… And three point seven.”
Ralphs (employee name)1+1 means break or lunch is over and get back to work
Now I’m curious: do minimum wage workers give a damn if the store is making more money?
And how were they supposed to respond if sales were lower , or higher, than usual?
When I worked in restaurants as a teenager, the managers often told us “good for you, you sold 5% more desserts this week.”
To which we kids on the night shift all thought “so what?–that just means we worked harder than last week, for the same pay.” For me, the manager’s pep-talk was always a disincentive to work.
I think code 75 is “Get a social media mention for Lowes.”
In my youth I cooked at a nice seafood place. The restaurant always had contests to sell whatever fish was going to go bad soon.
The same people always won. The good waitstaff sold little or none of the item, as they steered their tables away from it.
Now I wonder when a waiter makes a recommendation…
My son’s mother is Lowes employee in MI. No code 75 according to her, but there is a code 7 and a code 5. One is for manager assistance the other is for shopping carts.
Hmm… Maybe Code 75 is some rapscallions way of saying, “Hey, managers, YOU get your asses out there and shag some carts!” 
Depends on what motivates them. BBY has always been non-commission so there were always other ‘perks’. Choice of shifts to work, more hours than your co-workers when department hours got cut, possibly save your position when staff cuts came in January, choice of department to work in, hit a sales volume and a department or store gets lunch, promotion to s department senior, etc etc.
Healthcare employee here -
Code Red - Fire
Code Black - Bomb Threat
Code Adam - Child Abduction
Code Orange - HazMat Incident
Code Blue - Medical Emergency
Trauma Alert - Trauma Emergency
Code Pink - OB Medical Emergency
Code H - Secondary Helipad Activated
Code Green - Incident Response
Code Violet - Violent Person Response
Code Silver - Weapon or Hostage Situation
Code Brown - Missing Adult
Code Gray - Severe Weather
Code Echo - Prepare Evacuation
Code Evacuate - Evacuate
Interesting. I seem to recall these two being reversed when I worked in a hospital. That was ::mumble:: years ago, though, and my memory may be off now.
That’s because for many of the hospital codes, there is no standard in the US. See the Wikipedia article for some examples.
I worked for Home Depot after college for a while a long time ago.
These aren’t the actual colors, but “Paging Mr. Pink, report to [location]” was for manager or supervisor to report to whatever location as soon as possible.
“Paging Mr. Red [or whatever]” was for the managers to come immediately for a store emergency.
I actually had to use these once, when some overhead electrical wires started smoking and sparking over some lumber. No one came at “Mr. Pink” and it took a manager 5 mins to walk out at “Mr. Red”.
Manager–looking annoyed at me: “Why are you paging Mr. Red?”
Me: “Well, having an electrical fire over flammable material seemed to qualify.”
Going back in time to the 1970s: several chain department stores in my hometown (Penneys, Belks) didn’t have PA announcements, they had - well, I’m not sure what to call them, they were sounders that gave a tone. I’m not musical but let’s call it a middle-C, but electronic sounding with a fair amount of “fuzz”. These were usually in a pattern, such as X {pause} X X X. The note is the same, just varied in interval, a bit like Morse code, but with only 3-6 total notes in the entire “message”.
These would happen somewhat randomly, perhaps 2-5 times per hour. They’re probably to tell someone to do something, but as a shopper it was always a mystery.
I lived in a hospital for a week once and the codes were incredibly easy to figure out and this made the most sense to me.
Why make up a system that you need a secret decoder ring to figure out if a simple easily deciperhable system will do.
It was all doctor names and the names were ridiculously transparent. I don’t remember any of them now but it didn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out what they were codenames for.
The UK rail network calls for Inspector Sands whenever there is a fire alarm etc.
When I was a kid, we frequently went to Alexander’s in Connecticut (this was a chain department store based in NYC) and they had a series of tones that seemed to be used for this sort of thing.
At Community Hospital in Anderson, Indiana the Brahms Lullaby interrupts the usual music when a baby is born in the hospital. A nice touch, I thought.
We ate at a restaurant once where a strain of popular music would play. This would indicate to the server who was assigned that bit of music that their order was up and ready to be taken to the table.
Similar threads, some of which are pretty old:
I’m pretty sure there have been a few more.
At Montgomery Ward each employee had a number (up to 99) and the chimes would page that employee. The first chimes would indicate the first number and the chimes after the pause gave you the second number. X (pause) X X X would page employee 13. That’s a low number, so it would probably be a manager.