The other day while I was at the grocery store, I saw an employee wandering through the produce area with a hand-held scanner, scanning various shelf tags. I assume it was some kind of inventory thing, but he wasn’t counting anything, and the items he was scanning seemed random to me – walked over to the tomatoes and scanned the shelf tag on one of the bins of tomatoes, then over to the grapes, then over to the onions, then the strawberries, etc. I couldn’t really tell what the point was. Any ideas?
He was most likely checking the prices to be sure the shelf tag agreed with what the price at the checkout will be. It’s not easy to keep up with price changes.
Ordering. From my experience, not a lot of produce is kept on hand in storage so an order would be placed when more is needed.
I concur.
That sounds remarkably like the ordering process from when I worked night stock during college. My supervisor literally walked down the aisle and scanned things that were starting to get low and then punched in a quantity.
I work in a grocery store and either of these answers are likely correct.
Yep, agreed - could be either. Also checking to see that changes in price due to ads have been done correctly, the correct item is stocked in the correct place (about two weeks ago some doofus stocker put the cilantro in the parsley bin and the parsley in the cilantro bin… hilarity ensued), double checking inventory entries (if your inventory lists -15 of an item you may need to send a human to find out what’s going on there), and possibly other things. It’s been awhile since I worked the inventory side of things so I’m sure I’m not remembering everything.
Probably a shelf price audit.
Cite: I used to work on a team that maintained the shelf price audit client and server at a major retailer. The system was called… SPA.
Who counts inventory anymore? Bar codes keep track of inventory. Every time an item is scanned at the register, it records the purchase and the inventory amount gets lowered.
Because of “shrinkage.”
It’s still important to know what you actually have, so you can compare it against what you think you should have.
Except, of course, when the cashier is faced with 24 cans of soup and instead of scanning/entering 5 of this flavor and 10 of that flavor and 9 of some other flavor s/he scans the first one in line and types in “24” as a quantity - in which case your inventory is now off. Rinse and repeat for an entire day’s worth of cashier’s and groceries. That has to be adjusted by someone, somewhere. Even if a cashier tries to be conscientious about properly ringing things up you’ll inevitably have the Screaming Customer In A Hurry who will berate you for doing so because they don’t give a damn about inventory, they just see inefficiency in doing it the proper way and will demand that the cashier just scan one and ring 'em all up the same because they’re all the same price dammit what the fuck is wrong with you no wonder you work retail you moron (and that’s not even the worst I’ve been called - the alphabet of customer insults directed at me starts “A for asshole, B for bitch, C for Cu—”… you get the idea).
Then there is the stuff where the tag is missing or damaged where just the price and department is entered (my store calls that “key-dumping”) and someone has to go back and check the department to see what’s been sold or not sold because that technique does not provide the computer with inventory information.
Product can arrive mislabeled.
Now we have little scales in the produce section which enable customers to bag, weight, and print a price label for their produce. And they will inevitably ring a mix of bell peppers up as just one type even with a bag containing a rainbow of colors (the numbers are red=4688, yellow=4689, orange=3121, and green=4065 which are just the ones I have memorized, there are other variations on “bell pepper”) in addition to lazy/pressured cashiers doing the same thing. So maybe we’re selling roughly equal amount of all of those but three-quarters are being rung up as, say, “green 4065”. If no one adjusted the inventory the computer would order 3/4 green and only a fraction of the rest… and we’ll end up with pallets and pallets of green peppers, hardly any colored ones, and angry customers demanding to know where the yellow and orange peppers are. Then we have to sell all the extra green peppers before they go bad and put in a special request for all the colored varieties we should have asked for but didn’t. Meanwhile, the customers are bagging and tagging all colors of bell peppers as “red” today and the cashiers are still doing it wrong (because they’re lazy, because it’s faster to not break them down by colors and they’re rated on speed, and the yelling customers again).
Not to mention the computer generating reports stating things like we had a pallet on hand, received two pallets of green peppers but sold fourteen of them… in the same day.
Rinse and repeat for the 120,000 different items the average store in the chain stocks.
People are involved so it gets messy.
We have full-time people in every store every day chasing these inventory problems. “Inventory” these days is different than it was 50 years ago, but it’s no less important.
Shortly after I started at Safeway they disabled our “quantity” button for precisely this reason. When someone had a cart full of baby food jars or those little Fancy Feast cans, we knew they were all the same price so it was just so much faster and easier to count them up (or ask the customer how many they had and just take their word for it) and just scan one and hit the “quantity” button.
We were then instructed to scan every single item individually, and there was a lot of resistance from some checkers. I didn’t mind scanning stuff, but those weekly coupon books that Safeway sent out before they implemented the loyalty card system were the fucking bane of my existence. The coupons were good for X number of items, so you had to scan the coupon however many number of times the customer was buying that item. Some coupons were good for like 20 items or had no limit, so if it’s a coupon for Gerber baby food with no limit and someone walks up with a cart full of 200 baby food jars, you literally had to scan that stupid coupon 200 times, it was a completely idiotic system.
Yeah, our “quantity” button was disabled for a time. It’s back now - probably too many Screaming Angry Customers contacted Corporate and complained.
NOW our “gift receipt” button is disabled. This is making some customers into Unhappy Customers. I really hope they fix that one before Christmas…
So, did that make you a “night stocker”? :eek:
Computerized inventory is not reliable. Repeat: not reliable.
Walmart is famous for it’s computerized distribution and inventory system. So I check if they have the item in stock before I got there. All too often the shelf is bare. Sometimes I’ve gone back again and the product in stock is still not there for a good long while.
I’m a former Computer Science professor.
Computer’s are not magic. Things go wrong. If you’re running a store, double check what the computer says.
DCnDC and Broomstick are both on the money. Automated inventory seems like a great system, but it’s hardly foolproof.
Heck, we had that recall on Ragu just the other day, and even though all product was supposed to have been pulled from the floor, we kept having it show up all day, forcing us to have a manager come clear the register each time.
DCnDC, that issue with the coupons seems like a separate issue with implementation than just the quantity button. Something on the automated side tracking the bar codes and quantities of product sold. They already have to accommodate 2 for 1 or buy one get one discounted deals, as well as did the product match the coupon for size, etc., expiration date, and whether the coupon has been used or not. It should also be able to handle “can use this up to seven times” or whatever by code, not physical scanning.