shrinkage

01-29-00

I'm not getting any customer service stories. What, are the memories too painful for you? Can't you bear the thought of dredging up your horrid past? Or have you just come home from the good old service desk and don't want to talk about it?

Spill it.

I worked for 18 months in a gourmet grocery/wine shop. It was privately owned, part of a small chain in the Detroit area. Employees in the store, prior to its being bought out, were treated poorly by the owners. The middle managers were underpaid and shit on, and the store drones were crapped on from many levels.

Wages were determined based on experience, position, and the daily whim of the hiring manager. Some cashiers started at 6.25 and stayed there for a year, while others started at 7.00 and got raised to 8 within 6 months. John worked in the store with me, in a different department. Although he was expected to be an expert in the beer department (and he was,) he got paid the same as the baggers: 6 bucks an hour. He worked there for 10 months and never got a raise. I worked in two different departments (cashier and bookkeeper,) under two managers who raised me separately, not knowing that the other was raising my wage. In 18 months I received 4 raises, quitting at 8.50 an hour. I haven't made that much money at any job since, other than teaching music lessons.

The store was poorly managed. It was nobody's fault. The computer system, although brand new, was full of bugs and had terrible tech support. There were too many managers who didn't get paid enough to care about the store. The employee turnover was huge. Even though wages were competitive, nobody could stand to work there.

The employees who did stay stole everything that wasn't nailed down. Inventory was a sham. Nobody paid for lunch or drinks, and some departments took their lunches on the clock. The cashiers had a million schemes to let other employees get away with murder. For example:

• Hundreds of items didn't scan through the registers, because they were brought in by different vendors all over the state, and imported from all over the world. When entering items by hand, the cashier could misplace a decimal, charging .59 for a 5.99 focaccia, or 2.50 for a 25 dollar bottle of wine.

• Even items that did scan could be slipped over the scale without ringing, or could simply be voided from the receipt.

• In the state of Michigan, returning recyclable bottles and cans from carbonated beverages earns 10 cents per can. It adds up. Since our cans were counted and rung by hand, cashiers could save bottle slips from paying customers and use them again later. The management wised up to that one and began collecting the bottle slips from cashiers, matching them against the register totals.

• The store carried expensive, exotic produce. A cashier could "accidentally" enter the code for Golden Delicious apples (.99 cents/pound) when the customer had Braeburn apples (2.99/pound.) Or white mushrooms (.79 cents/pound) instead of shiitake mushrooms (15.99/pound.)

• Some of the bolder cashiers figured out how to void an entire transaction in between the time a customer handed them cash and the time the sale went through completely. The cashier could then pocket the cash, or put it in the register and take it out later. There was no way for a bookkeeper to track it, or even to know it had happened.

Those are just the cashier scams. Other employees walked out of the store with bottles of wine or groceries that it was assumed they'd paid for. Few people paid for coffee, drinks, or food eaten during their shifts. There was very little secrecy; most knew what the score was, and those that didn't were either new or blind.

Some individuals had elaborate schemes:

• One employee got her hands on the bottle return slips after they'd been tallied by the bookkeepers. She used them discreetly on all her grocery orders for the next month. Sometimes it involved bringing in a few bottles, just so the front end managers could see her walk by with the bags and wouldn't suspect when she got 15 dollars taken off her order.

• Over the course of a day, customers left unwanted items behind on the registers. These were known as "takebacks." At 8:45 a bagger would collect the items and go "reverse shopping," putting the takebacks back on the shelves. One cashier used to claim all the takebacks on her lane were items that she'd bought during her lunch break.

• One wine employee seemed beyond reproach, fooling everyone else to the point that they were embarrassed to mention their filching habits in front of him. After he quit, we learned that he used to put one or two bottles at a time into an empty wine box. When the box filled, he'd casually wheel it back to the loading dock and set it outside the door. At the end of his shift he'd drive to the back door and pick up the case. We were all floored when we heard about that one.

• Wine tastings occurred at least twice weekly. Invited to these tastings (some of which were impromptu, late in the evening, and NOT held by members of the wine department,) were wine guys, beer guys, and all male managers. If a woman manager stalked into the back office during a tasting, she'd be patted on the ass and sent back to her cash register.

• Pots of coffee brewed constantly for "customer samples." There were tiny paper cups by the pot so that customers could sample our flavor of the month. Most of the employees had an economy-sized travel mug at their stations, and the flavor of the month changed several times daily, at the whim of the bakery staff. Any employee hankering for a cup of tea opened any box from the hundreds of varieties on display.

• There were samples available at all times in the bakery, deli, produce, meat, grocery, and candy displays. Bakery staffers poked malicious fingers into 25 dollar cheesecakes, unwrapped them and spooned heaven into fluted paper cups for sampling. The deli staff hacked up gourmet cheeses daily. Cashiers sorting candy crunched Lindt and Ghirardelli bars under their fists and then opened the wrapper, "for customers." Grocery stockers opened up whatever met their fancy. There were regular samples of baguettes in the bakery, salsas and chips near the beer department, and citrus fruits in produce.

• Once a week, the meat department went crazy cooking beer brats, Italian sausages, peppered steaks, or shrimp kebobs, letting the smells waft over the entire store. Customers were drawn to the meat counter like zombies, only to find a gaggle of maroon-shirted employees gathered around a dwindling heap of delicious-smelling samples.

The owners seemed oblivious to the thousands of dollars' worth of merchandise that disappeared from their stores on a monthly basis. They came in regularly to hassle the wine staff, schmooze the rich, powerful customers, and treat the non-wine drones like dime-a-dozen street walkers. After they sold out the six-store chain to a national organic grocery corporation (for millions,) they continued to throw their weight around in "their" stores as much as possible. Finally, the entire family was barred from the stores. And there was much rejoicing.