When I was in high school, I worked afternoons in a grocery store, Albertson’s. In those days stores would buy a full two page newspaper ad each Thursday highlighting sale prices, and people would buy sale items, often in quantity. One day I noticed our assistant manager going around and marking up various items – I asked him “John, what’s this about?”
He said that they had to make up for money they lost on advertised sale items, so that part of his job was to go around and mark up enough stuff so that the store would break even on their “sale”. It was a good life lesson on how things really worked. There were no computers in those days, so that the process was not foolproof, but was at least carefully calculated.
This morning on entering our local Kings Sooper I encountered this sign. It says that shopping carts will stop rolling if they leave the parking lot.
Continue reading “How stupid are we? (he asked, rhetorically)”