On Fri, 28 Mar 2008 00:45:33 +0000, MM wrote:
>>It is only common sense if you work on the basis that prices are only
>>ever created once for a given item.
>
>No, it's common sense the first, second, third, nth time, however many
>prices an item goes through in its lifetime. Take Heinz beans. They
>have been sold in British supermarkets for donkey's years, but the
>price today is not the same as it was ten years ago. Each time a price
>label needs to be placed the first time, or updated on subsequent
>price changes, any store should provide the staff member with a list
>of prices. If the list is WRONG, then that is due to carelessness.
>Someone cocked up.
Exactly. Haven't you *ever* made a mistake in your life? Have you
*never* cocked up? Mistakes happen, it's a part of human nature. You
read the number "32" and copy it as "23". You may only make such a
mistake once in every 1000 numbers you copy - but that would equate to
at least one pricing error in a supermarket that sells over 1000
different products.
> They didn't make a mistake, they cocked up.
And what is the difference between "cocking up" and "making a
mistake"?
> Just
>like today at T5. A very major SNAFU. Every wrong price label is a
>SNAFU. It's common sense.
No, it's *one* thing fouled up, not all.
>>The FIRST time a price is put on the shelf for an item, I agree that
>>it is very little more effort to put out a correct price than a wrong
>>one.
>Not: "very little more effort", but NO extra effort, not one iota.
>Zilch extra. Just do it right first time. Airline pilots have to, else
>people die. Oh, and tell Cynic you agree with me, okay?
Perhaps in that case you could tell me why airlines waste all that
money on checking and often double checking every important action?
It's surely easier to check that a door is closed than to check that
the price you have put on a shelf is correct. So perhaps you could
explain why *3* different people check that a commercial aircraft has
all its doors closed before it leaves the stand for departure? And
that's in addition to door switches that bring up a warning in the
cockpit should any door be unlatched. And even with those
precautions, there are occasionally (*very* occasionally) cases of
aircraft taking off with an unsecured door.
If a professional pilot can make a mistake over a simple operation
that puts his own life in danger, how can you possibly believe that a
minimum wage teenage shelf-stacker is at all likely to do a boring job
without making a single error?
>>But when prices change it is very easy to miss putting a new price on
>>something (say you dropped one label without noticing, or one was
>>stuck to the back of another you put out).
>It is only easy when the staff member is being careless, a condition
>that would render the employee unemployable in my store, if I had one.
And how much salary would you offer your staff in return for
completely error-free work? When you were working for a living
(assuming that you ever did), do you believe that you should have been
fired for any trivial mistake you made?
>If you dropped the label without noticing, then you're being careless.
>It is YOUR job to take care! The store is paying you to behave
>properly and take every precaution to do the job you're paid to do -
>which in this instance is affixing price labels to shelves. Hardly
>rocket science, fot God's sake!
If you are expecting staff to take that amount of care, you would have
to pay them a *huge* salary. and allow them at least twice as long to
complete every task they are given to do.
>>In order to be sure this has not happened, you would need a second
>>person going around with a list of all the changed prices, making sure
>>that the new prices were all there.
>No, you do NOT need a second person, for, based on that argument, who
>would check the second person? You gonna send around a third person? A
>fourth?
If the consequences of a mistake are serious enough, yes, that's
exactly what is done.
If you do not know by now that it is *commonplace* for people to make
mistakes, I have no idea which planet you have lived your life so far.
--
Cynic
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