BOGO and 10 for 10 Blues

There is this plague upon the retail world called "BOGO". It stands for "Buy One Get One Free". It totally sucks from where I stand, which is behind a cash register in a grocery store. Basically, if you buy one item, you get another of the same item free. Sounds simple? Stupid, fucked up things always do, until you really have to deal with them on a personal level. Actually, BOGO (when it works, which it doesn't a lot) can mean one or more of the following:

Buy one of the same item and get one of the same item free.

Buy one item of a group of items and get a second similar item free.

Buy two of the same and/or similar items and get both at half-price.

Complicated enough already, is it? Factor into this that the average cashier has the mental capacity of a nesting hen and that the average customer has the intellect of a free-range chicken, and that the average customer is incapable of reading the advertising in his or her hot little hand, nor any shelf tag, even the big red and yellow ones that accompany said sales, or comprehending such phrases as "limit one" or "with $50 order or greater", and you already have a disaster in the making. But that's not all (as television commercials always shout at you)!

10 for 10 seems straightforwards enough: you buy 10 of any of the "10 for 10" items, and you get them for $10. Easy enough, huh? It usually is. What it really means is that most of the items actually cost you $1, but, some items (and no-one knows which ones they are, until you ring them at the register) you actually have to buy ten of to get them for $1, and some you can "mix-and-match", and some you cant ... get my drift? Try explaining all this to the customer when even you don't really understand how the system works.

This seems bad enough, right? Well, it gets worse. There are two people in our Scanning Department. Scanning deals with those funny little bar-codes on everything that you purchase (except produce, which has its own PLU (Price Look-Up) codes, which have to be manually entered). When prices change, like for our Sale From Hell, most of the price changes are downloaded into the store's computer system via satellite downlink. The Scanning Department receives a printout of the items and the price changes and the UPC (Universal Product Code) for each one. All they have to do is to go around the store with a marvelous little hand-held computer that is WiFi'd into the store computer system, which includes a laser scanner (called a "960"), zap the barcodes for the various items, and adjust for errors, which can be done, for the most part, from the 960 itself. Afterwards, you can run a printout of all of the changes you made and compare them to the list, to see if you missed any. Not hard, you say. It is definitely beyond the capacity of our Scanning Department.

So, many, many, many of the 1,613 items advertised for our Sale From Hell are improperly entered in the system. This means that the customer, who is already confused, finds his or her grand programme to save a fortune stymied at the register. And who do you think they blame? The Scanning Coordinator (they don't even know that there is such a person)? No. They blame ME. Now it becomes the job of the cashier and the front-end staff to figure a way to make the item ring at the proper price and in the right department (woe be unto you if you mistakenly credit or debit the wrong department!) and satisfy the customer without making a mistake which loses the store money.

And the Scanning Department? They are full-time and get benefits, and they work 9-5, with week-ends off. Nobody yells at them. Nobody knows they exist. When there is a fuck-up at the register, it is my fault. If I become unhinged and throttle a customer, it is I who will lose his job and go to jail. And that sucks.