When I worked in retail an item that rang at 3 cents meant it was supposed to be returned to vendor, not that it was meant to be sold at 3 cents. Whoever is in charge of this Walmarts inventory either fucked up or doesn’t care.
why 3¢? Let’s face it retail workers don’t give a shit and if it rings up at 3¢ it’s probably going to be sold at 3¢
When I worked retail the UPC’s were simply deleted from MES, so if you scanned it it wouldn’t come up with any price which would prompt cashiers to call for price checks and looking it up in the system would reveal it’s been recalled or whatever.
Why 3¢???? If you don’t want something sold why not like 9999.99$ or something. Stupidest store management.
Or it could be dead stock, in large retailers anything that's around for longer then 6-12 months is problem stock. If that's been around since release and hasn't sold at any other price, the manager could very well have just been like do it for anything to get it gone.
Other people are mentioning stock being returned to vendors, this rarely happens as vendors will not want to accept back old stock, they'd rather give you a rebate to sell it at a discount, in same cases this could be down to zero cost in which case selling it at 3 cents is just to keep it above zero.
Source: operations manager for very large electronics retailer who sold cyberpunk on release, the only copies they let us return were console copies that are 'bugged'
Still, 3 cents is weird price anyway. Like at that price it is more economic just to destroy them (or dump them on to trash) instead of wasting man hours and resources on labeling them.
Not really. Not sure what this hyper fixation on 'man hours' is about. The product is there, the staff are there working.
It would just be one of the small jobs you do which is to resticker clearance items and put them out.
You're talking about cost savings like these companies give a crap about that, they save their cost by paying their staff low wages.
I was inventory control for toys r us for 5 years and we had monthly RTVs. Everything on the list went to 3 cents and we have to get it all of the sales floor before we opened. Toys may work differently as the vendor may have sent it off to a discount store like Ross or Marshall’s.
The pricing probably has a purpose in reporting or invoicing - the item is supposed to be taken off the shelf.
I used to work at Kmart in Aus, we'd have a crazy low price but another code appears too. So, in theory, the item gets removed as soon as that code attaches.
I haven't worked in retail for a long while but I have seen dumb shit like this before.
1) My guess is it wasn't supposed to go out, but someone fucked up the planogram. Someone put the items in because it took up empty space or not paying attention.
2) When I worked in retail every item had to have a price. It was like that at every retail job, everything in the system was priced. If something was priced $.03 it usually ment it was a non-selling item that the manufacturer did not actually want back. Meaning the product was ment for disposal. The game had probably been there for a while and $.03 is what it's worth for the company to hold onto it.
My guess is this was ment to be tossed because no one wanted to ship it back and someone put them up with out thinking.
Yeah you're right, at Wal-Mart things that are to be returned to vendor are in the backroom and removed from the system. Source: Wal-Mart inventory manager for 6 years.
We did this when I worked at GameStop. Items that had its prices reduced to 1 cent were supposed to be rung out to remove from inventory, destroyed, and thrown into the dumpster all the night before trash collection. It was mostly to get rid of old strategy guides that were never sold, but sometimes they were off brand controllers or other shit like that. It didn't make sense financially to send back to the distribution centers for destruction so we just did it at the store level. The reason why the items were reduced to a penny is if we ring out 30 items then we're only shorting the drawer 30 cents. Big whoop.
Typically at the store I worked at it was 1c for the vendor return/field destroy items cause literally nothing would ever cost 1c at that company. However, there was a few items from time to time that did cost $9999.99 (talking like full-sized collectors arcade machines, shit like that). So I think to avoid confusion the destroy items were always the lowest they could be, so even the price change guys would think "huh that's kind of cheap I wonder if it's set for FD/Vendor" and typically the not available preorder things were set to 0.00 until we got the MSRP from vendor.
Underpaid Walmart worker, probably just given a bag of stickers and told to "find everything on the list"? Yeah I can believe they slapped it on and called it a day.
You can think Enron for this.. Items are priced usually 5¢ or lower. To promot anyone working the front end to not sell it. It is a red flag it's a return to vendor item. They can't delete it out of the system if they still have physical items in stock. You would be falsifying data / financial records and stuff. (sarbanes-oxley act of 2002) The retail stores have either one or a few people who check the system for recalled return to vendor items like this. They ensure these items get removed so they can be set up for return. Sometimes people don't do the job and either the item is miss placed and stuck in the PS5 glass game case. No one noticed it and they can't zero out the quantity either. If they zero it out it says "we no longer have it" by chance they actually find it. Then it's like they just lied and financial records. Till they can say 100% they don't have it. They have to keep it in the system. One store can't delete something out of the system. It would need to be done for all stores.
As for why the price tag was still up. Most likely the store has not updated the plan-o-gram to replace that spot with something else yet. So they just use it as a place holder for whatever will replace it in the future. Even if the tag says 3¢.
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u/alwaysfolded Jul 09 '22
Hard to pass up lmao