Expired products getting sold - this was when I was a was just a regular hourly employee. During orientation/training youd watch all the videos about checking dates and doing FIFO swaps (first in first out) by puttin the items that were set to expire sooner in the front of the shelves, and in the event you come across expired items you defect them out. There would be plenty of times we would come across some stuff that was expired. It could be weeks/months past expiration and my floor manager would not defect that **** out. He would treat it as a regular FIFO routine and put the expired stuff in the front of the shelf. His claim was that expiration dates are just suggestions and not really somethin to take serious And the products was still good and we are only hurtin ourselves by defecting it out. To combat that Id try to check dates as I scanned customers groceries whenever I got called up front to the check lanes to help with back ups and let em know they need to go back and get another one.
Price gouging - Probably the most common thing stores do, but this would happen when our manager knew we were gonna get slammed with traffic. Let it be heavy rain/flooding coming so people would come flocking in to get certain items. Hed wheel up pallets of flashlights, fans, batteries, water etc and up the prices on them. Wed get the rush of people panicking to buy items and none of them would notice the incremental change because they were just focused on gettin back home before the storm hit.
Credit card sign ups - this was the one that really upset me and a large reason why I left. We would receive daily goals on how Many store credit cards we had to get people to sign up for. And if you didnt hit your numbers then youd get performanced out. A lot of surrounding stores would be in the red but for some reason we never really had problems hitting our metrics consistently, till I found out how we were getting a boost. Any time we had orientations no matter what your position was you would get trained on the register, this was supposed to be done by the Front end manager because that is her area, but for some reason our store manager would always do this training himself, just him, no other managers, on one of the farther registers away from everyone else. His reasoning was that he wanted them to learn how to check ppl out the correct way with no distractions. One of the new hires came to me like a week after she was hired with a letter explaining why she was denied for a store credit card. So I try to explain to her bout credit scores/credit history/debt all type of factors play a role in that but she stopped me and was like no I never wanted a credit card to begin with. So Im like welllll why did you sign up? Come to find out during their cashier training portion our manager was telling them they were just doing simulations/practicing on how to sign a customer up for the credit card, but this guy was really signing them up. Most would get denied, but that didnt matter because the store would still get credited for a sign up, approval or not. During seasonal hiring was when this would be rampant because we would hire 15-20 folks every week. Most worked just long enough to get a check and then they’d disappear which was perfect for his set up. And he even upped the ante because our location was by a port where cruise ships came in. The ships would dock nearby for a couple hours and hella workers would get off and walk around our store in amazement like it was an amusement park. Majority of the workers were from other countries, they were not well off financially, and most of them spoke zero english. The set days he knew ships were docking and the foreigners would come in he would set up that same register up and get one of our bilingual employees to talk to them. They wouldn’t tell them they were signing up for a credit card theyd frame it as oh I can save you money on this purchase right now all I need to see is xyz. All these people were getting denied, but again that doesn’t matter, denial or approval, the store still gets a credit for sign up so the metrics are gettin met.
Theres plenty other shady **** theyd do, putting returned items back on the floor that were clearly used/opened (yes, even food), skippin out on givin raises for folks that have completed certain training, if more come back to me I’ll edit and add to this post but working in retail was probably was the worst decision I made lol but also taught me a lot as well. And since I worked retail and seen how they operate its definitely why I dont feel bad when I get over on them as a customer.