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Originally Posted by timcrook
Why do they try so hard to not let you PM? Do they get some how penalized? I don't want their pay reduced or to get fired.
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Originally Posted by timcrook
Has anyone here worked as a cashier or customer service at retail? I want the inside info, are managers hard on you if customers PM?
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OK, I'll chime in since I've had some experience with this. I used to work in retail until a decade ago (not toys or multi-item department store like what we're talking about here, but retail nonetheless). Staff don't get penalized, fired, or pay reduced for price matching, but the managers do scrutinize and review how much price matching each individual staff member has been doing, both in frequency (how many price matches have they done) and size (how large of a discount have they been matching). This is for business analytics as department and store managers will need to report to their superiors if something seems to stand out. Like, if one employee is discounting more than another, it calls into question that person's integrity (are they actually verifying legitimacy of these matches before processing them? How accurate are they following company procedure of their price matching policy?). This usually doesn't result in anyone getting fired unless of course they were blatantly discounting shit for unverified reasons constantly. More often it's just a matter of re-training and reinforcing the policies with that employee to ensure they're following procedure.
Monitoring price matching also allows managers to draw attention to the rest of the market to determine if a competitor is severely gaining an unfair advantage so they must re-assess the pricing or business model if it needs to be changed. Another possible reason I'd like to suggest is also profit margins. Toys, like many other mass consumer items, may no longer have the profit margins like they used to 10 or 20 years ago. To sell a $20 deluxe at retail cost to the customer, it's safe to assume Walmart or TRU's cost to them to buy it from Hasbro may only be $15 each at best. Most product margins used to aim for around 20% to make it worthwhile to stock them for sale. But as time has passed, margins have thinned out in nearly every type of consumer market: toys, electronics, clothing, home hardware, even vehicles and homes don't have the profit margins like they used to. That said, with a dwindling room of profit, retailers have come up with more stringent price matching policies. Sometimes, when you do see a sale go up, it's because these profit losses are often subsidized by the vendor: for example, if by selling a product at 25% off costs Walmart or TRU a loss of 5% from their cost price, then the sale is on because Hasbro has agreed to re-coup some of that loss to the retailer to soften the blow. "If you lost $5 for each one you sold on the sale, we'll give you $6 back". Low profit yes, but in times like that, the purpose of the sale is to either try to clear out end-of-production-cycle inventory to make room for new merchandise and/or it's a marketing gimmick by Hasbro or whichever manufacturer for the brand exposure: get more of their stuff into kids hands to inspire collecting and more future purchases. The "sacrificial sampler", so to speak.
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Originally Posted by alternatorfan
Like I said before these people at Walmart are uneducated in terms of product they carry.
As DELUXES, voyagers, leaders that are on sale at other places and vice versa.
That show a picture of an item. They focus on that exact item and not know the difference as to the rest of the wave mates. Or classes.
They focus on the pic And even if you try to explain that all DELUXES, voyager etc. Even Hasbro should educate to the sales person of their products they sell for Hasbro. I don't know how many times I've seen Hasbro reps at Walmart and toys r us they are a toy store and often I find that even toys r us employees don't know what they sell. How can a person get a job there that doesn't know anything about toys especially popular toys. boggles the mind.
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Originally Posted by alternatorfan
Ok points taken then why at toys r us do the people not know what they are selling its a toy store they make the same amount of money.
And Walmart too ok the toy dept people don't know what they sell and they work in that section ????
use your head man.
Don't hire people that have no interest in doing there job esp in sections that need educated employees.
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Honestly, these levels of expectations of how well-educated their staff should be on product knowledge are much too high, and I'll gladly explain why. The reality is that low-income jobs like this level of retail do not require very many skill sets. TRU and Walmart hire these positions for 2 simple roles: process a sale or put out stock. That's it. There's nothing fancy about those roles, nor should there be. One is an organic conveyor belt, the other is a merchandiser or shipper/receiver. The only criteria that Walmart or TRU look for in potential employees for these roles are if they are competent enough to be programmed for sales processing procedures, and if they can follow a planogram to put stuff out (if you can match numbers to pre-assigned shapes, you're set), have enough strength to move a certain amount of weight, etc. Hell, in some cases (especially at Walmart) you don't even have to be competently fluent in English to get these jobs! They don't care if a person is knowledgeable or not, nor are they going to care enough to educate their staff, because they weren't hired for that purpose. They got hired to put a body in front of an adding machine and another body to open boxes and put stuff out in a tidy manner (or at least their less-than-best reasonable attempt at one, lol). Even right now, the cashier and clerks will soon be a thing of the past as automation continues to be more efficient. More and more Walmarts and grocery stores are adopting self-checkout lanes to hire less staff. Merchandisers are still needed muscle because a person can still put out product more quickly than a robot can at the moment. But once their speed improves, those jobs will disappear for humans too. They already have the precision and accuracy to make things tidy. It's just a matter of time.
Do you want to know why there's no product knowledge training for this type of retail level? It's because the compensation structure is not commission based. If they paid their employees enough to give them incentive to be more knowledgeable, that would meet your expectations. But these are not sales roles we are talking about; they're not being paid to pitch pro's and cons of a toy or anything else their employer sells. It's strictly a merchandising or processing role so a commission structure is not the kind of pay structure the employer would want to introduce to their employees because it cuts into already slim profit margins, so they stick with simple button pushers and stocking grunts. Entry level is exactly like that. Any higher expectations of these job positions are glorifying them more than both the employer and employee intended them to be.
It is also because of these reasons why we as collectors sometimes see ridiculous product swaps being accepted and back on the shelf. Staff aren't going to know much better from the original toy vs the illegitimate stand-in, and the range of success some swindlers will get varies wildly on how much detail that employee will use to question the validity of the return. Obviously, if what's inside looks like the packaging art, that increases your chances. When it doesn't, it's because the employee assumed it was just one of numerous variants in an assorted line of toys, or because they truly don't give a shit and accept that some child will eventually ask for some unsuspecting parent to buy it anyway. One collector's trash is another kid's gem when it comes to toys.
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Originally Posted by Nocturn
Toys R Us being a toy store changes *nothing* they still have no obligation to become a human encyclopedia. That store is still huge, though not as big as a walmart, they STILL have THOUSANDS of products that their computers can barely even keep straight, you're expecting EVERY SINGLE CSR you encounter to have memorized every product for every toyline for every season for as long as they work there. That's impossible. It's you who needs to use his head.
The corporations have zero expectation that their employees memorize the contents of the shelves. The employees have no reason to. It's never going to happen.
Why does a toy section need educated employees? If anything that's a section where you need the least education because kids know what they want, and the products are designed to be safe, I'd say it's more important to have skilled employees in say, the photo booth, or electronics, or the goddamn hunting department.
Working in the toy department does not require them to know every toy. Even CSR's who are collectors themselves usually only have interest in a handful of toylines, because like most adult collectors, that's all they have the attention/money for. Beyond personal interest, there is no reason they would know the specifics and particulars of products on the shelf. Like I tend to know what's going on in the Transformers and LEGO aisles but that's only because I have a personal interest in those toys. An employee will never have a collector's knowledge of every line. You're asking people to be Google for next to minimum wage.
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Originally Posted by Shepp
The last time I tried to price match at WM, they had to call to see if the competitor had that item in stock. Since they didn't, no price match.
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Originally Posted by Yonoid
At Walmart website I loaded up all the voyagers on my phone to show they are all the same price point even though they all aren't on the flyer. Some instances I ask for a manager. More times than not I get the flyer price.
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Originally Posted by UltraMarknus
It probably struck her as odd that you didn't just do it at the checkout with a cashier, which I get. I think they get hammered so much with people trying to trick them they can get a little defensive lol.
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^ QFT. I acknowledge that the OP felt bad about their experience, but really, there's no reason to be once you get how store policies work (see my link at the end of this post).
Everyone's mileage will vary, and this topic continues to be brought up and beaten like a dead horse. Someone should just pin a sticky thread somewhere about the return and price matching policies for Walmart and TRU cuz it seems like this discussion comes up nearly every sale. In particular, I already did a small write-up on these policies last month in
this thread here, 1st post of the linked page.
