Yesterday was inventory at our store. We knew it was coming, and at least where I worked, were fairly well prepared for it. We knew that our department would be worse than everyone else by considerable amounts, and that we would be a major portion of the stores shrink. We did not, however, know how bad it was going to be. Sad to say, I think I was the closest in my estimation.
Our department did about $120,000 in shrink, with the store coming in at about $450,000. At least these are the numbers that are going to be recorded, reguardless of how wrong they might be. And that troubles me, not the dollar amount, but the accuracy of it. Our department is the number 1 shrink department in EVERY store, be it a Wal-Mart, Kmart, etc. We have very high ticket items, both large and small, and most everything in our department can be sold again, and we also have a lot higher dollar amount in our inventory at any given time. So us being bad was expected. What I hate about it, is the number is wrong.
Basicaly, the way they do iventory is we get everything ready by verifying on hands, prices, location, and placement of our product. A crew that is not affiliated with Wal-Mart comes in and scans everything in the store. Then we compare numbers, what they scanned versus what we are supposed to have. There are other things taken into effect, but that is it in its simplest form. And note, that I did say "what they scanned" and not "what we had". I say this because when I went in at 8:00am, aftermy department manager told me how bad we had done, she also mentioned how many horrid errors she had found. In some areas, like if there were two items beside each other, they would scan the label for one item and count the items in both homes, sometimes they skipped entire sections of product.
Now it does not matter how bad they screwed up, how many errors we find, and how much of an effect that does to our shrink number, we are marked down for the same amount, and that sucks. It is my biggest problem with inventory. Sure the preparation sucks because management can never decide what the hell they are supposed to do (even though they have done it for years), the schedules suck because they have to fit everything in before a date, they leave the store open during the process so customers can fuck things up, they are just in general rude and impatient, they are at times horrible inaccurate with their counts and that is our fault somehow, but I hate that when it is all over what they said goes...no matter what. It is stupid, down right stupid.
