Spent by Dana Goldstein

Author:Dana Goldstein [Goldstein, Dana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781775143895
Publisher: Digital Shoebox Inc

13

Never Pay Retail Again

Everything goes on sale eventually, and unless you’ve fallen into a bucket of ferret shit and need clothes in an emergency, as a retail employee you never have to pay full price for anything.

When I started at Old Navy in Bloomington in January, I had already missed the post-holiday markdowns—but those aren’t the only deep discounts in retail. The store was being flooded with new stock and returns were coming in droves. This was where I discovered markdown glory. A shirt purchased in October and returned in January had already reached final clearance status. As a customer with a gift receipt, you will get the full paid value in the form of store credit or a gift card. As an employee, I’m salivating because I know when I go to reprice that item, it will now be well below the original price. Those cool jeans I couldn’t afford at $49 were just returned in brand-new condition and can now be mine for $2.99. But before you mark your calendar and rush to shop for super cheap returned items after the holidays, you should know most of the returns won’t make it back to the sales floor. This is one of the only golden tickets retail employees can cash in. We scoop up the goods, putting them aside for purchase at the end of our shifts.

My first markdown cycle at Old Navy happened while I was training in the Bloomington store. During our evening shift, we changed signage and moved things around to get ready for the sale the next day. We matched SKUs (stock-keeping units, also known as bar codes) on the tags hanging off the clothing to the numbers on our reports. In the morning, the opening manager would run the SKUs through the cash register to ensure the prices had been changed overnight in the software download. This was an onerous task, one that nobody wanted to do and that usually did not get finished before the doors opened for business. Naturally, this job was handed off to the lowest-ranking person—me—and presented as a “learning opportunity.”

While retailers will operate on their own schedule for discounts, all goods will eventually be marked down. The language might be different, with catchphrases such as “price drop,” “deal(s) of the week,” “new lower price,” “manufacturer’s special,” or “manager’s special,” to name a few. Markdowns will also happen on specific days of the week, and not all markdowns for all departments will happen at once. I’ve worked in stores where markdowns happen on Thursdays, or where women’s clothing goes on sale on Tuesday, men’s on Wednesdays. When I worked for Gap, the customers grew so savvy about when our markdowns happened (every two weeks on a Tuesday), the company had to switch the model and roll out markdowns on shifting days.

Most stores have a three-stage markdown. Stage 1 is generally 20% to 30%. Stage 2 will be 50% of the original price, and Stage 3 can be up to 75%.

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