Today was one of the worst days I have had at work in recent memory. I had not even actually gotten around to looking at the normal things that I needed to check before I was being demeaned, bitched at, and otherwise told that I was the shit that gets scraped off of the bare feet of malnourished children in third-world countries…Basically, at least.
This was all related to the great shelf tagging adventure, of course. As I have written in the past, I was not going to do anything that was going to lose the store money, I think I may have been a tad dishonest with that statement though. I knowingly did things that were going to cost the store money, just very small amounts. Say there are three different types of La Victoria salsa, one is priced 1.89, one 2.39 and one 2.49 (due to being received at different times), the new tags all read 2.29, so I change them all to that price. That is losing us, on a case of 12, 2.40 on the most expensive one, 1.20 on the middle one, but is also gaining us 4.80 on the lowest priced one. The net of that would be 1.20 profit over leaving them all at their current price. I am not completely stupid after all.
There were a couple of cases when I did make notable changes in price for a store loss. Those were done mostly for simplicity on items that we did not have much of. One particular instance was a little jar of mayonaise, we had three on the shelf, the new price was 30 cents lower than the old price, but getting the new price into the register with all the other changes would save me a lot of time in the long run. An intentional 90 cent loss, knowing that the product would cost us less in the future, knowing that it would save me the time it would take to change the price later, it is 90 cents FFS.
Another instance of my failure was in the cake mix area. I did not change a single price with the cake mixes or frostings while we did the change, the reason was that we never buy them except when they are on a really big discount. So I left all of the prices the same and started hanging up special signs in front of the new shelf tags that had vastly higher prices –But– (there always is a but, isn’t there) I did not realize that they had made price changes in the actual cash register to some of those items, this means that the price I saw on the tag and the price it scans at do not match. Okay that seems a little fuzzy, even to me, so I will explain.
The POS (point of sale) software that we have in the backroom sets the prices and prints the tags for all of the items that we have on the shelf. The price of an item can be changed on the register itself, but you will not have a tag for the item, and the price will revert back to the previous backroom price if it ever goes on sale; i.e. The tag for Betty Crocker White cake says 1.59 on the tag, that is the price in the backroom, if you change it to 1.29 at the register it will remain 1.29 until it goes on sale. Once it goes on sale a file will be made in the backroom to transfer the sale price to the register, when the sale file is removed it will go back to the backroom/tag price.
Blah, I am boring myself as I type this, so I am sure the reading of it is probably not going all that well either. Let us never speak of this again…until tomorrow.
• I have been quite curious about the Fahrenheit 9/11 movie, even wanted to go see it, but I think I have changed my mind. Everything that I have read, from every blog I can think of, says that there is no information in it that has not been in the political blogosphere for a very long time. Damn me for not watching cable news and, therefore, thinking that Bush Dubya is the steely-eyed, strong-handed leader that he would want you to believe. I voted for this jack-ass, but I kind of lost faith in him when he was doing his best to read a book for pre-schoolers when the 9/11 attacks happened -mind you, he wasn’t doing it very well.-
I suppose that was all part of his strategery for the war on terror. Pretend to be an illiterate fool, then prove everyone wrong by actually being an illiterate fool…Well played.
Had I been the leader of the free world, I likely would have tried to make the world perceive me as a strong leader, a leader who was the voice of the people. But, then, I am not the President and that means that I don’t really need any scapegoats…Enough said…
• I saw a very brief mention of some country deciding that it needed to go ahead and put quality stamps on their brothels. I am not going to try to look the story up again since the fact that the countries that do have brothels almost invariably have less sex crimes than in the U.S.. I say almost invariably only because I do not have statistics for every country on earth and I don’t want to be telling lies.
Prostitution is called the “oldest profession” for a damn good reason, it is. Imagine 20,000 years ago, when man was first starting to hunt, make fire, become human as we know it. Man comes back with the bounty of his kill, woman tries to find something to trade for it, man would rather have a few seconds with woman than anything that she offers, woman puts up a red torch to let the clan know that her naughty parts are for sale to the man with the most meat (in trade, not the pants). Woman gets the best cuts in exchange for laying on her back and taking it.
Could it have happened differently? Yes. Is it likely? No.
Males have known, all through the ages, that females possess that which they are searching for. Not just the fact that the female has an ‘inny’ while the male has an ‘outy’, no it is deeper than that. The woman can have offspring, while the male can not. Of course no one in the days 20,000 years ago knew about impregnation, but that is not the point. I bet the woman’s crotch has been for sale longer than the most ancient artifacts prove.
I really think that it is a liberation of sorts to have the woman charge the man for sexual services. It is ‘prostitution’, but it is also of her own choice. That is executing total control of your own body, if you want to use the control of your own body for the sake of financial gain, it is at your own risk.
I really think that the only reason the Greeks started having anal sex with their young men was to circumvent the strangle-hold that prostitution had on their society. Had there been more reasonably priced hookers we might think of some of the Greek rulers as marketing genius.
Prostitution works to help stop sex crimes, prostitution also helps to stop the spread of disease (in coutries where it is regulated). Do we, as Americans, only look down on it since it seems so easy as a solution? Do we want to do everything in the most difficult way possible?
Time will tell.