From the Archives: The Price Tag
Holy hell I haven’t updated in nearly a month. Was the cake thing really that long ago?
Anyway, writing is hard and I haven’t been doing it, so I thought it’d be fun to take a look back and see the sort of things Skep was up to circa 2011. Turns out I was a wise-ass back then, too.
I was in my early 20s, and I was working at Sears (a good indication of just how long ago this was. Another indication was when I said “2011”). Mostly I was doing inventory in electronics and large appliances—stocking shelves, updating price tags, bringing washers/dryers/ovens/etc. to the floor for display, that sort of thing.
(I was supposed to be selling mattresses, but that’s another story.)
Near the end of my time there, we got in a new, top-of-the-line Kenmore Elite refrigerator. French door, stainless steel, 31 cubic feet of storage capacity, which was the largest you could get back then (maybe even still today, I haven’t been keeping up with refrigerator trends). The defining feature of this beast, I would say, is that the front of one of the doors could open independently from the rest of the door. I couldn’t say if this image shows the exact model, but if not it’s pretty similar:
I think they pitched this feature as “grab-and-go”. It seems to me like you’re still just opening a fridge door to take something from inside, but I guess I’m too dense to understand the complex nuances of refrigerator design.
The sticker price for this sucker was $4,200. Being the Sears house brand, you could count on it being on sale practically all the time; but this is clearly a design and price point built to prey on suburban families with more money than sense or self-control. I think it comes second only to the Hummer as a symbol of American excess.
When a new floor model came in, I’d unbox it, put it on the floor, and then print out a price card to hang on it, which also showed the product name and sometimes highlighted a couple selling points. The company would push these price cards to a piece of software I’d estimate was built in 1992, and we could just print out the one we needed, all ready to go. It would also push cards with that week’s sales prices, and print them automatically, so you could go hang them without having to research what was supposed to be on sale that week. Still, I’d have to look at the sale cards every Sunday morning and go “we don’t even carry half of this shit here” and spend an hour before the store opened picking out the ones I could actually use.
But due to your typical levels of corporate incompetence, sometimes after we got an appliance in, we wouldn’t see a price card right away. Hell, it could take days. Obviously, you can’t stick a shiny new model on the floor without a price tag if you want to start selling it, because anybody who sees it will go “oh, this one’s nice, but there’s no tag on it” and proceed to ignore it in favor of any of the older, less obtusely-priced models.
On these occasions—if we really, really, really needed to print a price card we weren’t sent—we could make one ourselves. This was a fun feature to play with when I was bored; I’m not sure I have it anymore, but I made a price card for myself, to replace the boring old name tag I wore on a lanyard. I was priced for clearance, of course. Just under $300, which shows you where my self-esteem was at the time (these days I could probably fetch $350). Unfortunately, no tanglible impact on the number of customers who asked me “do you work here?”, because that lanyard was all that separated me from a normal-ass person who happened to be pushing a washing machine around the store on a dolly. Weird that Sears went under.
So of course I had to make a card for our new showcase refrigerator (remember how that’s what this story was originally about?). And if I may say, it still holds up as one of my finest works:
For those of you who need a hand with the small print, the card reads:
$4199.99 — Kenmore Elite 31 cu. ft. French door refrigerator
- Door-in-door design for easy access to milk jugs you put in backwards somehow
- Excellent conversation starter - make your dishwasher jealous!
- Seats two - useful for when we sell out of air conditioners
- #1 rated refrigerator by lunch meats and moldy cheeses
- Requires two (2) AA batteries - not included
After I put it up, my section manager had to come by to see what all my coworkers were giggling about. Upon reading it, his reply was—and this is a direct quote—“ARE YOU ON CRACK?!” I don’t think he was pleased about the air conditioner joke. Companies say they want customer-oriented employees who think outside the box, but then you try to be proactive about offering solutions to their month-long A/C shortage and this is how they react. Very telling.
This price card still adorns a refrigerator door, but not the one it was originally made for. Instead, it occupies a position of pride on my own, much smaller, MUCH more affordable fridge.