Imaginary Shopper

Why do the district managers cringe when we go into a storefront - because, we throw off the inventory, and make a lot of work for the employees in the store. In fact, I am now cringing when I go into a storefront, as I have a lot to worry about whenever I go into a retail store. What if I don't do an imaginary quantity purchase?

Imaginary shopping is a complete pain to do, unless a person has good communication channels with the organization or the charity being shopped for. First of all, placing your hands on individual items is a real mess without a personal hand-held bar code scanner. Secondly, the video cameras make errors during the shop, and the record of all the items to be requisitioned is not always accurate. Thirdly, some stores don't close, so, getting the order out is a real pain. Finally, I don't have any of the paperwork, thus, I am left guessing who to get what.

Otherwise, all kinds of problems happen when the order is not assembled as per the unspoken and unwritten wishes of the client receiving the "gift". I know a little bit about a few of my recipients, such as, the little birthday girl does not like used clothes, she is an omnivore, her age is flexible between 12 - 19, and she is already a gold level mystery shopper, with full access to all kinds of databases.

I'm not trying to make trouble, I'm trying to get things accomplished, unlike some individuals who do another sort of a job that makes employees cringe. The whole delivery staff here is being replaced. Our kitchen manager walked off the job last year as the delivery people had begun leaving their suitcases to be delivered in the lunch room, and he was "not qualified" to return them. In fact, there was no return address on the suitcase, thus, he had no idea of where to return it to, and, traveled 70 miles out of his way to get the stuff to an office that would accept it, in Connecticut.

We now have a complete mess in the pantry. For the past year, I have been doing imaginary stock for the imaginary shopping, as well as placing imaginary labels with red circles and lines through them on any suspect or out of date code merchandise in the pantry.

This is an imaginary mess, we have more imaginary guests on the way, fleeing New Orleans ahead of whatever Hurricane Gustave might bring, including boatloads of refugees from their Caribbean vacations. So, I attempted to do more imaginary on-line shopping for food and beverages and school supplies. The private school that I have been doing pre-writing for became an imaginary school after the property it was on was sold.

I even purchased a whole mess of echinacea in the hopes of having a few echinacea plants planted at the town park area. During my recent visual census of the town park, I noted that someone did a fantastic job of starting a fiddle-head plantation of one acre, and I also noted that we need ten acres. We have new imaginary workers here, who are going to continue to be imaginary workers until there is a bathroom facility at the local park here.

Some of these workers are so new to the retail environment that these individuals do not know the top five responses to complex questions from customers:

1) I am helping a customer
2) Please talk to a manager
3) Please talk to customer service
4) Fill out a customer service card
5) Maybe security can help you

I learned the hard way that "I don't know" and empathetic listening skills are not options for line workers, which sounds bizarre, being that I started this article out discussing imaginary shopping. However, imaginary shopping is extremely expensive to do, and not lucrative at all, well, at least for me. If it was lucrative, I would have started my own charity organization already, to help support line workers. Line workers have it tough, and really need at least one customer per day to be sincerely nice to, in order to get through the difficult day.