One interesting design choice in these Roman Empire stores is the stockroom being open to the salesfloor. I have to wonder why they decided to do this, since there's nothing stopping customers from wandering around back there! Anyways, this view just emphasizes how bad Fry's stock situation was, with practically nothing on the stockroom shelves (and I imagine there's a good reason for the things back there to not be on the salesfloor, since there's plenty of space for them!).
I've heard that Fry's was very worried about employee theft at one time. Thus, one thing they did was to make the stockrooms open to the rest of the store in an attempt to try to make it more difficult for employees to steal inventory since I suppose there might be more eyes on them. Usually the stockrooms were somewhat roped off from the salesfloor so customers couldn't get back there, but the employees might have been lax in blocking off the stockrooms when there was little stock left in them.
ReplyDeleteSupposedly Fry's was so worried about employee theft that they would randomly send the content of their dumpsters to their corporate headquarters to prevent employees from throwing something out and then I guess picking it up from the dumpster later on to try to steal it. You can see how Fry's had a bad reputation among their employees!
Wow, that's not the reason I would have guessed! Between this paranoia and the return policy stuff you were talking about earlier, it sounds like Fry's corporate was a bit out there back in the day!
DeleteHere's a 1997 article from Forbes Magazine talking about Fry's somewhat controversial policies such as the open stock rooms and them sending dumpster contents back to corporate HQs. The article does seem somewhat biased against Fry's, but certainly the customer service complaints have been echoed by customers who shopped at Fry's in around that era at least.
Deletehttps://www.forbes.com/forbes/1997/1103/6010086a.html?sh=4501f2716023
Fry's was certainly a different type of retailer, that's for sure!