All that glitters is not gold.

If you own or are ever planning to own a store in which you would produce every week sales flyers, give your employees the best gift you could ever give them. Don’t make a whole, 2 week sales flyer, "packed with 175 coupons in more then 500$ in savings!”.

Why the heck not, you’re probably asking. It’s good publicity; it seems it would attract a lot of buyers. What’s wrong with a store sales coupon flyer?

I’ll tell you all what’s wrong with it.

I’m a cashier. I work anywhere from 4 to 10 hour shifts a day. We don’t need incompetent shoppers coming to our register with over 20 items that are anywhere from 1$ to 20$ off with the display of their coupons for the according items, and expecting to get the sales prices without the damn coupons!

I had many people today, who came to my register and bought a bunch of items, once I rang them all through and gave them their final total amount, they look at me like I’m stupid. That I should have seen the 7 crumpled up coupons they had in their hands, and made it out to ask them if in fact they had any coupons for their purchases today.

After noticing that a lot of people weren’t carrying the coupons they needed to get the sales prices off the items I knew were on sale, I was kind enough to ask if they did in fact have the corresponding coupons for them. Many didn’t, obviously, for the fact that they think it’s our job to flip through the many flyer books we have on our register tables and find THEIR coupon for ALL the items that THEY want.

I even had one man tell me that “No, I don’t have a coupon; you’re supposed to give it to me!” So I muttered under my breath and picked up a flyer book and flipped through it to find his 6.50$ off Tylenol coupon, so that he could get his sales price of 8,49$ opposed to the regular price of 14.99$.

The book I was looking at I had been using all day to pick out the store coupons many people didn’t give me. Many of the coupons were now missing from the book. The Tylenol one was one of them. So after going through the flyer 2 or 3 times to make sure that I hadn’t missed it, the man has the common decency to shout at me “What, you haven’t found my damn coupon yet?” Well, holy shit, I nearly slapped him in the face.

So employers, remember, don’t make coupon books for your store. And if you’re optimistic enough too, then make sure you give your pessimistic employees a nice cold, J&B on the rocks. Because they'll need it after a shift in hell.