Big box nightmare....scanning accuracy at the register!!!

Burgundy, Barolo, Barbaresco, single vineyard wines, Lieu dit…

All these wines with subtle label differences and no barcodes that signify big $$$ differences at the register.

How do you cope? We are upwards of 10K SKUs and to not have items like this scan is a serious threat.

Comments?

Any decent POS software should have custom upc creation as a part of it…A “barcode blazer” thermal printer that prints out reasonably small upc stickers costs about $400…that should solve the problem.

Now having competent data entry people is another story…when I worked at Marty’s and we had probably the same amount of sku’s or more, only myself or the other wine buyer would enter the invoices for the higher end wine items to ensure that they were named, marked, and priced properly in the computer and on the shelf. We would always double check the higher end wine orders to ensure the data entry person had done the job correctly if we didn’t do it ourselves.

Also, there was always a “front end” manager double checking large orders at the registers, and usually wine customers with large orders were checked out at the register by a wine dept. employee as well as the manager. All of that redundancy helped avoid most errors.

[1974_eating_popcorn.gif] Ditto what Brent said!

We have well over 10,000 SKUs, and the Barcode blazer from our POS system is our savior.

I’ll be right over to your store!!!

Brent,

(Disclosure: I’m not ITB or anywhere close to it - just a customer.)

It doesn’t seem that the potential problem is at the cash register with high dollar wines being sold. The customer serves as a check to make sure he/she isn’t OVERcharged. However, a retailer’s nightmare is when the $400 bottle comes through and rings up as $35. No alerts would be triggered because it would be an apparent small transaction. This is when it pays to have good customer relations and hopefully the customer would be honest and point out the error (or at least ask to have it checked).

Chris

We actually have a pretty good handle on the situation. It begins with stock staff training. We drill it into them~ If there’s no barcode, it doesn’t go up on the shelf. The same goes for shelf tags. If there isn’t one, don’t just put the wine up.

I want to take things to the next level and check for scanning accuracy as items are being received so as to further remove non scanning items from the sales floor.

Chris,
Thanks for clearing that up. Now put on your swimmies and back to the kiddie pool.

Honest customers, that’s a good one!

My store is much smaller and I am on the register or near it a lot so I can catch things if they arise.

When there is no barcode on the bottle, I still enter it into the POS system and create an item number for it, then use a pricegun and put the number on it. That way when the bottle gets to the register, the clerk can just type in the item code.

It works ok for us at a small store, but I’m sure would be impractical (and kinda ugly) at a larger store.

I wish all wines just had barcodes on them…and ones that scan. That’s my pet peeve when they won’t!

A code number works just as well as a bar code with the exception that a clerk has to punch numbers rather than scan which allows for another potential for error. And, as mentioned before, while creating a upc is the best solution trying to find someone to staff the position can be a challenge.

I am speaking from a grocery store perspective so take that for what its worth. Almost everything we sell has scan bars and we have 30,000+ items in the system.

John

Hey, I just pointed out a $1300 mistake in the retailer’s favor a few months ago (wrong vintage sent) and I’m quite confident that all my local drinkers would have done the same thing. I didn’t discover it until several weeks after the fact, so I’m sure it would have never been noticed otherwise. The fact that I had developed a very trusting relationship with the retailer made it unthinkable to consider otherwise. It would have been like taking advantage of a close friend or relative. (FWIW, he posts on this board, but I’ll let him decide if he wants to reveal himself.)

I just assumed that higher end wine drinkers had a little better ethics, but it sounds like from your perspective, not so much…

Chris

I don’t think Brent has much contact with higher end wine drinkers.

Oh no, not again…

[rolleyes.gif]

For items without bar codes, we manually key in the item at the register. Some of my employees are faster at this than others, but I find it better than adding barcodes to each btl. Since much of our biz is done via email/internet, putting in barcodes and slapping them on the btls would just not be time well spent.

During busy times in the store, I try to be around the cash register to speed things up.

I hate when we have multiple vintages of the same wine and they have the same bar code, that is problematic for inventory purposes.

I’ve pointed out mistakes that would have gone in my favor (granted, not nearly on the scale of the $1300 mistake of which Chris speaks) … I’ve also pointed out mistakes on items that I am not buying, but noticed as I was browsing the store … there are honest customers out there.

Brian Grafstrom:

there are honest customers out there. >

No doubt, and God bless the lot of you. My thought in posting this was to see what other big box guys do to control these untagged items. I have worked in places that were very unconcerned with these types of items and it was an inventory nightmare.

More fun and games:

Guess what? I found out a couple of weeks ago if you sell this:

and this:

the former scans as the latter.

For us, that was a $60+ dollar discrepancy.

Not to mention that this week Conundrum 375s and 750s came in with the same barcode!

Mark, I feel your pain. We recently bought an electric cash register and had to read instructions on how to set it up. It’s a little quicker, but Carrie and I both liked the feel of the old one, you know, just like a slot machine. Punch in the numbers, pull the handle and watch the numbers pop up.

Mark

I have seen the 375ml problem in the past. It is amazing how things can get so screwed up.