Retail store signing 101

We were going to save this post for another day, but it ties in so well with what we posted this morning that we decided not to wait.

People are out shopping today; every store we visited had plenty of customers and lines at the fitting room and cash wrap counters.

Georganne saw some t-shirts on sale at Chico's: $19 each when you purchase two or more of the elbow-sleeve tees or $15 each when you purchase two or more of the short-sleeve variety:

Unless you read the sign on the other side of the rack; that sign says short sleeve tees are $19 each when you purchase two or more:

Georganne picked up two of the short-sleeve tees, and pointing to the conflicting signs, told the associate who was helping her that she'd like them at $15 a piece. The sales person called a manager who, after a few minutes of reviewing the merchandise and the conflicting signage said something along the lines of, "The crew neck short-sleeve tees could be $15 a piece but the short-sleeve tees you chose are $19 each." George pointed out that none of the signs mentioned anything about style, they merely read, "elbow length and short-sleeve." The manager said she was sorry, but insisted that short sleeve t-shirts were $19.

And then the manager did something incredible: She walked away without correcting the signs. Retailing 101: If a product is signed incorrectly, fix the sign ASAP.

If 99.9 percent is good enough ...

There’s a television commercial running in Chicago that boasts about the company’s 98 percent customer approval rating. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Well, it’s not when you consider the following:

If satisfying 99.9 percent of your customers is good enough then …

• 12 Newborns will be given to the wrong parents every day.

• 114,500 mismatched pairs of shoes will be shipped each year.

• 18,322 pieces of mail will be mishandled every hour.

• 2.5 million books will ship with the wrong covers.

• Each day, two planes that land at O'Hare will be unsafe.

• 315 words in Webster's Dictionary will be misspelled.

• 20,000 incorrect drug prescriptions will be written this year.

• 5.5 million cases of soda won't have any "fizz."

• 291 pacemaker operations will be performed incorrectly.

• 3,056 copies of tomorrow's Wall Street Journal will be missing one of the three sections.

• 880,000 credit cards in circulation will turn out to have incorrect cardholder information on their magnetic strips.

We’re just saying …