I started at seventeen, pushing carts in a parking lot in the rain, and I finished as the manager of a mid-size store with a hundred and forty people on the schedule. In between I ran produce for four years and meat for six.
Which means I have personally set more prices, printed more markdown stickers, and thrown out more good food than I care to write down.
Nothing in this book is a secret in the sense of being hidden. Every single thing in here is done in the open, in front of the customer, every day of the week. It is simply that almost nobody has ever been told what they are looking at.
The strip of white plastic along the front edge of the shelf. The rack at the end of the dairy run. The reason the first thirty feet of the store look the way they do. The last two digits of the price, which are not decoration — they are a code the staff read at a glance, and it costs the store nothing to keep printing it where you can see it too.
Every chapter opens with the situation as you actually meet it in the store. Then it explains what is happening behind that situation, and why. Then it tells you exactly what to do about it, in an order you can follow on your next trip.
Where a method does not work, or only works at certain stores, or has a catch, I say so inside the chapter rather than burying it at the end. That is the whole arrangement.
"If you can read a shelf tag properly you can walk into a store you have never been in before, anywhere in the country, and know within about ten seconds whether what you are holding is a good buy."
Chapter 1 · The Price Tag Is A Document
