Pricing: Fill & Download for Free

How about the old “detail package” scam? A couple of years ago, I bought a new Mustang from a local Ford dealer. We had negotiated a reasonable price, and the time came to sign the final paperwork.** The shiny car in questionOn it was a line item that was not mentioned before. It read: “detail package,” and the charge was $895.I picked up the paper and waved it at the salesman I was working with.“Hey, what the hell is the “detail package?”“Sir, that is very important. It protects the paint from the harsh Florida sun and protects the interior in case you spill something.”“And that costs $895?”, I asked incredulously.“Yes, sir.”“Well, I don’t want it. It is listed here under optional items.”“I’m sorry, sir, you must take it.”“And why exactly is that?”, I asked again.“Because it is already on the car. It can’t be removed. Please sign the paperwork.”I placed the paperwork in front of him, stood up, said, “I’m not paying for that,” and walked out the front door and back to my old Subaru.Out of curiosity, I called the service department of the dealership and asked them what the detail package consisted of.“Oh, they wax and buff the car, dress the tires, and Scotchguard the interior.”“Thanks. Who are ‘they’?”He told me the name of the local detail shop that performed the service for them. He said they have been performing that service for the dealership for as long as he could remember. I can’t recall the name now, but at that time, I proceeded to look up their number and gave them a call.“Hey,” I said to the guy who answered the phone. “I’m looking at buying a new Mustang at XYZ Ford dealership in town, and I’m wondering what all you guys did for the detail package on that car. Could you please look it up for me?”“Sure,” he said, it kind of surprised me. “What is the VIN?”I gave him the VIN.“Sir,” he came back on the line, “We never did that car.”“Oh, Ok. Thank you very much.”Now I was pissed. The slimy sales guy had lied to me and essentially tried to scam me out of almost nine hundred bucks. I almost totally gave up on buying the car, but it was exactly what I wanted, and I had been looking for one like that for a long time.The next day I asked for a meeting with the manager of the dealership. I repeated to him the story I just told you. The odd thing was, he didn’t seem surprised at all. It was just business as usual.He asked me to have a seat while he looked into the matter. About ten minutes later, he came back to me and said simply, “We’ll take the charge off.”With that, I signed the papers and took off in my new car.

1) Socks subscriptionAn entrepreneur from Switzerland named Samuel Liechti had a crazy idea to start a company that would distribute socks to subscribers several times throughout the year. For nine pairs, each “sockscriber” pays a minimum of $89 annually to keep the socks rolling in. Surprisingly enough, there is an immense amount of people who are too lazy to grab a pair of calf-high socks at the store and subscribe to this silly service.Each new "sockscriber" receives a calculation of how much time he will save by not making sock purchases: about 12 hours every year, or three weeks in the lifetime of an average Swiss male, which is estimated at 82 years. Liechti brought his "sock-scription" service to the U.S. in 2005. Two years later BlackSocks began selling subscriptions for underwear. Liechti now boasts 60,000 active customers in 74 countries. BlackSocks opened a New York office last year.2) Providing personal paparazziCelebrities aren't the only ones that can have paparazzi all around them. Now, you can hire your personal paparazzi for a day! This is how Celeb4aday.com makes bucks—by giving you the ultimate celebrity experience. It can be for birthdays, gag gifts, parties, bachelor & bachelorette parties, or ANY other event that requires The Star Treatment. Celeb4aday.com believes that the everyday person deserves the attention as much, if not more, than the real celebrities.3) Star registryyou can put stars under your name and get certification for it! This, of course, comes with a price. International Star Registry (ISR),the original star registry that has been naming stars for people since 1979, allows you to do just that. Celebrities, dignitaries, and individuals all over the world have used its services to buy a star for friends and family.The ISR offers a gift package wherein a special star is selected in the sky and you get your Star Name and Star Date recorded along with it. The gift package includes a beautiful parchment certificate, a sky chart with your name and the star's coordinates, and an informative booklet on astronomy. All names in the astronomical compendium will be published in Your Place in the Cosmos©, which is registered in the U.S. Copyright Office. However, this is not recognized by the scientific community. Stars' names are only reserved in the International Star Registry.4) Butterfly supplierSelling butterflies and making millions? It doesn't seem conceivable, but Jose Muniz has managed to pull it off. You can get your very own live butterfly from Jose, who started the business based on a bet.It all began when a friend bet him $100 that he could not sell butterflies for a living. Now, seven years later, the former business consultant and his wife, Karen, own Amazing Butterflies (amazingbutterflies.com), a live-butterfly distributor with offices in Tamarac, Fla. and San Jose, with a projected $1 million in revenue in 2006.5) Selling Irish dirtAlan Jenkins, a Belfast entrepreneur, and Pat Burke, an agricultural scientist from Tipperary, have already shifted around $1m (£512,000) of Irish muck to the United States.Their company, called Official Irish Dirt, has also received online contacts from Irish people all over the world who are keen to get their hands on dirt from back home.It was Jenkins who came up with the idea. During a visit to see friends in Florida he heard some Irish-Americans at a meeting of the Sons of Erin, a community organization for people with Irish ancestry, saying they would like to have some Irish sod placed on their funeral caskets. Soon afterward he met Burke, who worked at the Irish Department of Agriculture, at a dinner party and the business grew from there.Since Auld Sod's Web site, officialirishdirt.com, went online, Burke says he has shipped roughly $2 million worth to the United States, where about 40 million people claim Irish ancestry, and Enterprise Ireland estimates annual sales of Irish gifts at more than $200 million.6) Friend rental serviceWe all grew up being someone's friend, but we never got paid for it. Well, today is an entirely different era. You can now get paid for being a friend. All you have to do is create your profile in RentAFriend.com, set your hourly rate, and wait for somebody who is interested in hanging out with you. It's a win-win situation right there.Rent A Friend allows you to create a free friendship profile, where you can charge up to $50 an hour to be rented for social events and activities such as weddings, sporting events, concerts, movies, operas, hiking, biking and dining.Site owner Scott Rosenbaum got the idea from dating sites. He noticed that nobody was offering mere friendship and he wanted to "go a step back" from dating sites. Therefore, this is a strictly platonic website.

Hard no. Not even close. I know people who worked at Dillards selling shoes who made over 50k back in the 90s. UPscale retailers were mindbogglingly inefficient and they charged for it. Thing is, they paid well. My grandmother worked at Higbee’s down town Cleveland and while she wasn’t the major bread winner, she did make enough to add considerable income to their home—nothing today outside of management or Costco can say that.The economics today have been heavily disrupted by technology, advances in logistics, software and so on. In the course of my life in retail, it wasn’t so much about entry level jobs paying crap (they always have) it’s just that the economics of how a store is run have changed drastically. Whats left are all the original crap jobs but far fewer of the higher paying jobs and a fraction of the benefits once offered.That’s not anybody’s fault or some perfidy on the part of fat cats. Most of this money isn’t going to them. Most of it is going to cutting prices to the bone. The retail market in the US is so competitive and so un-regulated that it’s the wild jungle out there. Every retailer is in a vicious war with the others. And no wonder, they’re all going broke because it’s always in the process of being disrupted by something new.In my time at Kohl’s, here are some changes I saw. I will use my own coding for simplification of store ranking positions.Levels: 1, 2, 3 are individual contributors (Or “ICs”; the numbers represent seniority). $8–$12 per hour.Levels: 4, 5 are junior and senior supervisors (small/big departments). $10–$17 per hour.Level 6 is a key-carrying hourly manager. $15–$25 per hour.Good? Okay, let’s do this.All stores except REALLY busy ones lost their HR manager. They have a store manager, a hardlines/dock manager and a softlines/CS manager. The store managers became the store HR managers too. Supposedly 50% of that payroll went to make competitive pricing (which I did see) and then to hourly worker support (more headcount and hours, which I don’t believe I ever saw).Loss of a $55,000–75,000 salaried job. This means, someone below them has just lost a career target they can aspire too making it far harder to work their way up to a good income.The software the company uses eliminated the need for major hand-written scheduling, gantt charting projects, etc. Suddenly the store admin, an entry level supervisor role (level 4), went from a full time position to a part time. Then it was downgraded to just senior IC (level 3). Employees can use their own app or the website to self-schedule and ask an interactive agent questions about benefits and pay. Same rule: fifty/fifty split on payroll savings.Loss of a $$25,000–30,000 a year full time job with good benefits and vacation. (This was the MOST desired spot in the store: decent pay, insanely good hours — can be home right as kids get home, ability to work from home, flexible hours, relaxing office environment, key power player in the store, enjoyable job to do.)The software that runs the cash office was really upgraded. The diminishing use of hard cash and checks means that credit cards were the vast majority of our purchases. The cash office supervisor (Level 4) was abolished. We kept the four part-time cash office associates but instead of six hours a day, we went down to four hours a day. Same rule: fifty/fifty split on payroll savings.Loss of a $20,000–25,000 a year full time job with good benefits and vacation. (This was the second most desired spot in the store: decent pay, insanely good hours — can be home right as kids get home, ability to work from home, flexible hours, relaxing office environment, key power player in the store, enjoyable job to do.) Sure, not a lucrative career, but that wasn’t the point — it was mostly women, mostly stay-at-home moms who had a comfy job where they made mad money to do nice things for their family — gone.Inventory Tracking Software is so accurate that it allows everything to be processed into and out of the store with no human hands meddling with the system. In the past a dock supervisor did this, but there is no dock supervisor (level 5) any longer. That position was abolished. Half the payroll went to unloaders/merchants. A key carrying manager (salary or hourly) comes in to unload the truck with the team and “force” as much product to the store meaning that no additional labor was needed for backstock and processing during the week.$30,000 full time job, gone. Third most desired spot in the store because of the early hours. Always 6am-2:30 PM. Great hours. Always home in time for kids.Custodian supervisor was removed (level 4). All custodial staff terminated or converted to other departments. A service area contractor was hired to come in and clean the store in the AM. No full time custodian on duty any longer—the staff onhand could handle it. In other words, I had to clean up shitty fitting rooms and the bathrooms went to hell. Same rule: fifty/fifty split on payroll savings.Loss of a $22,000 job that men and women did in their retirement. I had a wonderful woman who worked for YEARS as a custodian manager at a Hospital. She was so proud of the fact that she never missed a day of work. We lured her away because she was retiring and wanted a 20-hour a week job working in the morning. We hired her then fired her in six months—job abolished. I was crushed.The morning replenishment supervisor (level 4) was downgraded from full time to part time associate (level 3). The hours expanded to the rest of the crew. This time they actually did it. An “in stock” team comes in every morning for four hours (two people) to get any merchandise that might’ve been backstocked to the floor.Loss of a decent $25,000 a year job. (Easy hours, flexible around one’s schedule, little stress.)All front end supervisor (level 4) coverage was reduced from open-to-close to just Friday evenings, Saturday from noon to close and Sunday afternoon. They were not down-leveled but two positions out of four were abolished and cut from 40 hours a week to 20 hours a week (to include cashier shifts).Loss of two decent, $25,000 a year jobs.The store visual (merchandising / decor) supervisor (level 5) who installed graphics and help set the look for a sale, was cut down a level (4). Her assistant was removed. Same rule: fifty/fifty split on payroll savings.Another highly sought after job that people just drooled over. You set your own hours, work 40 a week whenever you wanted (except for mandatory Monday mornings or major service events when shit had to get done). When we let our senior visual manager go, I was so sad. $30,000 job with easy hours (you can even do it when the store is closed and it’s a JOY to do— visually setting all the mannequins and setting up the graphics is an artsy-worker’s dream).The Ad Set team was removed. They worked from 8pm-12am. The system was upgraded to electronic tags and pricing. No need to swap out signs. The technology caused the ad set supervisor to be downleveled from 5 (high authority due to the complexity of the task and the team) to level 4 and given one helper to use in their short, once every week shift. That’s right. One four hour shift for a previously 25–30 hour leader who could also add 10 more hours a week to be at full time. The entire crew and the hours are gone.The beauty department supervisor was removed. A beauty associate was added. to work on Friday and Saturday evenings. Department was moved to jewelry. Same rule: fifty/fifty split on payroll savings.Loss Prevention Supervisor (level 5) abolished. Two part-time LP associates added (in uniform) to walk around the store only on busy days.Loss of a $30k-40k job.Abolishing of 1/3 of all district managers. $125,000 job + bonus. A difficult job but still one people aspired to.Abolishing of 1/2 of all regional VPs. $200,000 job + bonus. A difficult but clearly high level job that people sought after.What’s coming down the pike? Easy, these are the things being developed RIGHT NOW that aren’t science fiction:Every item embedded with an RFID tag. You walk through an archway and it scans all tags and rings them up.Robotic floor cleaners (Walmart is already testing them).Automated in-stock robots that can do most of the picking and moving of product to the floor. An associate (for now) still loads it. Because the robot does most of the thinking, the associate just man-handles the product. Team will go from about 15–30 people at night to 10–20 people. The third shift stocking supervisor is being abolished. The manager won’t need any help due to the smaller team size.Amazon and Walmart are both testing automated delivery drones. Goodbye delivery people.You see, we added a few dozen hourly headcount. We abolished all full time positions except for hourly levels 5 and 6. WE lost a salaried manager. See, nothing is inherently wrong or unethical with these changes. Kohls didn’t get a say in what the market looks like. Kohls has repeatedly struggled gaining market share and to do that, it has to compete or go bankrupt costing everybody their jobs. I watched stores struggle and my friends who opened stores in California and Florida all had horror stories of how hard it was to transplant the Midwestern corporate culture of the company to different regions of the country.All that is fine. But what isn’t fine is the fact that models of efficiency (like QualPro and SixSigma and Kaizen) have turned making businesses efficient into a literal science. When Kohls went with one of those efficiency modification systems, they really changed. Entire stockrooms were remodeled based on how the organization observed the number of steps it took to get from point a to point b. Everything was under the microscope. The way the trucks were unloaded went from a slow peck at the truck to everything all at once dumped off the truck and to the floor (where you sell things, so that is good).Efficiency is good but there’s one thing to know. There is one part in every business that is utterly wasteful and problematic and quarrelsome and inefficient and frequently lazy: humans. Humans are wasteful bags of mostly water. Capitalism is good and efficiency is good but there is a point, beyond which, if efficiency for the sake of efficiency is chased, it doesn’t pan out so well for us. (Unless we all get put out of work by machines that do the stuff we don’t want to, then, well, that utopia/dystopia will have to be the problem of someone long from now.)