The Only Product You Can Move From One Store To Another

I have seen this a lot: People are asking questions along the lines of moving unactivated product to another store either within the chain or outside. First, don’t do it. It might be “worthless,” but in the eyes of the law you are stealing product.

Without going further into the details surrounding why it’s wrong, let’s look at the business operations aspect of moving said product. Let’s say I am a planner for CVS allocating all prepaid products. In a simple explanation, I will be using a system that will at a high level see all inventory and sales levels and when I drill down I can see more details as it disaggregates. At a high level, everything will look fine. If I drill down and start to look at the trees and see in store A nothing is selling because someone is moving prepaid cards, I will not replenish any kind of product. My system tells me the store is fully stocked and does not require any more cards. Meanwhile, if I look in store B, there’s an artificial uptick in sales because it just so happens there’s a cashier willing to play ball so I will wind up over allocating.

When we do a full physical of inventory in the store A, that’s when I’m going to see a shrinkage and have no real explanation of prepaid cards disappearing. The selfish act of moving product from one store to another could have implications to a store’s shrink rate with a potential of the store losing a bonus. Corporate would update the systems to match the physical inventory and the process will restart of allocation, but even then it would not be accurate. If we use prior year activations and we see it is low, then this year we will not allocate as many to store A.

In retail, things change so quickly, that cashier who wouldn’t play ball with you in store A might not be there any more and that could be a “friendly” store.

The Only Card You Can Bring To Another Store

I do not mean PayPal My Cash cards specifically as the only card to bring to other stores, but any of the reloadable cards. Just snap the bottom half and leave it at home, and bring the top half and reload it at any of your favorite stores.

If you do multiple cards, you should make an indication on the halves so you know which one you are reloading. My recommendation is to “key” the cards. It is similar to how RAM is keyed, so during installation it only goes in one way. You want to key the halves of the cards without giving away your PIN.

You don’t even have to make cuts into the cards in the same location. You could easily do something like writing a “1” on both cards or a 🙂 . Just whatever it takes for you know which card was reloaded to which PIN.