Dear Editor,
Every Sunday I leave my house to go visit some friends. I pass Grove and go North and come back before night. (I can’t take drivers who don’t blink!). Most Sundays I will stop at DDL store at Diamond to buy. I am a pensioner on fixed income so obviously I look for bargains. The offer “wholesale” on any purchase – minimum three items. (Some days and first Sunday one item discount). Alcoholic beverages are always never discount unless you buy a minimum of three. (Even their own). Ok Management policy. Bottles. You must either return them, or pay forty dollars for each glass bottle you take. Ok. Up to last few weeks I took my empty bottles. During the week, there is a small booth at the Northern side. Some-times I leave my bottles and enter and told them. No problem. Sundays, I took bottles inside and told the cashier what I left. Sometimes I had a joke with them saying, ‘you have to charge me for one or two as I brought less’. No problem.
This week Sunday was different. I dropped off eight DDL bottles. Went and collected four large Vodka and four High Wine and three 7Up. (Incidentally when we will stop this wastage without recycle of these useful bottles and like Makeson: 592 etc.) Cashier actually leaves her post to go and check my drop bag of empties, but return, saying, ‘you cannot buy those’. Eh? Wrong bottles. Now Cashier and me in dialogue. Ok: is not the Poor Cashier, but Management. I recall in NY, people actually lived on bottle returns. Bottles and cans are all five cents returnable in machines that give cash slips. Why DDL bottles are not interchangeable anymore in their own system in GT?? Maybe if they continue this policy, a competitor should offer fifty dollars each and crush them and sell to the concrete based people. So no money making on, say Vasko wine bottles, because they don’t have in stock. My solution today? Take back the four bottles of high wine and take four bottles of Vasko wine, and actually give away three as my birthday sample drinks. Bottles gone!! And of course DDL sales today drop.
Next time I will take my big Canei bottle, buy at the Cash register and empty it out right there in my bottle and return the empties, forty dollars each bottles!! And waste time!! Cost benefit? Customer satisfaction? And I wonder if Sundays is approved at Ministry of Labour as a “normal working day” or “double time”? Let me make another point clear. I agree with a forty hour week with overtime after forty hours worked (week). Not eight hours a day then overtime. Change the Labour Laws and Overtime Regulations like in some Organisations. Principles not men!!
Sincerely,
L. A. Camacho
