Every week Sears updates its weekly sales. For each of these sales, the associates that work there must take down all of the previous sale signs, and put up the new ones. This might seem pretty standard, but this is a much greater task than it seems. In a single Sears there is over 4,000 signs that must be put up. Also they must print out hundreds of “weekly ads” which is a few pages showing some of the good deals the store is going to have.
Now if you don’t mind, let’s do some math. The Sears Holdings Corporation has approximately 3,900 locations in the US and Canada. If each store uses approximately 4,000 signs, that totals 15,600,000 signs… a week. That means over a year approximately 811,200,000 signs are printed. Thats a lot of paper! Assuming an average tree produces 80,500 pieces of paper, that would mean over 10,000 trees! Not only that, those numbers are not including the ads that are printed every week.
Not only is this hurting the environment, but also the company. The cost of these ads are tremendous! They have to pay for the paper, the ink, and don’t forget the employees! The employees work on this ad for about 2 hours every saturday night, and from 5-2 every Sunday morning! At an average of $8.00 an hour (taken from http://www.Glassdoor.com) thats $88.00 per associate just for working on the ad. If each location has approximately 10 associates dedicated to this task, that comes to $3,432,000 a week just to pay the workers! That’s $178,464,000 over the year!
Clearly Sears has some thinking to do about whether or not they want to continue with all these “sales” when most prices stay the same week to week anyway. Yet they still print out new signs for them every week!
TDKaak 