News

Chronicle Deadline

The first issue of The Chronicle for the new year will be in the store on February 3rd, 2010! We welcome your submissions and encourage committees to submit reports.

Deadline for submissions is January 8, 2010.

A Message from the General Manager (19-Nov-2009)

New Cash Registers

Karma Members, we have recently purchased new SHARP cash registers and intend to have them up and running early in the new year. Our current registers, which we got in 1986, have served us well indeed. The new cash registers, however, have many time-saving features, the main one being barcode scanners. We look forward to both reduced wait times at check out and minimizing the time our staff spend using pricing guns – an outdated practice!

An important additional feature is the powerful back-office software which will give us, for the first time, useful sales reports and inventory control tools. What this means for us is more consistent and accurate pricing, and fewer out of stocks.

It is my hope that changing over to these new cash registers will not be too daunting for our member labour cashiers. We will try to keep a similar keyboard layout. Also, many steps of a normal transaction will be replaced by a single touch screen key. And with the addition of barcode scanners the new registers will likely be even easier to use. Cashiers, please look forward to quick retraining sessions in the coming weeks.

Thanks, Justin

An Important Message from the Karma Board (9-Oct-2009)

Markup Changes

Dear Karma Members,

Karma attempts to set its prices as low as possible, consistent with meeting our expenses. Unfortunately, with sales currently lower than in the past, it is necessary to raise the markup slightly. This adjustment, approved by the Board on October 5, will not solve our financial problems, but it will make a contribution towards solving them.

Over the course of October, the staff will be increasing the average markup by about 1.7% of the wholesale cost of goods. Our average markup over wholesale will rise from about 35.1% to about 36.8%. At the retail level, you will see prices rise by about 1.2%.

Some of you may be wondering, "Didn't Karma have a fixed 32.5% markup before this change?". Actually, there were already three markup categories: Karma had a base markup of 32.5%, but the produce markup was higher at 40%, and the nutritional supplements markup was higher at 34.5%. Other adjustments for discounts and roundoff raised the actual average markup to 35.1%. As part of the current change, Karma has adopted a wider range of markups on different categories of goods. The new markups are fixed in the sense that they are predictable within each category, but they are not the same in all categories. If you are interested in seeing a detailed list of the category markups, you may ask any of the staff to show you the new list.

Older news items can be found in the News Archive