Blantantly deceive your customers

We have received our first submission from another SPS employee, this time an ex Studio Manager. We'll call this person SM1. Let's read, shall we?

"I learned immediately that I was expected to use shady sales practices at SPS. I really don’t believe that this is coming completely from the corporate level, but more from the Regional Manager. Between the months of July and November 2006, so much emphasis was put on on-site printing that we were instructed to tell our customers that this was their only option.

[Editor's note: On site printing costs an additional 3 dollars per sheet, has worse color quality than lab printing and is on glossy rather than matte paper]

Managers in my district refused to honor coupons, saying that their studio only did on-site printing. If the customer got angry enough, the studio would order them from the lab, but still keep the extra $3 on the sheet price.

We were told not to put out any of the fliers with the current promotional collection (We had to keep the one hanging on the wall up because it was required, but if a customer asked about it, we were to talk down the lab telling them how the pictures took almost a month to come in). Basically, I felt like every day we were asked to lie to the customers about prices and products.

Other questionable initiatives:
-Denying customer use of the $9.99 package
-Only selling certain products in a 20x20 size when the company clearly has the 10x10 size on the website and price list
-Denying the existence of the 5x7 wallet/combo size
-Not letting the customer know about any collection less than $100 (this is back when there WAS a collection under $99.99).

Things improved when the new CEO came on board and we were focusing more on “making the day” [beating last year's sales numbers] and we were instructed to start using the company-created collections rather than the many various manager-created collections that were floating around and serving only to confuse our associates.

Several customer service complaints in our district led to a call from corporate to our entire district about dissatisfaction with on-site printing, and all of a sudden our Regional Manager was saying on-site printing was only meant to be offered as an option to customers, telling us to now do the very thing we had earlier been expressly told not to do."