Tag: Identifiers

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The Way Cool License Plate Book

Everywhere you go you see vanity plates. The best of them are those that make you think and then reward you with a good laugh. Now there is a book that captures all the fun and excitement of vanity plates from across North America.

Inside The Way Cool License Plate Book you’ll find plates that show how their owners feel about the cars they drive (or wish they drove!), the work they do, the sports they play and the dreams they have.

This book is the perfect companion for any vacation or road trip. Parents will be happy knowing that the games in this book strengthen math and reading skills as well as provide hours of fun. Kids will enjoy spotting plates from across the country and reading the hundreds of vanity plates inside. Categories of vanity plates include:

  • Cars
  • The work we do
  • Sports
  • Animals
  • Places
  • Music
  • PL8 fun

and there are 8 pages of games for car trips.

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Something Is SKUwey Here


I found this some time ago in a sporting goods store. I wonder why the programmer made the tag printing machine print an error message on the tag itself. Probably to preserve the order of tags which are probably batched in relation to pallets of items.

A few days ago I was talking to a Radio Shack employee. It turns out they can print out a manual for most things they sell by just punching in it’s SKU number into a computer. I asked her if she knew what SKU (pronounced “skyoo”) stood for. She didn’t know. Can’t blame her -it took me a few months of writing an e-commerce application and hearing the word daily to inquire about it’s meaning. SKU is an abbreviation for Stock Keeping Unit.

By the way, in Radio Shack I was looking for a cheap lcd tv that I could use to hook up to the camera that is trained at entrance of my apartment building (it is hooked up to a coax cable that runs through the building). They had a tiny one for about $200, but I’d like a slightly bigger and cheaper one. B&W is ok. Any suggestions? I also need to find an affordable lcd tv for the bathroom. Come on, it’s the future now. We’ve been promised tv monitors and cameras everywhere. I am not asking for usable video phones, flying cars and robots bigger than a vacuum cleaner.

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I See a Gondola. Impulse Speed, Engsin. We Are Off to the Races!

News in photography from : How to take “Panasonic” pictures.

From The drama with tandems, gondolas and POGs in Sears.

Now, store display, design and marketing always fascinated me. So I did a bit of digging around:

Apparently this is a gondola (the long shelves) with end caps :
(from http://www.leggettsfg.com/)

Tandems seem to be Sears specific type of shelving. I wonder, who invented gondola shelves and why made that person name them so.

I found Glossary of Aftermarket Terms and dug this stuff up:

SKU: Stock Keeping Unit. Refers to each single item carried by a retailer. Every color, style and item having its own vendor or vendee number has its own SKU.
Keystone: A markup of 100% or more.
Loss Leader: A high-demand product such as motor oil or spark plugs, sold at cost or below to draw customers into a store.
Velocity Price: Pricing system based on relative movement within a product line (usually discounting faster moving items more deeply than slower movers).
Ad Slicks: Black and white reproducible artwork used for packaging and advertising.

When I was working on online stores, I once asked in a meeting what SKU stood for. Interestingly enough nobody knew the correct answer. I looked it up on the Net later.

You know those strings of items that festoon the shelves that we now know are called gondolas?
(image from http://www.hubert.com)

Apparently those are called “impulse strips”. When will they come up with warp strips?

Now, this is an interesting name for a suprmarket layout:
(taken from http://www.discountshelving.com)
(Illustration 1) Racetrack Layout
Racetrack Layout consists of a main aisle that will lead customers from the front area, around the whole store, and leads them at the check out counter. It is designed for two-way traffic that directs customers to what they are looking for.