GNC is not a "health food" store. They don't carry more of the grocery products. And you do have the facts, but you have facts you've seen with your eyes and not bothered to ask deeper about, because had you, you could have more facts with which to not necessarily judge every single GNC or GNC employee the same. I'll give you the skinny, because I like you, despite the fact that that comment pissed me off:
Right now there's a war going on between Corporate and Franchise GNC's. Corporate GNC is basically the poster-Company for "evil American Corporation" and have been with their last 3 regimes of management. I work for a Franchise owner who is the idealistic person you want running a GNC. When he instructs us to our strategies, the FIRST thing he mentions is getting people to their goals. The LAST thing he mentions is turning a huge Profit. He knows with good business, and good service, knowledgeable people, the money will come. In-fact, we don't hire people who don't have some kind of substanciated background in Fitness and/or Nutrition unless they seem like they can pick up quickly. Recently we let a guy go after his first-week because after that week, he couldn't tell us what Vitamin A is good for.
Now, as I was saying, there's a bit of a war going on. Corporate GNC wants us to be like Burger King. Every GNC you go into they want us to look EXACTLY the same. However, over-the-years Franchise owners who do good business have made their most money bringing in outside Products that the GNC warehouse doesn't stock. Special Orders from thrid-party companies do us the best business, because we can negotiate profit margins to give the customers the best prices, and still make money. As of this new management, they DO NOT want us doing this anymore. To the point where we have an outside third-party management Company coming in and doing routine checks on our store, taking pictures and making notes and sending them to the Corporate Office, and guess what...if we don't make their criteria, they PULL THE FRANCHISE from the owner. Pretty shitty eh?
Not only that, but you are also right about something else. We are being encouraged to push certain Products because they're on GNC's top 100 sales list (which is a paradox, because these Products MADE the top 100 list by selling the best, and yet we need to be threatened to sell them?). But the threats are not to us, it's to the owner. If we don't sell a certain percentage, guess what...we lose the bonuses we get when the Company puts products on-sale and thus, gives us price-break bonuses on the wholesale cost to keep the integrity of the Profit Margins. See, the shit we carry from GNC's warehouse is NOT free to Franchises, they have to pay GNC for them (we even pay for signs when they want the stores reset, which is fucking ridiculous), and whenever you see 25 and 30 percent off they give us price breaks on the wholesale costs to keep the profit margins (which were already cut almost in-half with this new management) in-tact. What they're saying is that if we don't sell a certain percent of our sales of these Products, then bing, we lose those price-breaks and the entire Profit Margin. The owner of my store said if this happens he might as well sell his store back to the Company (at a loss, which is I think what they want) and get out of business. But he cares about his employess and genuinely cares about the business, so he's fighting. He's also the Chairman of the Board of Franchisees currently, so we as his staff (and many other employess of Franchise stores) are doing our best to stick by our owners and tough it out until something is done perhaps legally.
THOSE are the facts, and still only some of the facts. And I doubt you knew all of that. Just please don't lump "GNC" together, because it's not at-all like that. There's a reason behind the current trend, but regardless, GNC didn't become the biggest-name in Vitamins and Supplements by being shit even if the Corporation is shit now. I had some guy in my store last week yapping to me about how much better Vitamin Shoppe's prices were and all that. I asked him "dude, what would happen if every single GNC in the Country lowered their prices to match Vitamin Shoppe and Nutrition Depot's prices, what would happen to those stores?" Because of the GNC name being so well-known (I mean people who buy shit from Vitamin Shoppe and get sick sometimes sue GNC because they don't differentiate and GNC is just the first store name to come to mind when they try to remember where they bought it, and we have people try to return products they bought from Vitamin Shoppe to our store occasionally), those smaller chains would cease to exist altogether. There is a such thing as healthy competition, which is one of the reasons Corporate GNC doesn't mind being the price-gouging bad guy everyone who surfs the Internet seems to label it as.
But not every GNC doesn't give a shit about people and their Health and goals. If I (as a GNC employee) were like that, I certainly wouldn't be willing to come home from 9 hour days of work and log into this place and give advice over the Internet, let alone mod the forums with subjects I have the SAME damn conversation about 50 times a day at work. lol
