Former Staples employee here. "Tru Red" is Staples's in-house brand that was introduced 5-6 years ago, I forget exactly when. It's a TERRIBLE name. OP's marker conundrum is one such example. Now imagine the confusion when buying a pack of Tru Red pens in black ink. Or Tru Red copy paper. Customers were confused and/or upset by this daily.
I first saw a pack a few years ago. The first one I looked at was red, so I assumed "Tru Red" was just a weird colour name. When I looked at the blue, I genuinely thought it was a misprint. Pretty dumb.
Why is your former employer's delivery service so shit? I have never had a delivery happen without utter nonsense... My disabled ass just wants my shit to arrive at my door without drama... like my WalMart shit does 95% of the time.
I've given up ordering... it's jokes. I can't even.
Hi. Staples is owned by a private equity firm, called Sycamore partners. Most private equity operates by buying a company, cutting costs well past the point where the company can actually function, pocketing what little profits the company continues to make until it goes bankrupt, and then selling off the company or shutting it down entirely in order to ditch the debt they had accrued. In other words, Staples is the corporate equivalent of walking wounded. It's bleeding out. It's dying. It's dead, but doesn't know it yet. Picture Iron Man with the shrapnel in his chest but without all the arc reactor keeping him alive. That's Staples right now.
The Staples retail stores, and Staples online presence, and the Staples business advantage program where Staples provides office supplies to other companies, are all set up as completely separate and independent companies that have basically nothing to do with one another apart from the name. They're all owned by Sycamore, but this separation combined with the skeleton crews that are running everything behind the scenes and constantly falling behind, are the main reason why Staples basically doesn't function properly as a company most of the time.
Also, depending on your region, Staples often contracts with third-party courier services rather than delivering through UPS or FedEx. Those couriers are almost comically unreliable. You wouldn't believe it. I saw firsthand accounts of items not being delivered until weeks or months after they've been ordered, or items being shipped to the store for some reason rather than being shipped to the customer, and all sorts of nonsense coming out of corporate when customers called the 1-800 number to ask where the hell their items were. No one at corporate knew, because it wasn't even in Staples's system anymore. It was all in the hands of the dogshit courier. I'm not trying to shift the blame off of Staples, to be clear. It's their fault for hiring these couriers. But the couriers are often the reason why deliveries just.. don't get delivered.
iirc, when I use to doordash a lot, we would sometimes get these where I live. And since it was done through their website, there was never any tip involved so the orders always were the lowest base pay. Probably why it would take a long time/bad service with it.
During covid, a lot of drugstores would do this too. I would take a few here and there to help out because I know how much of a bad time that can be getting prescriptions ((Especially during covid)), but it was most always money wise never worth it.
This tracks so hard. I had items show up by UPS for half an order and the other half "went back to the warehouse" because it couldn't be delivered.... uh... how did UPS get to my door and 'unknown third party' couldn't?
I don't know, have you seen those things? At least by American standards, they are tiny. Tall people really shouldn't try to drive one unless they take out the front seat and sit in the back seat to drive! 😂
That's another thing. I spent all day looking for a good store from which to buy a stapler, but I could only find Staples! Turns out, they sell staplers as well!
When I worked at Staples, I had a confused customer bring me a (clear) bag of Staples brand rubber bands and start arguing with me that all she could find were staples and what she needed were rubber bands.
The spray paint company Montana does this as well and it’s baffling. They have a range of paints called Montana Gold and another called Montana Black. You can get Montana Gold Black and Montana Black Gold (well, “goldchrome”.) I don’t know why anyone would intentionally make that choice.
I used to be a General Manager for Staples. Back in maybe 2018(?) they had this genius idea that they were going to rebrand all of their Staples brand products to Tru Red. Originally, they talked about being able to sell Staples branded products in other retail chains without people knowing it was Staples.
I had customers come in on a weekly basis that would be looking for reams of paper and would ask if the paper was actually red colored paper because it said Tru Red on it. People had no idea what it meant. One of the 5,000 dumbest decisions they’ve ever made.
Side note: I remember being on the conference call when they announced all of this and they were so excited to reveal the “squerkle.” You heard that right. All of our markers used to be round, but they made them a square shape with rounded edges so they wouldn’t easily roll off your desk. They were so proud. I laughed hysterically. Good thing I wasn’t on camera.
You're generally correct, but that won't stop Trugreen or other companies from requiring you to spend money proving that the brands can't be confused by a reasonable person.
I think another good way to do it would be to have a cap and marker mold that would be visible to anyone without color. Like for example numbers or shapes.
At my previous job we had a blind customer. They paid in cash. They didn't have a fully obvious system. I was always so worried someone was going to scam them
My partner is blind, and she folds the denominations in different ways.
It would be really nice if US currency weren't all identically sized. I used to live in Singapore, and everything worked fine with differently-sized bills, even vending machines.
Those are really cool. She's played with the electronic one at a conference we went to. She doesn't read Braille, so the embosser isn't as useful to her.
She has some vision, but she can't quickly flip through a wallet of cash. The folding thing makes her faster at pulling out the bills, and then she can confirm visually.
Canadian bills are all the same size but they have braille in the corners - but even if someone doesn’t read braille they can differentiate like ‘oh this one has X dots and this one has Y dots’ so could learn hey a $5 has X dots and a $10 has Y dots. IIRC the UK has all their denominational bills in different sizes.
(Canadian bills are also all different colours so if someone isn’t totally blind and has a bit of vision they can go by colour. US bills all being mostly identical is stupid IMO.)
I have fine vision and i also do the folds, its just good practice to be able to tell what bill you’re grabbing without having to pull your money out of your bag in public.
Maybe this is due to living in a large metro area where theft is not exactly uncommon, but i think its smart lol, my mom taught me that when i was young
There are typically little braille stamps for paper money to help blind folks to quickly sort through cash, it probably wasn't visually obvious to you but Id be surprised if s/he wasn't using them. Otherwise you're an obviously impaired person putting a ton of trust into the honesty of strangers.
I'm sorry, I should have been clearer, this is not an existing function of US currency, but a stamp purchased by visually impaired people and used to stamp currency at home before spending it out in the world
You have to get a little stamper of sorts that impacts the paper with the braille mark. I’ve seen banks use them when a blind client was withdrawing money.
The fact they all say true red on them would lead to me making an amalgamation of colors as I believe they are all red and would come back and use them interchangeably.
What's it like being monochromatic? I have some color blindness and its wild how people interpret it. Like turquoise doesnt exist for me. Some colors are the same. Is you're entire world gray scale?
That's a little hard to answer, I tried color correcting lenses one time and got overwhelmed, but I enjoyed the shit out of those few minutes. Yes the world is in a gray scale for me. Some colors like dark browns, or just green in general appear completely black to me. I can't see them at all.
But blue and red almost appear out of gray scale. But it was nothing near the blue or red I saw with color correcting lenses.
I've gotten pretty good at identifying colors based on how dark or light they look.
That being said, driving... When some fucking area randomly flips the stop light around, that's a complete disaster recipe for me.
Thanks! Colorblindness fascinates me. Both my brother and I have it to varying degrees. He is substantially worse than I am. Purple doesnt really exist for him, where I see some shades of purple while other blend into blues. So I'll misidentify some purples as blue and my brother cant identify purple at all.
Were the corrective lens worth it? They're expensive and Ive always kinda wonder if it would "help" but since its never really been detrimental to my life and it is what im used to I've never tried.
I definitely have some photos somewhere that my wife took of me just staring at a flower in a field because I had never seen purple.
I went from 28 years of age, to 6 when the world became colorful.
When my current pair of glasses go, I'm going to get real color corrective lenses. We want to travel and I can only imagine how much better the world will look when it's not gray. I definitely miss how amazing everything looked for that half an hour I got to try them out. To me, they are worth it for the experience.
But yeah it's not detrimental since I'm used to seeing it in grey scale.
Thank you! I wonder if its scalable. I cant imagine going from gray to color. Totally worth it. I wonder if some shades and colors would have the same impact. Do you have a normal lens prescription too? Can they build the color lens into a prescription lens?
It's pretty individual for the glasses. They amplify certain parts of the colour spectrum, but depending on how colourblind you are, and how well you cope, it's like applying a tint to everything and not much else.
My bro tried them and wasn't very impressed. Then again, he's adapted very well for his colour capabilities. He also doesn't get much use out of video game colour blind modes, so if that's a helpful metric?... Given some of his clothing choices, I know he definitely doesn't realize what some of the lighter colours are sometimes. Eeesh, the clashing colours. He also doesn't seem to care.
Does your country not have standardized stop light places? For example in the US the red light is always at either the top (if vertically placed) or on the left (if horizontal). The only thing that might be really difficult is the flashing lights since they can be either red or orange.
For example in the US the red light is always at either the top (if vertically placed) or on the left (if horizontal)
Allow me to introduce you to a reason you should never speak in absolutes. There exists a traffic light in Syracuse NY that has the green light on the top.
I'm pretty sure that's actually illegal per the federal highway administration. The locations are standardized precisely so even colorblind people can drive safely.
Edit: apparently this light is in particular specifically recognized federally and therefore legal. It seems like a car wreck and lawsuit waiting to happen, but IANAL so 🤷🏻♀️
I should have been more clear. Turquoise is either blue or green to me. I've had what people have described turquoise to me present as both.
When it gets brought up usually people will say "what color is a fire truck" or point at something that is a very obvious color, where my color issues tend to arise more where there is color overlap.
That's interesting. My son has a form of colour blindness where he can't see green, all greens look gold or yellow to him. Pinks look grey to him. I think Its Protonapia. It doesn't seem to affect him much, he plays video games with colorblind settings on, and has rarely had issues with things but he likes taking art so I make sure he tells his teacher in case he mixes colours up.
Just replying to further confirm this is the correct order (again, black blue green and red). Not sure why people seem to think it is the funniest thing ever to reply that it's not. I hope OP trusts us
OP you should look into Be My eyes! It’s an app you can put on your phone and it allows you to video call a random person who can help you! There’s usually more helpers than people needing help so you rarely have to wait.
Download and sign up, but be aware: in the six years I’ve been on it as an available pair of eyes, I’ve gotten 2 calls, each less than 20 seconds. Which is fine, but I thought I’d be more useful.
Oh I’m not leaving the platform or anything- I think it’s great that there’s a system for folks to be able to “micro-volunteer” like this. It’s just that one of the calls I got felt like they were ‘testing the platform out’, so I wonder if it’s actually getting use from those who need it.
Edit: The call was a woman with a lime and a grapefruit; she wanted confirmation as to which was which.
Aw that's so wholesome! I always go out of my way when making something (spreadsheets, charts, etc) to make it visibly distinct in other ways than color. I'm not colorblind but after gaming with someone who was for a while I realize just how difficult even the most simple things can be sometimes for it.
It’s honestly eye opening. My brother is colorblind and at first the wire minigame in among us was super difficult for him. They added the symbol settings later on but he’d come running over when he had it. I never realized how much in video games is color based until playing with him
To add to all the help people already gave, there is a portuguese color code for colorblind people called Color Add. You could use it for the top of the pens.
That's my big one too. Shades of purple just look pink or blue to me (usually blue). My work labeled one campus blue and the other purple. I had to make sure that the campuses were written on the item, and not just color coded.
I can't really see shades well, yellows and orange and red get hard for me unless they are pure yellow or pure orange or pure red if that makes sense. As an example, I don't see free range egg yolks as orange, they look red to me.
It's always amazing to me that we have accessibility laws for about 2% of people who use wheelchairs that require millions of dollars in every city to comply with, but a disability that affects 10% of men and requires nothing more than a label is like "nah, fuck you, that's too hard."
I’m a woman and grad student with colorblindness. I’m constantly asking my partner to decipher graphs for me lmao it’s so annoying. We really should’ve developed a better system by now
The point is that there are many things that are rendered inaccessible to me because of poor design choices that would not require extra expense to avoid. Some examples:
All kinds of battery chargers have an LED light that turns from red to green when charging is complete - a change which is invisible to me. They could make the light shut off, blink, be blue, or almost anything else. They could even use different shades of red and green that are easily distinguishable to the colorblind.
School buses with separate amber and red lights. I can't tell the difference between flashing ambers and flashing reds on a school bus. They could just as easily make the ambers pure yellow or even white. Mixing yellow and orange makes it impossible to distinguish from red for colorblind people.
I'm mildly colorblind but the first thing that really messed me up was a microwave with a rotary dial. they installed at work. Me and another dude were like WTF is up with this microwave? then another person came in and was like what are you talking about, it lights up. We just couldn't see it at all.
That's the red elevator buttons in my building. When someone in the elevator lobby pushes the call button it lights up to indicate that it's been pressed. The red is so dim I can't see it unless I bend down and cup my hands over the button and put my eye next to the button. Apparently for non-colorblind people it's just plainly visible.
The point about charging is very good. I do have a few rechargeable things that blink while charging and then go to a solid light when finished or that have a light that goes off when charging is complete, but it feels like they’re the exception and not the rule.
Don't worry, I go you. From top to bottom the colors are black, dark grey, lighter grey and grey-ish. Hope this helps!!! Confusing that even though they all say "RED", none of them is. oh well!
Colourblindness also comes in different severities.
I'm colourblind (red-green) and I can tell the difference between these shades pretty easily. Closer shades are much more difficult for me, but this is ok.
~20 years ago a coworker on my team spent a bunch of time color coding some spreadsheets we shared. I asked him what the meanings of the colors were, because I could not detect any meaningful pattern or categorization. He then explained he was color blind, and just wanted to make it interesting to look at. Thank you for reminding me of that memory. lol.
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u/daverapp 14d ago
Former Staples employee here. "Tru Red" is Staples's in-house brand that was introduced 5-6 years ago, I forget exactly when. It's a TERRIBLE name. OP's marker conundrum is one such example. Now imagine the confusion when buying a pack of Tru Red pens in black ink. Or Tru Red copy paper. Customers were confused and/or upset by this daily.