Many Happy Returns

One of the running jokes in the show was the minor speech impediment of one of the characters (Mickey Manners's Joe Foley, IIRC). One of the store's regulations was that, after every interaction with a customer, the employee was expected to say, "Krocmeyer's appreciates your patronage." Foley always had a particularly difficult time with this sentence.

Another source of comedy was that the return desk was expected to ask the customer why he/she was returning the item, and to try to convince the customer to keep the merchandise anyway. I got the impression that this was actually a major function of the department, to _discourage_ actual returns. Thus I was a little confused when the plot of one episode was that the store considered replacing the returns employees with a computerized system in which customers would simply drop unwanted merchandise in a bin, insert the receipt in a slot, and automatically get their money back (with a recorded "Krocmeyer's appreciates your patronage").