n Work hard. Your first priority should be to do best you can to meet goals and those of organisation you work for. Office politics, co-workers mood swings and petty arguments will usually take care of themselves, if you overlook them.

n Keep your word. Don't make commitments you can't keep. Consider verbal promises as contracts and write them down to ensure they're fulfilled.

While sometimes it may seem that bending truth, playing office politics and undercutting others will help you get ahead, you're much better off conducting yourself with honesty and integrity. Not only will you build a firm foundation for success, you'll also find it easier to live with yourself during day and to sleep well at night.

If that’s case, then try your promotion on next tier of customers – people who may bring you only pants and skirts, but who take their shirts to 99 cent place around corner. Offer a volume discount to this group of customers and see if they will increase their volume to get discount. Talk to them and find out what’s important to them as you hand them a coupon for next order.

If you run this experiment for a month or two, you’ll begin to really see effect (positive or negative) on your bottom line. At same time, only money you’ll spend on this effort is printing up some coupons to hand to customers. If this really works, then you might consider increasing your investment in this idea and advertising it through newspapers or coupon services.

Test marketing is a great way to test out all of your ideas on cheap and limiting any possible negative effects. Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club, once said that if you keep your expenses down you can afford to make a lot of mistakes and still recover. That’s very essence of test marketing! Good luck and have fun!