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  • Sunday, Sunday, SUNDAY...

    ..or, holy I am gonna really hate game days.

    This past Sunday was opening day for the Patriots.

    The first three morning pickup slots--8, 9, and 10AM--were full (why does the company allow pickups at 8AM if nobody is actually in the store until 6?). The software we use allows us to send delay notifications to customers if an order is not going to be ready right for their time slot, I had to send these notifications for all orders in one slot just to be safe.

    Except...turns out that those notifications never actually made it to the customers. Whether that was a network issue or because most of our customers don't actually use the app until they're near the store, I do not know. And hence my rant in Sucky Manager Thoughts.

    I was handling things, suddenly C decides to chase me down in the aisle while I'm shopping, telling me that one of the customers that a delay was sent to has shown up. I believe he was also trying to page me over the store PA with order numbers...which tells me nothing. I have no clue what he thought he was accomplishing there. I have three orders in the handheld at once, and I literally cannot do anything with any of them until everything has been shopped and staged...when there are multiple orders in one time slot, there is no way to separate them by order. Everything comes down at once, everything must be shopped and staged at once. I have two items left for the customer that's here...he decides to insert himself into the process, and it is then that I realize he really has no fucking idea what he is doing or what I do. Takes him two minutes to grab a bunch of bananas and some pita bread and he almost threw them in the wrong bags.

    I finish the orders I have, and 'stage' them by reprinting the labels (so I can scan the staging locations) while giving him the bags that need to go out. That actually seems like it'll be a useful workaround in the future...

    The next two orders that come in are too large for the handheld in one go, so I give him the produce labels and a handheld and tell him to log in and shop that half. He prints the paper list and decides to use that to shop...I come back from shopping my half and he has left his perishable items in a shopping cart and done bupkis with the labels. Which means I have to waste time that I do not have picking and staging that stuff correctly (we are never supposed to shop by gathering items in advance and scanning all at once--that is seen as cheating the system for keeping pick rates low).

    Somehow I got everything out; I don't know if we had to issue any credits for wait times. I told my supervisor (M) everything when she came in--the failed delay notifications, C running me down in the aisles and making useless pages, how C not only broke the rules for shopping orders but forced me to also do so when I completed the pick that he screwed up. I think M sent a fairly salty email to the district program supervisor about all that.

    I've printed out the football schedule and am going to post it in the online-pickup room now that I sorta know what to expect...might do that for hockey and baseball as well.
    "I am quite confident that I do exist."
    "Excuse me, I'm making perfect sense. You're just not keeping up." The Doctor

  • #2
    why does the company allow pickups at 8AM if nobody is actually in the store until 6?
    Because they still think that "Work smarter, not harder!" is actually a thing that can be done so easily -- then again, they're not the ones who have to do it.
    Last edited by EricKei; 09-20-2021, 01:42 PM. Reason: typo
    "For a musician, the SNES sound engine is like using Crayola Crayons. Nobuo Uematsu used Crayola Crayons to paint the Sistine Chapel." - Jeremy Jahns (re: "Dancing Mad")
    "The difference between an amateur and a master is that the master has failed way more times." - JoCat
    "Thinking is difficult, therefore let the herd pronounce judgment!" ~ Carl Jung
    "There's burning bridges, and then there's the lake just to fill it with gasoline." - Wiccy, reddit
    "Retail is a cruel master, and could very well be the most educational time of many people's lives, in its own twisted way." - me
    "Love keeps her in the air when she oughta fall down...tell you she's hurtin' 'fore she keens...makes her a home." - Capt. Malcolm Reynolds, "Serenity" (2005)
    Acts of Gord – Read it, Learn it, Love it!
    "Our psychic powers only work if the customer has a mind to read." - me

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    • #3
      Quoth EricKei View Post
      Because they still think that "Work smarter, not harder!" is actually a thing that can be done so easily -- then again, they're not the ones whop have to do it.
      Bingo. That's the go-to mantra for those who don't actually have to do the work ... and couldn't do it even if it meant a firing squad instead.

      When we started the personal shopper thing, I was a newbie at the store and put my name in. Didn't get hired on as a personal shopper. Now that I see what they go through, I will flatly refuse any attempts to get me to train as one.
      Customer service: More efficient than a Dementor's kiss
      ~ Mr Hero

      Comment


      • #4
        As always, Dilbert has that answer to Work Smarter, Not Harder.
        "I don't have to be petty. The Universe does that for me."

        Comment


        • #5
          Yeah, the metrics are a bit nuts. I still don't know how the system calculates pick times...the only time I can actually make or beat the expected pick rate is before the store actually opens in the morning (no proto-humans wandering the aisles). M has told me to generally ignore the district coordinator's yelling about metrics and just do my best. I am literally the only person there besides her who can do this with any real competence...but I need an additional backup person. Luckily we got a "new" AM (I worked with him at this store 4 years ago) who has extensive experience with online pickup and knows what we need to make this work.

          I was looking at the customer comments from last week, and a few of them actually did call out the management for not having enough people.
          "I am quite confident that I do exist."
          "Excuse me, I'm making perfect sense. You're just not keeping up." The Doctor

          Comment


          • #6
            I actually was on the other side of this a month or two ago. Ended up idling in the lot with my car A/C on for about an hour in the Southern Summer (tm)(I checked the order/receipts ) -- It turned out that the store had only scheduled ONE person to do the picking at all that day in the just-after-lunchtime slot, so it wasn't the worker's fault. Keep in mind that, for this store (blue logo with a white K), I consider myself lucky if I can get a pickup time 8 hours ahead, so I am fairly certain that they have enough pickup orders that manglement KNOWS they should have more people doing this.
            "For a musician, the SNES sound engine is like using Crayola Crayons. Nobuo Uematsu used Crayola Crayons to paint the Sistine Chapel." - Jeremy Jahns (re: "Dancing Mad")
            "The difference between an amateur and a master is that the master has failed way more times." - JoCat
            "Thinking is difficult, therefore let the herd pronounce judgment!" ~ Carl Jung
            "There's burning bridges, and then there's the lake just to fill it with gasoline." - Wiccy, reddit
            "Retail is a cruel master, and could very well be the most educational time of many people's lives, in its own twisted way." - me
            "Love keeps her in the air when she oughta fall down...tell you she's hurtin' 'fore she keens...makes her a home." - Capt. Malcolm Reynolds, "Serenity" (2005)
            Acts of Gord – Read it, Learn it, Love it!
            "Our psychic powers only work if the customer has a mind to read." - me

            Comment


            • #7
              Oh, that sucks. My company has a target wait time; no longer than two minutes from arrival notification to handoff. That is going to get sorely tested in the winter; that half of the parking lot is in bad shape and will get very slippery. I'm sure manglement knows, they just want to preserve their bonuses by skimping out on worker bees.

              I discovered that the tracking app we use will occasionally send "arrival" notifications even if the customer is nowhere near the store (nothing like a timer running and you have no idea where the customer is...we don't even get car make/model sometimes). It seems that each store has its own way of notifying/communicating with customers; some use texting (don't know why we can't), some have enough staff to have someone constantly watching the cameras/app...and some just don't.
              "I am quite confident that I do exist."
              "Excuse me, I'm making perfect sense. You're just not keeping up." The Doctor

              Comment


              • #8
                best I've ever gotten was about 5-10 minutes; usually closer to 15. On that one particular day, it took over an hour because they hadn't started picking the order yet when I arrived due to being backed up...because, again, the managers didn't schedule enough pickers nor just pull a bagger to help or something like that.
                "For a musician, the SNES sound engine is like using Crayola Crayons. Nobuo Uematsu used Crayola Crayons to paint the Sistine Chapel." - Jeremy Jahns (re: "Dancing Mad")
                "The difference between an amateur and a master is that the master has failed way more times." - JoCat
                "Thinking is difficult, therefore let the herd pronounce judgment!" ~ Carl Jung
                "There's burning bridges, and then there's the lake just to fill it with gasoline." - Wiccy, reddit
                "Retail is a cruel master, and could very well be the most educational time of many people's lives, in its own twisted way." - me
                "Love keeps her in the air when she oughta fall down...tell you she's hurtin' 'fore she keens...makes her a home." - Capt. Malcolm Reynolds, "Serenity" (2005)
                Acts of Gord – Read it, Learn it, Love it!
                "Our psychic powers only work if the customer has a mind to read." - me

                Comment


                • #9
                  I have a double whammy: not only are there not enough people so anyone I've been asked to train can't shop as they're always on a register (we don't even have enough cashiers on a good day), but there are very, very few people that M and I actually trust to not fuck this up. The facilitator must explain/fix any mistakes made by the shoppers...we just do not have the time to clean up messes.

                  C can't understand why I just want to train people to run orders to the cars...but again, I have doubts about some people's abilities to follow directions that simple (take Order 125 to the blue car in parking spot 4).
                  "I am quite confident that I do exist."
                  "Excuse me, I'm making perfect sense. You're just not keeping up." The Doctor

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    Quoth Dreamstalker View Post
                    C can't understand why I just want to train people to run orders to the cars...but again, I have doubts about some people's abilities to follow directions that simple (take Order 125 to the blue car in parking spot 4).
                    But the car in spot 4 is teal, not blue.
                    "I don't have to be petty. The Universe does that for me."

                    Comment


                    • #11
                      The only customer that I can see the moment he enters the lot is in an orange sedan. Anything else...gray/silver look the same, any shades of blue, dark blue/black...and of course we get random dorks parking in the pickup spots.

                      For color (or license plate numbers) to be helpful, we need an ultra-hi-res-4k surveillance camera..we have the crappy grainy dome cameras. It might be okay if the spots were closer to the store (other stores have the spots very close to the doors, ours are about 100 yards away in the far half of the parking lot at the very outer edge of the camera's useful range--and the dome is exposed to dirt, dust, rain, etc so is scratched to hell and blurrier than usual).
                      "I am quite confident that I do exist."
                      "Excuse me, I'm making perfect sense. You're just not keeping up." The Doctor

                      Comment

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