I'm putting this in 'General' because it covers everything ... management, coworkers, customers ...
1) Disgruntled staff.
At least two people have bailed that I know of with a third planning to leave (that I know of) and who plans to make life as difficult as possible for management until he's gone (I was present when he said this). One staffer, who worked on our website (not sure what she did) apparently left without anywhere to go to, snarling that, as a minimum-wage job, they weren't paying her nearly enough to put up with this crap. Staff members who are still there are VERY unhappy, and some have turned VERY cynical, about the store and how it's run.
We're also having quite the number of NCNS and sick call-outs. At least some of the latter could be legitimate; there's supposed to be a nasty cold making its way around the city.
Store's been open two weeks.
2) Disgruntled customers.
Two customers that I know of have said they'll never be back. One was one of mine; he was very polite to me, but said the 'help' he'd gotten was very poor. Second guy was just a sighting, yelling "I'm going to [Competitor]!!!" as he stormed out the door. No idea as to the story behind that. A third case of an unhappy customer (don't know whether she'll be back or not) was, oddly, a woman whom I spoke to while buying something from HER stall in Large Mall. She'd come in to my store to buy a stepladder and ended up talking to two people from that particular department, both of whom said flatly they knew nothing about stepladders. One tried to plead that they "haven't been trained in that" yet.
One coworker reported having no fewer than three customers scream at her in the space of one shift. Another cashier told her "You don't put up with that. Shut down your machine and call for a head cashier." Problem: the coworker was in the Lumber department when this all went down, which is at the far, FAR end of the store, and where there is often nobody else around. I should add that one customer was screaming because we had sold out of whatever it was he wanted ...
3) Dipshit management.
We appear to be doing the same thing that (I've heard) Walmart does: saturate the store with staff for a few days, or perhaps a week, after which they slash the staff down to the bone, and then some. We had ONE 'loader' on duty during my shift today. Loaders help customers put stuff in their vehicles as needed, and collect shopping carts from the parking lot. Over a three- to four-hour period, this loader had not yet managed to get to the carts, because he was being run ragged from one end of the store to the other (Customer Service, front cash, and Lumber) trying to help people put stuff in their cars.
Oh, and did I mention that he was scheduled to go home at 5 p.m., with the next loader scheduled to come in at ... 5:30 p.m? Meanwhile, there was a woman waiting for help with putting a large countertop into her vehicle ... I called twice for help for her, and left after notifying the upper echelon staffers (Customer Service, where the head cashier and such are usually found) that I didn't think the customer would want to stand there until 5:30 when the next loader came on .... Normally they get somebody from the department itself to help.
The floor overall seemed alarmingly empty of staff, as we cashiers discovered when customers came to US with questions and we tried to find the 'specialists' in various departments who might actually know what they were talking about.
4. General chaos.
My first customer today bought three large-ish items, one of them a light fixture. It came up as $40.
"No," she said. "It's about $35."
I tried a number of things to determine whether it was on sale. This included doing a check on my machine in a secondary program, and calling somebody in the lighting department, who said no, the price was $40. The customer was very polite but also very persistent: no, she said, it was around $35.
We can't leave our registers, so I was running out of options. I finally glommed into another worker who *was* mobile, and asked her if she would go back with the customer and check on the light. Coworker came back with a sticky label that clearly read that the price was ... $35.
So, as a cashier, I can't trust the in-store system, and I can't trust the people in various departments, when it comes to pricing ...
I'm starting to have some sympathy for those people who say "Hahaha, that means it's free, right?"
Also, we're supposed to call the head cashier to do a 'second count' if somebody pays with cash for anything that costs $300 or more. I had three of these today. The first time I called, the head cashier didn't seem to know what I was talking about, although she came over and counted. The third time, she was tied up with something else and never did come over. Eventually I got tired of the $100 bills staring at me everytime the cash drawer opened, so I just shoved them under the cash trays. If my till is off ... oh well. (No, nobody signs anything when we do these second counts, so there's no way of keeping track of whether we actually called anybody ...)
Also, we've been handing out special coupons since the store opened. I've been cheerfully giving them out to anybody who comes through my line, as that's what I was told. Another cashier, puzzled, said she had been told to only give them to people who spent $100 or more ....
5) Not a sucky customer, but I still wanted to bang my head against a wall.
We have a very, VERY old system on our cash registers (can you say DOS? I knew you could.) This, of course, makes many procedures take far longer than they should.
I had two women -- mother and daughter -- come through my line. Each was buying a $600 Christmas tree. Each had a $100 coupon. Mother goes first. We get through the entire checkout process, including the coupon, counting the cash (!!!) and THEN she says, "Oh, I wasn't going to pick it up for a few days, is that okay?"
Not really, ma'am. The sale had gone through with a 'tag' that indicated it was being taken home today, so it was, theoretically, gone from our stock. Now, IF she comes back in three days (or whatever) there's a possibility that we might have run completely out of those trees, having not put one aside for her. You know how we had to change that "tag"? She had to go to Customer Service, they had to refund the sale, and then put her through the whole purchase procedure again. Even though she no longer had the coupon because I had shoved it through the little slot in the drawer after using it ...
Like the woman buying the mispriced light, this customer was very apologetic, and it was NOT her fault that she didn't know she needed to tell me this early on in the checkout process. But again ... why do we make this so very difficult?
The daughter was getting the same tree and we cleared it up VERY early in the process that she too would be coming back later to pick up her tree.
Tell me again how customers are so very important to us.
1) Disgruntled staff.
At least two people have bailed that I know of with a third planning to leave (that I know of) and who plans to make life as difficult as possible for management until he's gone (I was present when he said this). One staffer, who worked on our website (not sure what she did) apparently left without anywhere to go to, snarling that, as a minimum-wage job, they weren't paying her nearly enough to put up with this crap. Staff members who are still there are VERY unhappy, and some have turned VERY cynical, about the store and how it's run.
We're also having quite the number of NCNS and sick call-outs. At least some of the latter could be legitimate; there's supposed to be a nasty cold making its way around the city.
Store's been open two weeks.
2) Disgruntled customers.
Two customers that I know of have said they'll never be back. One was one of mine; he was very polite to me, but said the 'help' he'd gotten was very poor. Second guy was just a sighting, yelling "I'm going to [Competitor]!!!" as he stormed out the door. No idea as to the story behind that. A third case of an unhappy customer (don't know whether she'll be back or not) was, oddly, a woman whom I spoke to while buying something from HER stall in Large Mall. She'd come in to my store to buy a stepladder and ended up talking to two people from that particular department, both of whom said flatly they knew nothing about stepladders. One tried to plead that they "haven't been trained in that" yet.
One coworker reported having no fewer than three customers scream at her in the space of one shift. Another cashier told her "You don't put up with that. Shut down your machine and call for a head cashier." Problem: the coworker was in the Lumber department when this all went down, which is at the far, FAR end of the store, and where there is often nobody else around. I should add that one customer was screaming because we had sold out of whatever it was he wanted ...
3) Dipshit management.
We appear to be doing the same thing that (I've heard) Walmart does: saturate the store with staff for a few days, or perhaps a week, after which they slash the staff down to the bone, and then some. We had ONE 'loader' on duty during my shift today. Loaders help customers put stuff in their vehicles as needed, and collect shopping carts from the parking lot. Over a three- to four-hour period, this loader had not yet managed to get to the carts, because he was being run ragged from one end of the store to the other (Customer Service, front cash, and Lumber) trying to help people put stuff in their cars.
Oh, and did I mention that he was scheduled to go home at 5 p.m., with the next loader scheduled to come in at ... 5:30 p.m? Meanwhile, there was a woman waiting for help with putting a large countertop into her vehicle ... I called twice for help for her, and left after notifying the upper echelon staffers (Customer Service, where the head cashier and such are usually found) that I didn't think the customer would want to stand there until 5:30 when the next loader came on .... Normally they get somebody from the department itself to help.
The floor overall seemed alarmingly empty of staff, as we cashiers discovered when customers came to US with questions and we tried to find the 'specialists' in various departments who might actually know what they were talking about.
4. General chaos.
My first customer today bought three large-ish items, one of them a light fixture. It came up as $40.
"No," she said. "It's about $35."
I tried a number of things to determine whether it was on sale. This included doing a check on my machine in a secondary program, and calling somebody in the lighting department, who said no, the price was $40. The customer was very polite but also very persistent: no, she said, it was around $35.
We can't leave our registers, so I was running out of options. I finally glommed into another worker who *was* mobile, and asked her if she would go back with the customer and check on the light. Coworker came back with a sticky label that clearly read that the price was ... $35.
So, as a cashier, I can't trust the in-store system, and I can't trust the people in various departments, when it comes to pricing ...
I'm starting to have some sympathy for those people who say "Hahaha, that means it's free, right?"
Also, we're supposed to call the head cashier to do a 'second count' if somebody pays with cash for anything that costs $300 or more. I had three of these today. The first time I called, the head cashier didn't seem to know what I was talking about, although she came over and counted. The third time, she was tied up with something else and never did come over. Eventually I got tired of the $100 bills staring at me everytime the cash drawer opened, so I just shoved them under the cash trays. If my till is off ... oh well. (No, nobody signs anything when we do these second counts, so there's no way of keeping track of whether we actually called anybody ...)
Also, we've been handing out special coupons since the store opened. I've been cheerfully giving them out to anybody who comes through my line, as that's what I was told. Another cashier, puzzled, said she had been told to only give them to people who spent $100 or more ....
5) Not a sucky customer, but I still wanted to bang my head against a wall.
We have a very, VERY old system on our cash registers (can you say DOS? I knew you could.) This, of course, makes many procedures take far longer than they should.
I had two women -- mother and daughter -- come through my line. Each was buying a $600 Christmas tree. Each had a $100 coupon. Mother goes first. We get through the entire checkout process, including the coupon, counting the cash (!!!) and THEN she says, "Oh, I wasn't going to pick it up for a few days, is that okay?"
Not really, ma'am. The sale had gone through with a 'tag' that indicated it was being taken home today, so it was, theoretically, gone from our stock. Now, IF she comes back in three days (or whatever) there's a possibility that we might have run completely out of those trees, having not put one aside for her. You know how we had to change that "tag"? She had to go to Customer Service, they had to refund the sale, and then put her through the whole purchase procedure again. Even though she no longer had the coupon because I had shoved it through the little slot in the drawer after using it ...
Like the woman buying the mispriced light, this customer was very apologetic, and it was NOT her fault that she didn't know she needed to tell me this early on in the checkout process. But again ... why do we make this so very difficult?
The daughter was getting the same tree and we cleared it up VERY early in the process that she too would be coming back later to pick up her tree.
Tell me again how customers are so very important to us.
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