Please burn something in effigy for me

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Tomorrow is the start of our ginormous Lowest Prices of the Season Sale. I can see the suck coming from a mile away.

I am working 11:30 to 8 and my job will be downloading and filling pulls all day so we can keep up with sales. This means I will spend most of the day doing furniture carryouts instead when Numbnuts/CBFH embarks on one of his many Journeys of Discovery in which he attempts to ascertain whether boogers really do taste like Big Macs. Furniture is marked down a ton so we expect a lot of carryouts tomorrow and I have to do as many pulls as possible so they aren't as big Saturday morning because...

To top it off, corporate decided we are evidently life-threateningly low on sale items (which explains why the backroom is already jam-packed full of stuff ), so they added a truck for tomorrow night, forcing our manager to slap together a crew of people to fill and backstock all the freight. When we left today it was sounding like we were going to be a person short and have to rely on a couple of people who've never done truck before. So any stories about the snausages of both the customer and co-worker types will have to wait until at least early Saturday morning before I head off to work.

[Kyree]

*Big Hugs* Good luck, Irv! Make it back to us one piece.

[Becks]

Here's hoping you retain what's left of your sanity.

[Evil Queen]

Bye Irv! We'll miss you!

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Awful. Just awful.

Came in at 11:30 yesterday and the manager on duty told me how things were going to work: The entire store would be requested every hour. My job is to pull and fill all the merchandise requests. If I get behind, I can ask people to help me out by pulling or filling. If we get swamped with carryouts, I have to help with them. The goal is to have the end-of-day pulls be as small as possible so the autopull person isn't spending her entire day working on pulls and can help us with the truck.

Took about an hour for that to get shot to hell. The pulls were coming in faster than I could pull and fill them, and carryouts were virtually non-stop all day. And people weren't just buying one thing either. They were buying entire bedroom sets, entire patio sets, big screen TVs, and so forth.

Not to mention I also had to spend a lot of time answering outside calls because corporate, in their never-ending quest to max out their bonuses, allocated payroll like it was just going to be a normal day. Meaning only two people to cover hardlines, and one of them was on a register almost all day backup cashiering. There were also corporate bigwigs in the store, so we had to make sure to call for backup cashiers anytime the lines got too long; otherwise they're demanding to know why we're not doing this because "the customer's time is important."

Aside: As a very wise man once pointed out in web comic form, the customer's time really is not that important; otherwise they wouldn't find so many different ways to waste it other than making that purchase it's so important to make quickly. And if it really was important to corporate, they'd at least give us the payroll to have all the checkouts open and manned

Anyhow, back to yesterday: The pulls got so bad I had to tell my manager to stop downloading every hour, so that we could at least get some filling done. It doesn't pay to pull if the merchandise isn't going to get filled.

So this morning, while the end-of-day pulls may be smaller, there's most likely going to be lots of stuff from yesterday sitting in the backroom needing to be filled. Nobody could get to it because they were so busy with carryouts and customer service.

I will be surprised if we get the truck done. The DC saved the biggest truck for the day we would be most shorthanded.

[Evil Queen]

Wow, what a sucktacular day.

[Igorina]

IPF,

Here, have some rum balls. I also have cookies.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Today was just as nutso, but I was doing truck I didn't have to deal with most of it (We're not expected to help with carryouts or outside calls or special projects or anything like that when we're working on the truck; our main priority is the truck)

And we did finish it, by pulling a few people to help us out.

At 12 noon I checked the autopulls and there were 252 skus (different items) needing to be pulled, and as far as I knew nobody was assigned to do them.

There was also the little issue of a piece of furniture we needed for a customer but couldn't find (see thread titled "I pwned the store manager" to find out what happened there).

Finally, I get to take tomorrow off. Woot.