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So as you probably already know, my company is rolling out a "small town"prototype store to little hick burgs too small to support even a Wal-Mart, and one of the first of these new stores is half an hour away from me. So as their "sister store," my store is being made to send a bunch of people up there to get that store set up, stocked, and ready for its grand opening September 10.
The frustration isn't going to come to an end once they've gotten through grand opening. We're going to be helping them out A LOT. Because the stuff I've heard from people at the swamp who worked there is not good.
So they will run into big problems very shortly after grand opening has come and gone, and corporate will probably send people from my store up there to fix them, instead of teaching their people how to do things the right. And their people will never learn how to do things correctly.
All we've been doing is catching fish for them. After we leave after grand opening, they're going to starve, and we're going to be called back up there to catch more fish for them. How in the hell can corporate think this is an effective use of our time and energy?
The frustration isn't going to come to an end once they've gotten through grand opening. We're going to be helping them out A LOT. Because the stuff I've heard from people at the swamp who worked there is not good.
- Nobody up there, from the store manager on down, seems willing to listen to anything we tell them. We had a couple of their people train at our store for a while, and during their training they said and did all the right things. But now that they're in the new store, they won't even acknowledge us, much less listen to anything we say. Then again, you may not be all sunshine and rainbows if you were promised 40 hours a week when you were hired, and weren't getting them, so you're filing for unemployment to make up the difference.
- They don't set planograms correctly. They set them backwards, they put product in the wrong spots, they don't measure and set the shelves at the heights called for in the planograms, they don't slope shelves as called for in the planograms, they don't install fencing on the shelves as called for in the planograms. All we've been doing is fixing what they fuck up.
- Their backroom is evidently an epic disaster. For example, one of our people had an alarm clock to backstock one day. The alarm clock was located in three different places. One of them was the normal place for electronics backstock downstairs. Another location was upstairs. The third location was also upstairs, on the opposite end of the backroom.
- The guy setting up their backroom is another one of those you cannot talk to. We tried to get him into our habit of taking stuff out of boxes whenever possible, and placing products on the shelves with their UPCs facing out. That way, when you go to pull something, you just scan UPCs until you find the correct item. Their backroom guy will not do this. He told our people "Why bother? You have to pick the box up off the shelf anyway. It's not that much more work." Suffice to say, if I was working up there with him, I'd be at his throat.
- In their backroom, they are apparently backstocking grocery items with pet supplies and cleaning products.
Nothing is kept together. Everything is just tossed in the first available spot. - They can't do outs scans correctly. Instead of printing off an out-of-stock report and searching for items that appear on the report with quantities on hand, they just scan a label for a backstock location, and slap an out-of-stock tag up over the label if the product has no backstock location. They won't look for it on the floor, even though, as I mentioned before, they're not stocking things in the correct spots.
- Because they're fucking up their outs scans, they're running out of product (the store is open and doing business right now). So, to fill their shelves, corporate sent us down a list of 50-some SKUs they need, and the receiving clerk had to go around the salesfloor and the backroom, finding these items, pulling the quantities called for on the list, packing them up, and making up transfer lists. She had to do all this instead of helping us with the truck. At least we weren't the flagship store, which was told to pull200-some SKUs to send into this store.
So they will run into big problems very shortly after grand opening has come and gone, and corporate will probably send people from my store up there to fix them, instead of teaching their people how to do things the right. And their people will never learn how to do things correctly.
All we've been doing is catching fish for them. After we leave after grand opening, they're going to starve, and we're going to be called back up there to catch more fish for them. How in the hell can corporate think this is an effective use of our time and energy?
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