Re: my work rant.
The excuse was that stocking levels were so bad that the time had to be taken before the Memorial sale started to fix things. Though the store manager said all the right non-commital things she’s clearly not happy either (tone of voice, exact word choice, and her own actions tell me ALOT). The Garden-seasonal department’s spring-summer sales carry the store, literally. From the months of April to July our departments sales equal or better the sales of the rest of the store (with the occasional exception of Lumber) for the rest of the year. I know the fuss is always made about Thanksgiving and Christmas, but for big box home improvement stores, at least in this area of the country the really big thing is spring-summer. Having a department manager who cannot keep up has the potential to kill the store.
Mind, its not all her fault or under her control, but she’s not keeping up with basic stuff.
Example: back on 4/20 a $50 trash can went to its final clearance price of $13 before the “throw them out” point. $13. These are nice 13g stainless steel cans. That SHOULD have been the trigger for the department manager to check stock, pull them out to a highly visible spot if they weren’t already (this should have been done at least one markdown prior really, but it should have been checked within the week after 4/20 too) and make them go away before they have to be trashed. If not herself then by handing the info to an associate to do. We as associates can’t see the markdown schedule so it has to be handed to us.
Yesterday, 6/2, an Assistant Store Manager handed me an info tag for these trash cans, informed me that the system says we have 35 of them, and to please pull them, tag them, and make them visible cause we have two weeks before corporate automatically orders them trashed. 35 of them, and we haven’t sold a single one in two months (that I can check). Thats $1750 worth of sales down the drain if they get trashed. Shit happens, the occasional box of clearance merchandise gets missed and ends up trashed. 35 13g trashcans is 3 PALLETS worth of merchandise. Hell, if nothing else, making sure that they were out and tagged during the Memorial day sales madness would have likely fixed the whole problem!
It took me 5 minutes to find them. It took me longer to find an appropriate spot to display them, mostly because of the bulk involved. But not that much. Another half an hour to get them out of the overhead, tagged, and in location.
Maybe an hour of my time total.
While I helped customers and answered phone calls, by myself cause the only other person in the department was Newbie M who I saw all of three times for my entire 4hour shift.
Yeah……
Me thinks that a department manager should be learning from this experience. Otherwise, maybe someone named Ruth may end up with her job.
Someone named Ruth would refuse it, been there done that, I’m perfectly happy NOT doing management again TYVM. But I know which dept head I’d like them to move into the dept!
And yes, thats why I normally try to refrain from TO MUCH criticism of my management. I have a pretty solid idea of what they have to deal with. But in this case she put herself in this position. She actually asked for it because its a required step to promotion in the company.