Welcome To The Warehouse... Hope You Survive!

Since my last post, I’ve been relocated into our store’s warehouse and I must say that it is FANTASTIC!  I don’t know why I never tried to apply for a spot there sooner.  I have seen the light and it is warehouse, ladies and gentlemen!

It all began when I went into work one day to work in my old department but before I could even punch in to start, I was pulled aside by one of my store’s managers.  He asked if I had picked a department to switch into and after telling him I preferred the warehouse, that department’s supervisor approached me and told me to ignore the following week’s schedule that was already made.  I was quite surprised since this was on a Thursday and the new schedule was to start on Sunday.  Not a whole lot of time to get myself into the mindset that this was the end.  My coworker, Victor, who had been working with me for years in that same department and who had also gotten the assistant supervisor spot, was standing next to me at the time and we both were left somewhat speechless.  We figured we had at least another week to work together.

My new supervisor came back and handed me a new schedule and ran down a list of things I was going to be doing the first week.  It was all becoming real, really quickly.  That Thursday was also the last day Victor and I were going to work together in the same department.  At the end of his shift we said some rushed ‘good luck’s and that was that.  An end of an era in our department.  It was odd.  I’ll still see Victor around the store since he was relocated to a different department, too, but it won’t be the same.

Then, on my last day in my department, I was hit with nearly every possible issue and every possible grumpy customer.  Do you ever have one of those days?  It’s like everyone just waits for that one particular day to bitch and moan.  It’s amazing.  You can go days without running into problems and then BAM – it hits you all at once.  The day when the world says, “Sucks to be you,” and laughs.  When I came in to work that day I had been a bit bummed out that I was going to be leaving for the warehouse but by the end of my shift, I couldn’t have been happier.  I was reminded about all the perks that went along with getting off the sale’s floor, which is, mainly dealing with assholes.

I was a bit disappointed, however, that my last day wasn’t greeted with a bit more fanfare from my coworkers.  I have to admit, I figured that since I had been in the same department for several years and had outlasted most of our employees and managers I would’ve had a free lunch or something.  Not that I deserve one because I’m awesome or anything, but my work rewards people for just showing up and doing their job.  Oh well.

Then Sunday rolls around and it’s my first day in the warehouse.  And holy shit is it a sweet gig.  Granted, nothing in retail is rocket science but warehouse is so laidback and fun thanks to the relative freedom you have back there.  There are no customers to really deal with and most management won’t bother me unless they need something done around the store, so right off the bat it already rocks.  Plus, I was out early that first shift and had the rest of the day to enjoy while most of my coworkers were just showing up.

Since there are more people working in warehouse than my old department, a lot of the work was also divided up a lot more than it would’ve been.  I’m also enjoying the fact that I can now give the salespeople shit just because I can.

For example, if somebody comes into the warehouse for no apparent reason, I now typically say something like, “Hey, who said you could come into my warehouse?”  To which a warehouse associate would normally go, “YOU’RE warehouse?  You’ve been here for less than a week!”

Apparently, being a dick suits me.

I also don’t go into work dreading what possible issues I might have to face.  That was always the worst.  The work isn’t hard but when you have people who complicate it with issues and complaints for no real reason, it’s the pits.  There’s nothing like that – so far – in the warehouse.

Now, I’m sure that the warehouse will have its drawbacks.  It’s retail.  However, all I’m going to do is remind myself of that very last day in my old department and all of the bullshit I had to deal with and I’ll know that I’ll have it so much easier than I ever had.

I’ll go into the changes in-depth in a later entry.  I just thought I’d update on the change and my initial reactions.

More soon from the frontlines...

“If You Could Reapply For A Second Time For The Same Position… That’d Be Grrrreat.”

I know!  Another gap in posting.  But I am back… again!

The past few weeks have been quite the interesting experience at my job.  I’ll have to break this down into two posts perhaps but I’ll just write about what’s affecting me directly in this entry.

It actually began several months ago.  My company has decided to change the layout of my department and because of that, I had to reapply for the same exact position I’ve been in for the previous few years.  Nothing was changing about the position but because they were redoing the structure of that aspect of the business, I had to prove my worthiness to stay on (I guess).  That was kind of insulting, in my opinion, but whatever.  My supervisor was a good guy and his manager had known me for most of my career there so it wasn’t as if I was overly worried about getting hired.

I go for the interview and a short while later, the manager – let’s call this person Lester – contacted me to tell me that I would be staying on in the department but since the reorganization was taking place, there was only one full-time position available.  Doesn’t sound too bad but there were two full-timers vying for the position – a coworker and myself.  We had been under the impression that there were two full-time positions but it turns out we were wrong.  Long story short, my coworker took an assistant supervisor position that was available in the reorganized department and I took the full-time spot.  That was last August.

My supervisor, meanwhile, was told he wouldn’t be staying on when they redid the department and so we got a new supervisor around September of 2013.  Besides the changing of the supervisors, however, nothing changed.  My coworker who got the promotion experienced no change in duties and pay (as far as I know).  It was basically all paperwork.

Fast-forward to around January and we were told that we would have to re-apply AGAIN for our spots.  Our department would be finally making the real reorganized structure they had been laying out since last fall: now there would be different pay structures, different bonuses, different uniforms, etc., etc.  Now our interviews would be with our new supervisor (who we had only known for a few months and who came in with his own way of doing things).  There was nothing wrong with the new supervisor but he had more of a used car salesman mentality and that was different from how we had been trained to interact with our customers, which seemed to be good enough for our department to hit our revenue goals for most of my time in the store.

Our newest part-timer was determined to stay on in the department and began memorizing everything he/she could.  In just a few short weeks, he/she had absorbed as much product knowledge as he/she could.  It was quite impressive and he/she blew me away.  I, however, had more of a blasé attitude about the whole thing.  I had been there for years and if I got the spot, great.  If I didn’t, whatever.  I kind of was looking for an excuse to do something else, I guess.

I mean, I knew my products and I knew how to talk to customers and I knew how to fix most of my own issues.  In my time at this job, I even had managers who didn’t want to deal with my department’s customer issues come to me to resolve problems.  I wasn’t the best but I seemed to be fairly relied upon and looked upon favorably by most of my store’s managers through the years.  So, I was probably the most relaxed person going into these new interviews out of everyone.

(I should point out that I did need a job but I wouldn’t have been devastated if I didn’t get hired on.)

The new interviews were quickly approaching.  Things were getting serious now.  However, even before we were supposed to interview with our supervisor, my newest part-timer was told that he/she was going to have a second interview at another store with other department managers and corporate managers.  He/she was the only one who was told about such a meeting.  The other full-timer and myself were not.  When we went in for our first interview nothing was mentioned about a second interview.  Other than that, my interview went swimmingly.

A week passed with no word on if I got the spot.  I was leaving on a vacation the following week and just before I left the part-timer told me that he/she got a spot on the new team (which was awesome for him/her.  I was totally excited for him/her because he/she deserved it.).  Yet, no word still about my situation, but I wasn’t completely stupid.  I knew as soon as the part-timer got their second interview BEFORE even having their first and the rest of us didn’t receive the same that we didn’t get on the new team.

I wasn’t upset about the situation but I felt more insulted than anything.  For one thing, my supervisor knew I was going on vacation but I still hadn’t heard any word about the application.  Then you schedule a secondary interview with our coworker before their first interview and you don’t think it’d look suspicious to the rest of us?  Plus, like I said, we were doing pretty good as a team month after month.  We were part of the reason the company felt they should reorganize the department structure thanks to how good we were doing.  So we’re good enough to warrant a restructure but not good enough to stay on?

I go on vacation and while I’m on vacation, I hear that the part-timer was the only one who got hired on to stay in the department.  Not that anyone knew if I got a spot but I was 99% sure I hadn’t.  I came back from vacation and even though I had been back for three days and the first day of training for the part-timer was the following day, I still hadn’t heard anything from my supervisor.

Finally, I had to TEXT my supervisor to find out.  He told me to call him and over the phone he told me that there was a lot of talented competition and that I wouldn’t be staying on in the department.  I guess I handled it better than most since, like I’ve said again and again, I knew this was happening for weeks by this point and I’m not stupid.  I had been thinking about what I wanted to say to my supervisor but when the time came to actually receive the news, I thought, “What’s the point?”  The decision had been made and my coworker who hadn’t received a spot had been sticking it to the supervisor enough for the both of us.  It was best to just move on.  And that was that.  It was pretty disappointing that my supervisor couldn’t have the spine to tell me to my face if I got the spot or not but HEY, that’s the kind of new management my company wanted for the reorganization.  Hope that works out for them (since that probably didn’t come across in text – that was supposed to be sarcasm).

Since then I’ve actually never been happier going into work.  There’s a great freedom in knowing I won’t have to deal with the same issues and the same people and the same questions day after day.  I can handle the grumpy customers better and I just go in and do what I can but I don’t stress about stupid bullshit any more.  I do have options other than termination but I’ll get into that in another entry.  I’ll also get more into how I’m feeling as my time in the department is coming to a close in another entry.  I’ll also talk about the fallout from the shake-up in another entry.  This has been long enough.  Suffice it to say, the bumbling rollout of this transition – from last fall to now – is pretty typical of my company’s rollouts.  They seem incapable of doing anything coherently.  It’s truly an amazing feat for such a large company.

More soon from the frontlines...

The Sound Of Silence

Look at me!  I’m posting on a fairly regular basis!  Onto the entry…
First off, only my humblest respect is meant to Simon & Garfunkel for the title of this entry.  However, it is quite fitting.
The latest installment features another customer interaction that I learned about during my stint in appliances the other day.  This was just too good to pass up.  Do you want to feel better about your life?  Well, then read on!
A customer had recently purchased a refrigerator from our store.  This refrigerator was a floor display that was sold to him at some dirt-cheap price – nearly a thousand dollars off of the original price.  The customer called the department later that day saying he wanted to cancel the refrigerator because he was reading reviews that it was a bit loud.
Okay, I get that.  If you live in a small home and noise is an issue, you don’t want it sounding like a freight train coming through, right?  But there are a few directions you can go with this scenario.
1.  There is a high chance that it was plugged in when he purchased it.  It was a demo unit.  Did he hear noise in the store?
2.  Why cancel it before you even got it into the home?  If you saved over a thousand dollars for a great refrigerator, wouldn’t you want to try to at least see if it sounds fine?  Even if it is loud, you can still either return the item with no restocking fee or you could ask yourself, “Is this noise not worth the hundreds of dollars I saved?”
Whoever took the call was able to talk the guy out of it (mainly because they told the guy that they’d be able to sell a great fridge at dirt-cheap to a less picky customer on that same day.) but that wasn’t the end of it.
The guy called the next day and told the supervisor that he wanted to come into the store and listen to the refrigerator for two hours to see how it runs.  He wanted us to get the refrigerator that somebody had already wrapped up and placed off the floor, bring it back onto the floor, unwrap it, and then plug it in just so he could sit around and listen to it.
I don’t know about you, but I sure as hell wish I could have two hours to kill just sitting around some electronics store doing nothing else other than listening to how a refrigerator sounds.  Even when I’m home, I have things to keep me busy.  I have to give it up to the guy.  He did find the one thing that sounds more boring than actually selling appliances:  listening to them run.
According to the appliance team, the guy came in just the other day, listened to it for less than a half hour, talked with the appliance crew about all the customer reviews he read online (UGH!  That’s a whole other blog post alone.  Wait have I already done one of those?  Shit.  See, this is what happens when you don’t update regularly.), and ended up canceling it anyway.  I went up to the refrigerator that he was sold, stood around the item with another coworker for several minutes, and didn’t hear a damn thing.  I just heard the sounds of his parents weeping at the wasted time their son wasted in our store.
More soon from the frontline...

The Only Way Out Of Retail

That line, “The only way out of here is in a box,” – or some variation of it – is used in movies all the time but I think that it could easily be placed at the top of every application for every retail job.  And that’s because, for an alarming amount of people, that seems to be the only way out of retail.  I know that sounds like a joke but I don’t mean it to be.
In the last year alone I’ve heard about somebody who worked at several of our stores dying from a heart attack either while on the clock or as he was leaving from work.  I’m not 100% sure on the particulars surrounding the event.  Everyone in the store who knew about it kept talking about that.  It was our greatest fear – to die wearing a shirt with a nametag on it.  A few of us even joked about how we would rip our shirts off if we ever felt a heart attack coming while on the job.  We didn’t want the last minutes of our lives to be with our job’s invisible collar around our neck.
Then just recently, our own store had a near scare.  One of our own employees suffered a heart attack outside of work.  Thankfully, the guy is doing okay so far.  Tough bastard.  But to think that this guy had a family and suffered a heart attack during the holidays really gives you the willies.  This is somebody I’ve seen on a near daily basis and have spent countless hours shooting the shit and griping about the stresses of work with.  I couldn’t comprehend it.  My brain could not wrap itself around the idea of somebody around my own age lying in a hospital bed from a heart attack.  I don’t believe in Christmas miracles but I’m damn glad he’s recovering because not everyone is as lucky.
This all seems like a running theme in the world of retail.  I know that’s just life and everyone dies – don’t get me wrong, but it just seems like something about working in retail is conducive to heart attacks.  Stress is a natural part of the retail world and everyone feels it.  From the customers complaining just for the sake of complaining to the customers who are too lazy to read the print on the tags so they come to interrupt your work so you can read it for them.  Maybe it’s the irregular schedules for most of the hourly employees, who are thus unable to plan anything else in their lives.  Or the schedules that change at the last minute without any notification – plans be damned.  Perhaps, it’s the long and demanding hours during the holidays that simultaneously put even more stress on employees who have to miss out on family time.  The seemingly increasing amount of work placed on a smaller and smaller workforce as companies try to squeak by without having to increase their payroll.  Or how about having the smarter employees having to pick up the slack from the idiot employees that the management deemed worthy of hiring?  That one is my personal favorite.
This doesn’t even take into account the poor eating and drinking habits most of the workforce partakes in.  Energy drink companies should give each employee a free case of their products at the holidays for all the business we generate for their companies.  How else are most employees supposed to stay awake on Thanksgiving night when they have to work from ten o’clock to six o’clock the next morning, only to return at noon to start another eight hour shift?  Then there are the late night inventory shifts that end at two in the morning but see some employees return seven hours later to open the store.  The needle full of adrenaline to the heart in Pulp Fiction likely got its inspiration from retail workers.
Then there are the endless amounts of fast food joints conveniently located around my job that almost everyone goes to for lunch breaks.  I feel like I’m one of the few who brings their own food from home as much as I can.  I see what all that fast food is doing to the bodies of many coworkers and I want to avoid health issues as much as possible.  But convenience is typically the way most people lean and when you only get a half hour lunch break – if you’re lucky – then fast food it is!  All that fatty food clogging your arteries while the stresses of your job slowly build and build and build cannot be good for the body.
Sure, I know we don’t perform brain surgery at our jobs, but when you’re getting paid the amount of money we get while doing all the work expected of you by no fewer than five different people on a daily basis, it can feel like it.  Okay, I’m still being a bit hyperbolic, but you catch my drift.
So, in my ever-constant attempt to come up with solutions to my daily rants, where do we go from here?  I doubt companies are going to hire enough staff to do the work that they think we can accomplish.  I doubt our pay will all magically increase and I doubt the hours will change.  I also highly doubt customers will start thinking for themselves and solve their easy questions on their own or keep their petty complaints to themselves without raising a ruckus.
So, I ask again, where do we go from here?
No, seriously, where do we go from here?  Because I’m actually at a loss for ideas.  I just hope we can all make it out of here alive and not in a box.  Hopefully I’ll be able to come up with something by the next post.  If you’ll excuse me, I have to go make a cup of coffee before work.
More soon from the frontlines...

Nostalgia Is A Bitch

     One thing that bums me out about working in retail is the number of people who quit, transfer, or get fired.  The last year or so, my store has gone through a number of changes in personnel and it still is odd to not see people there that I used to see all the time.  When you work in a job in the retail world you come to depend on friends to help cheer you up and help you make it through the day.  I don’t know where I’d be without those people who’ve become more than just coworkers.

     When I first started this job, I doubted that I would ever know more than the names of coworkers within my own department.  It really wasn’t even until the first several months or so had passed on that I began to recognize people from the opposite end of the store and associate names with them.  I just kept my head down, learned what I needed, and viewed everyone’s relationships at the store as an outsider.  I don’t know exactly when I began to feel like one of the crowd but a store that seemed quite large when I began seemed to shrink.  I knew most of the employees and began to joke around with even the new hires.  I had become part of the “team”.

     Of course, throughout my time at this job, I’ve had plenty of people come and go, but lately the people who’ve left have been the ones that started at around the same time as myself.  I never thought that these people would move on before I did and seeing them leave for greener pastures has made me feel a bit left behind.  I always figured that I’d move on before others did; not that I thought I could find better faster than they could, but I just hoped it’d be me leaving them first so I could make a clean break with everyone at the same time.  I don’t know how much that made sense but I guess it’s like a relationship – I’d rather be the dumper than the dumpy (Dumpey? Dumpie? Oh, Microsoft Word, why do you let me down??).  Now, whenever I walk around the store, I can only picture and think about times I’ve shared with those no longer there.  While those memories always elicit a pleasant feeling, they also make me feel a bit sad.

     Switching gears here, let me focus on the workers who are there to replace those who left.  Whenever there’s a new hire, there’s the tiniest of pieces that I recognize in myself that just wants to say, “Damn, do I have to get to know them, too?  It’s so much work! Blah!”  I’ve come to the conclusion that thanks to the turnover rates in the retail world, I try not to form attachments to people who have been at my store for less than 4 months.  At that 4-month point, I’ll take the chance and bother to learn your name instead of calling you “boss” and start having more meaningful conversations.  I’m sorry but my heart just can’t take more pain!  You understand, of course.

     I think the toughest part of it all is the fact that I most likely won’t see much of them outside of work.  This will most likely be true despite how much I get along with those people who’ve moved on.  Sure, we’ll always have online social networking and the occasional get-together, but that’s not the same and everyone knows that the promise of “We’ll have to stay in touch” is generally a lie 90% of the time.  Not that that’s anyone’s fault, necessarily; it’s just a way of life in the fast-paced 21^st Century.  We’re too busy with the day-to-day events of our lives to try and set aside time for people.

     Perhaps that’s just a bullshit answer but I’m amazed how quickly a day goes by.  I guess I’m just getting old.  I can’t get as much done in a day as I once could and the first to get cut in my laziness are my friendships.  That makes me feel bad but I just want to set aside this entry to those of my coworkers, nay, friends who’ve left recently and say that I have appreciated the time we’ve had together.  Not that any of you will ever come across this entry, but you all meant a lot for my sanity!  I hope to stay in contact with you all for many years to come.  You’re banter, dancing, singing, and random acts of kindness prove that good things are in your future.  Karma will not forget every smile you bring to those you work with.

     Conversely, customers, karma will also not forget every pissy comment you say to employees making barely more than minimum wage.  Just a fair warning there for you.
     More soon from the frontlines...