Quote:
Originally Posted by unclebilly
I see that type of employee too much... this is why I choose Amazon over supporting local. This video just made me mad...
What do we do with this dude and Lowe’s girl? What type of job could they actually do?
Funny thing is they all want to make 6 or 7 figures after a year or two of employment and can’t figure out why opportunities don’t fall into their laps... attitude. That’s why.
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I've worked in retail (auto parts). I was the guy that went out of his way to try to help the customer, tried to find the hard to find part, tried to ensure that they had what they needed to get back on the road. And no matter how nice and helpful you are, there's always a slew of jackasses *****ing about you, the store, the parts, trying to con you, trying to scam the store, etc.... Yes, there are some normal people that come through and appreciate what you do. There are also plenty of folks that feel entitled for you to go above and beyond, or feel that no matter how cheap something is or how helpful you've been or how much money they've saved over alternatives that they're getting screwed and they are going to gripe about it.
And that's from the customers, then as an employee, the company is trying to save money which means fewer folks working, a ****ty work environment, low pay, etc....
I was managing my own store after 2 years. My mandatory, minimum weekly schedule was 55 hours. 10 hours Mon, Tue, Thu, Fri and Sat and 5 hours on Wed. And the district manager told everyone that there was probably only one guy in the district that could realistically manage their job in 55 hours, the rest should be working at least 60. I think my usual weeks were 65-ish hours, but there were 80 hour weeks, and once or twice even more. I think I once had a week that was >100 hours. That was in 1994 for $21k/year. If they sent a new store layout that required rearranging all of the aisles/merchandise, 99% of the time managers were told "you can't increase your payroll to get this done. You have to either get your employees to work harder when they are here or you'll have to do it yourself."
We had one of those redesigns come down once. The company had paid some consultant who said "every store should be laid out identically" (which would be impressive since there were probably 100 or 150 different size and shape stores. We were given a "planogram" that showed us how to lay everything out. The planogram was designed for 48" tall shelves. We had 44" tall shelves. I was reprimanded for not getting the planogram done correctly. I was also told "in the old days, the manager would do whatever they had to do to get the merchandise in the store" which would have been in direct conflict with the "every store should look the same" goal of things.
When I was promoted, the previous manager got canned. I think I big part of it was that he did a half assed job of the weekly ordering and only had something like 85-90% of the store's total skus in stock. We had monthly sales goals. If we made the sales goals, I got a small monthly bonus. I went through the first order and had us up to the standard of something like 98-99% in stock. I got the first monthly bonus. The next month, they bumped up my goal 10%. I made that goal too. THe next month, they bumped my monthly goal up 15%, and I made that goal. After 4 months in a row of hitting the goal (full stock of items and happy employees), they bumped my goal up something like 25%. Of course, I didn't meet that goal. They left the goal there for several months. Then after a while, they dropped my goal down to just under what I'd been managing. I got the bonus, then they jacked it back up. I saw that they'd randomly increase and decrease goals to give you the occasional bonus, but make sure that you didn't get too many bonuses. It was too obviously how they'd do it, and wasn't based on a formula or history, it was arbitrary.
Retail is horrible. My dad when he retired got a job at a hardware store. It was a small old Scotty's. After he'd worked there for a while, I was visiting my parents and he had a chat with me.
When you complained about the autoparts store and quit, I thought you were being a pussy.
Now that I'm in retail and see what my store manager is doing, I realize that you were smart and I'm glad that you left. It's a crap job for crap pay.