Archived Am I the only one that actually LIKES modernization?

[jenna]

Very few tms get 40 at my store. Mainly TLs.

 

[REDcardJJ]

availability is a big factor, too. i have a bunch of team members only getting 20 or so hours a week who i wish i could give more but they aren't available when i need people. so i have to hire to fill in those gaps in coverage which means less hours overall.

 

[can't touch this]

I really liked being available 60 hours a week but getting 12

 

[hufflepuff]

Why would you get rid of fill groups? That's crazy and causes a pulling nightmare. We have all our fill groups still intact, as it should be.

Because my current leadership has absolutely no idea what they're doing

 

[seasonaldude]

I felt your pain. Somehow I ended up with only FRO shifts for somewhere around two years, maybe every three months I'd get a non-FRO shift. And it was a constant dumping ground for everything. I'd get talked to about the state of the fitting room, I'd do my best to try and keep up, but there's only so much you can do when you work 25-30 hours and the store is open over 100 hours each week, I'd bitch to leadership and nothing would change. I'd get all the tagging done, a Herculean task, get a single day off and the next day I came in there'd be hanging clothes taking up 18-24 inches of bar space needing tags on top of over a dozen torn underwear and socks packages.

I was given opportunity one day to spend an entire shift cleaning out the closet. I was promised that no more fixtures would be allowed in it. It was beautiful when I finished, nearly the end of my shift, and less than five minutes to go to the end a softlines TM pushed an entire cart of fixtures (we were allowed to use them at that point) to the closet. I said nope not the closet and she said "Fine! You put them in the fixture room!" Had she been five minutes later she would have sabotaged my entire day's work.

The only thing that made it change was a new ETL coming in, all of a sudden it was rare that I got an FRO shift because he wanted everyone everywhere. I'd go to the fitting room and gleefully do to them what they had been doing do me, I'd go to the fitting room and the desk would be completely covered with what other people (not me) dumped and the FRO freaking out about people just leaving their shit there and I'd laugh on the inside. Things got really bad there for a couple of months but it wasn't my problem anymore; even when I was FRO leadership wasn't looking at me as responsible for the fitting room because it was equal responsibility with the rest of softlines. And then things got a lot better, as people realized that they couldn't just dump stuff there because they'd have to clean up too. By the time I was getting regular fitting room shifts again the other TMs were a lot cleaner.

I'm glad I jumped ship though before the final modernization mandate kicked in. I had a couple days of the final standard and I freaked out when I saw all the clothes at the fitting room even though I knew it was no longer my problem.

You would hate me. Style at my store used to store their dedicated vehicles in the fitting room. They decided they didn't want to do that anymore because reasons so they started just shoving them down their backroom aisles. The very same aisles that I run up and down dozens of times a day. So, I push all those vehicles back to the fitting room closet when I get a chance. This is our daily mostly friendly battle. But, as I told our style TL, "would you rather I just INF your stuff or walk the backroom aisle with an RFID gun before doing so? That's what I thought, so stop blocking my way."

 

[gsa4lyfe]

availability is a big factor, too. i have a bunch of team members only getting 20 or so hours a week who i wish i could give more but they aren't available when i need people. so i have to hire to fill in those gaps in coverage which means less hours overall.

Retail in a nutshell.... I wish there were more lifers at my store. I’m at a small format college store and we only have a handful of real adults and a ton of college/high school kids.

 

[REDcardJJ]

Retail in a nutshell.... I wish there were more lifers at my store. I’m at a small format college store and we only have a handful of real adults and a ton of college/high school kids.

i have a LOT of high school kids and a significant amount of college kids. probably about 1/3 of my team! yikes

 

[gsa4lyfe]

i have a LOT of high school kids and a significant amount of college kids. probably about 1/3 of my team! yikes

Don’t get me wrong a have a hand full of rockstar college kids but most of them are just there because their parents are making them work a couple days a week and they’re just not into it

 

[Snarf]

i wholeheartedly support front end modernization. life is a LOT easier when you can grab any advocate and throw them anywhere in the front. cash office is the biggest hurdle by far though.

Its working at the front of my store too not including cash office. When it comes to guest facing issues they are doing great. We were having a lot of people take too long and mess up in cash office so our AP leader has our hr tm do it every day she is scheduled.

I will say though that at my store there is increase of defectives not being proccesed and put away correctly because not everyone is fully trained on the smaller things at guest service. After a few emails and taking things back to the front to be properly wrapped/defected tends to fix the problem. At least before a new tm is "fully trained" at guest services.

 

[InboundGrunt]

When I come to work in the morning, the honest to god thing I want more than anything else is for things to get done as smoothly and efficiently as possible. I feel good when I leave for the day and the truck is finished, the department I worked is clean/zoned and everything is backstocked. Extra bonus if the baler is empty for the closing team. I enjoy hard work. I wouldn't have survived Inbound this long if I didn't.

But this never happens anymore. We've been put in a position to always be behind and it feels like a perpetual state of failure.

Almost every single change has made things worse for my particular store or put up roadblocks towards success (except ordering more u-boats, of course! 😍 ). The major issues my store had pre-modernization? We still have them post-modernization but now with less hours and worse morale. The same departments still lag behind even with many new TMs (pro-tip: payroll is the issue, not the workers. Performance out until the cows come home, we'll still be fucked). We have different leadership and lots of new team members, but somehow modernization hasn't straightened us out. S H O C K I N G. Once the rest of my store had to deal with many new parts of the modernization process our flow team had already been dealing with for many months, everything got worse and we haven't recovered. Turnover has been constant.

The old leadership lied to our faces about any number of things, including what our hours would look like in this new system. They're mostly gone now, hopefully they're properly replaced before 4th quarter but WHO KNOWS. I'm more fascinated by this methodical devolution of a somewhat dysfunctional but hard working store and turning it into a misery machine that reaps the souls of its workers and whose primary purpose is to find fresh blood to feed its insatiable hunger for despair.

but maybe I'm just being negative idk

 

[happygoth]

You would hate me. Style at my store used to store their dedicated vehicles in the fitting room. They decided they didn't want to do that anymore because reasons so they started just shoving them down their backroom aisles. The very same aisles that I run up and down dozens of times a day. So, I push all those vehicles back to the fitting room closet when I get a chance. This is our daily mostly friendly battle. But, as I told our style TL, "would you rather I just INF your stuff or walk the backroom aisle with an RFID gun before doing so? That's what I thought, so stop blocking my way."

I am 100% with you on the backroom. It's extremely annoying to go get something for a guest or try to pull auto fills and the aisle you need is full of vehicles.

When our reshop racks are empty, leadership wants us to put them in the back stockroom in the area where we process Style truck, which is on the opposite side of the store. The problem is, we usually need those racks again in short order. It just seems like a waste of time. So we try to keep them on the floor even though they can be an eyesore.