There is that but also you can allot hours based on the amount of work needed to get done such as zoning the store, setting pogs, managing guests, and expected traffic along with anything else you can think of. Just divide the amount of work that is needed to get done by department and assign appropriately. Their current approach of just slashing hours because it looks good on paper is just such a killer in terms of work management because they are using the equivalent of a hammer for brain surgery. Getting rid of the sales floor while maintaining coverage in the required areas costs so much more money than it's worth. Take for instance, theft.
Theft has become a huge issue at our store because they got rid of the sales floor, it doubled in less than a year. Our AP team hours doubled because of that. However, we cannot afford to have AP go around our store without acting like a salesfloor person. We literally do not have the hours to afford to use AP to the best of their ability. So they basically just transferred the hours from our store to the AP whom get their hours from district. They moved the numbers from one column to another and say it's cost effect.
The single largest controllable expense a company has is not payroll. Payroll is credit which enables a company to get the work it wants done. Inventory is the single biggest problem a store has. Every time something goes on clearance here I think about how wasteful it is, especially when the problem was the fact that we couldn't get to the floor on time. Either people were too busy to take the items from the backroom and fill the floor or it was being stolen too fast to be properly stocked. An example of this is candy. We sold some dark chocolate peanut butter m&m's (I think). We eventually clearance'd them out of the backroom because, what we believe, were bad sales. Turns out that wasn't the problem. The label had been covered up from a sign that was torn out and nobody every checked it again. So we missed out on the additional sales because nobody was around to check it out. We missed out on 30% of the profit margin for said product.
Now you compare those missed sales to the fact that this company has an aneurysm when somebody may clock out 5 minutes past their scheduled shift. There is a huge cost differential in values there.
/I also love the article is talking about how sales could possibly be completely related to things that cannot be predicted. It's as is if it was all relative or or something...