Archived Backroom Nightmare

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With how back to school as a super freaky tier store made the backroom look, I genuinely fear what the backroom is gonna look like come 4th quarter... and that’s with a solid backroom team trying to keep things neat. We had points where if you wanted tvs or furniture from the backroom there was no way to get to them because of all the pallets of freight from rolled trucks under the new process.
Back to school was a complete fuck up at my store, didn't sell as well as management hoped, long story short I had pulled 400+ bottles of "BTS" glue off the shelf to put into back-stock, combined with alot of pencils and binders.
 
Only a matter of time before employees get hurt.
That's not an issue with the prior-overnight team. That's an issue with people not doing their job correctly and back stock not being purged. Speaking from experience, when I first started last year we had flats upon flats of freight AND backstock sitting on the floor in electronics department. Now, we don't have a single vehicle of anything sitting anywhere.
 
Back to school was a complete fuck up at my store, didn't sell as well as management hoped, long story short I had pulled 400+ bottles of "BTS" glue off the shelf to put into back-stock, combined with alot of pencils and binders.
My store had the opposite problem. We are sisters with a super freaky Target and are a much nicer store so those that know the area will drive the extra distance to come to us for BTS. As such we were allocated the same ammount of BTS as a regular Super Target of our volume, and ended up selling out constantly. With Spots decision to push back setting Halloween an additional week this year we practically had an entire corner of our store empty.
It got so bad our Hardlines ETL said f*ck it and told POG to set everything and anything that was not street dated. Of course our DTL just happened to decide to swing by the very next day and gave us a "slap on the wrist" which is code for "we got into major shit" at my store. Yikes.
Want to know the worst part guys? My store has been doing phenomenal with the new process. It's been a challenge but we are clearing trucks, constantly making sales by multiples of $10k daily, comping up in almost every dept., backroom is completely cleared and taken care of at least once a week (although our BRLA has done from 99% to 97.8% due to less experienced members being asked to backstock), and so on.
And it is still a shit show. Having lost almost a solid 1/3rd of our bulk steel for increased softlines processing area, area for store of the new Uboats we still haven't received, area for new printers/rollers for SFS, and increased usage of GM steel to hold diapers now that our 2 aisles had to be condensed to 1 to accommodate the new Softlines backstock strategy, there is barely room to put away Paper/Furniture/Sterilite as is, let alone transition. It's good we no longer have backstock pallets because that whole section of the back of the line is now transition pallet space which Is a total fucking mess. And i can tell you right now we are SCREWED when we start getting in 2-Day. There is no room to put any of it! Black Friday is going to come early this year boys because we are going to need to send those pallets straight out to the floor to be able to fit everything lol.
And speaking of transition we can barely fit the 9/16 Domestics rollout as is. HOW ARE WE GOING TO FIND SPACE for the 10 pallets of Christmas trees alone we will be recieving come Christmas? The actual only place I can think of fitting more transition that what we got for Halloween which already started needing to left in the middle of recieving and moved from dock door to door as needed will be under the line.
This is going to be one hell of a year folks.
 
My store had the opposite problem. We are sisters with a super freaky Target and are a much nicer store so those that know the area will drive the extra distance to come to us for BTS. As such we were allocated the same ammount of BTS as a regular Super Target of our volume, and ended up selling out constantly. With Spots decision to push back setting Halloween an additional week this year we practically had an entire corner of our store empty.
It got so bad our Hardlines ETL said f*ck it and told POG to set everything and anything that was not street dated. Of course our DTL just happened to decide to swing by the very next day and gave us a "slap on the wrist" which is code for "we got into major shit" at my store. Yikes.
Want to know the worst part guys? My store has been doing phenomenal with the new process. It's been a challenge but we are clearing trucks, constantly making sales by multiples of $10k daily, comping up in almost every dept., backroom is completely cleared and taken care of at least once a week (although our BRLA has done from 99% to 97.8% due to less experienced members being asked to backstock), and so on.
And it is still a shit show. Having lost almost a solid 1/3rd of our bulk steel for increased softlines processing area, area for store of the new Uboats we still haven't received, area for new printers/rollers for SFS, and increased usage of GM steel to hold diapers now that our 2 aisles had to be condensed to 1 to accommodate the new Softlines backstock strategy, there is barely room to put away Paper/Furniture/Sterilite as is, let alone transition. It's good we no longer have backstock pallets because that whole section of the back of the line is now transition pallet space which Is a total fucking mess. And i can tell you right now we are SCREWED when we start getting in 2-Day. There is no room to put any of it! Black Friday is going to come early this year boys because we are going to need to send those pallets straight out to the floor to be able to fit everything lol.
And speaking of transition we can barely fit the 9/16 Domestics rollout as is. HOW ARE WE GOING TO FIND SPACE for the 10 pallets of Christmas trees alone we will be recieving come Christmas? The actual only place I can think of fitting more transition that what we got for Halloween which already started needing to left in the middle of recieving and moved from dock door to door as needed will be under the line.
This is going to be one hell of a year folks.
My store is the equivalent of a walmart neighborhood market. So for us to get 20+ pallets of BTS is just absurd. We've had 30 pallets of this year's Halloween seasonal and 2 weeks (roughly 15 pallets) of c and d repacks sitting in grocery backstock until they were able to have me (a lonely linemaster) de-palletise, sort, label, re-palletise and wrap everything to be backstocked correctly until such time it can be pushed. Got pushed last night, supposed to be pushed 3 weeks ago. All because of BTS
 
My store had the opposite problem. We are sisters with a super freaky Target and are a much nicer store so those that know the area will drive the extra distance to come to us for BTS. As such we were allocated the same ammount of BTS as a regular Super Target of our volume, and ended up selling out constantly. With Spots decision to push back setting Halloween an additional week this year we practically had an entire corner of our store empty.
It got so bad our Hardlines ETL said f*ck it and told POG to set everything and anything that was not street dated. Of course our DTL just happened to decide to swing by the very next day and gave us a "slap on the wrist" which is code for "we got into major shit" at my store. Yikes.
Want to know the worst part guys? My store has been doing phenomenal with the new process. It's been a challenge but we are clearing trucks, constantly making sales by multiples of $10k daily, comping up in almost every dept., backroom is completely cleared and taken care of at least once a week (although our BRLA has done from 99% to 97.8% due to less experienced members being asked to backstock), and so on.
And it is still a shit show. Having lost almost a solid 1/3rd of our bulk steel for increased softlines processing area, area for store of the new Uboats we still haven't received, area for new printers/rollers for SFS, and increased usage of GM steel to hold diapers now that our 2 aisles had to be condensed to 1 to accommodate the new Softlines backstock strategy, there is barely room to put away Paper/Furniture/Sterilite as is, let alone transition. It's good we no longer have backstock pallets because that whole section of the back of the line is now transition pallet space which Is a total fucking mess. And i can tell you right now we are SCREWED when we start getting in 2-Day. There is no room to put any of it! Black Friday is going to come early this year boys because we are going to need to send those pallets straight out to the floor to be able to fit everything lol.
And speaking of transition we can barely fit the 9/16 Domestics rollout as is. HOW ARE WE GOING TO FIND SPACE for the 10 pallets of Christmas trees alone we will be recieving come Christmas? The actual only place I can think of fitting more transition that what we got for Halloween which already started needing to left in the middle of recieving and moved from dock door to door as needed will be under the line.
This is going to be one hell of a year folks.
We got our new u boats. They are garbage, they look nice and shiny but are slick as fuck. Boxes flying of and shit, and some of the uboats don't ride smooth anymore, had em less than a month and they're already fucked up.
 
My store had the opposite problem. We are sisters with a super freaky Target and are a much nicer store so those that know the area will drive the extra distance to come to us for BTS. As such we were allocated the same ammount of BTS as a regular Super Target of our volume, and ended up selling out constantly. With Spots decision to push back setting Halloween an additional week this year we practically had an entire corner of our store empty.
It got so bad our Hardlines ETL said f*ck it and told POG to set everything and anything that was not street dated. Of course our DTL just happened to decide to swing by the very next day and gave us a "slap on the wrist" which is code for "we got into major shit" at my store. Yikes.
Want to know the worst part guys? My store has been doing phenomenal with the new process. It's been a challenge but we are clearing trucks, constantly making sales by multiples of $10k daily, comping up in almost every dept., backroom is completely cleared and taken care of at least once a week (although our BRLA has done from 99% to 97.8% due to less experienced members being asked to backstock), and so on.
And it is still a shit show. Having lost almost a solid 1/3rd of our bulk steel for increased softlines processing area, area for store of the new Uboats we still haven't received, area for new printers/rollers for SFS, and increased usage of GM steel to hold diapers now that our 2 aisles had to be condensed to 1 to accommodate the new Softlines backstock strategy, there is barely room to put away Paper/Furniture/Sterilite as is, let alone transition. It's good we no longer have backstock pallets because that whole section of the back of the line is now transition pallet space which Is a total fucking mess. And i can tell you right now we are SCREWED when we start getting in 2-Day. There is no room to put any of it! Black Friday is going to come early this year boys because we are going to need to send those pallets straight out to the floor to be able to fit everything lol.
And speaking of transition we can barely fit the 9/16 Domestics rollout as is. HOW ARE WE GOING TO FIND SPACE for the 10 pallets of Christmas trees alone we will be recieving come Christmas? The actual only place I can think of fitting more transition that what we got for Halloween which already started needing to left in the middle of recieving and moved from dock door to door as needed will be under the line.
This is going to be one hell of a year folks.
Fuck, just remembered our shit got clearanced out saturday. 😂 Etl was like "fuck it, mark any BTS item that doesn't have a home location 70% off" and all of that was only 5% of all the school supplies. Our back room may be spotless, but backstock for stationary is cram-packed 😂😧
 
@Luck im jealous! our backroom hasn't come clean consistently since last quarter, we are on our 3rd backroom TL in 2 years, and it doesn't look good for our logistics ETL as district has been showing up almost daily at this point to figure out where the fire is. Our BRLA is so bad that no one even wants to look at it, last i heard we were far below the lowest in the district. And with the new process it'll probably dip lower as now every tm is required to backstock their own stuff.

I wish i could say our backroom was a nightmare, you can wake up from nightmares, or even recover from them. But ours is a lost cause, it'd be easier to simply restart at this point. The biggest issue is definitely the "team", everyone has such a "i'm only here for me" attitude and it drags the whole store down. TLs and up won't address that issue, and when they do it feels forced or dry. Like they're just spouting something from a tv show they saw once.

Our new backroom tms don't communicate, most have been slow to adapt, and the majority need constant hand holding even weeks into the job. We had a newer brtm closing one night who just disappeared according to the GSTL, wouldn't respond to calls even after being repeatedly asked to, managed to pull only a handful of small batches, and apparently didn't show up for his last shift...

Our ETL is newer so he's still got that whole gung ho "i can do this" attitude, but with every week that flies by he's looking worst and worst. He's a nice guy, obviously smart enough to get the job done, but can't plan ahead more then a few hours when we needed someone who could plan ahead a few weeks. I mean when you're shocked to see pallets and pallets of BTS rolling in, you're not prepared at all.

Communication from up top is lacking so hard lately too, TLs hate each other so much they work around each other, ETLs are dazed and confused all the time and rather then asking tms how to solve something, they just shove it into a dark corner till someone like me finds it. Most tms aren't sure how the new process works so they wing it, our backroom team is so fragmented and overwhelmed. The backroom vets aren't much help, and our TL doesn't understand when i tell him that we need a PLAN, not simply telling everyone to move faster.

I guess the one shining light is that our management is nice and our STL as overwhelmed as she is still cares. They've even gone as far to pull me out of the backroom because a Sr.TL caught me with my face in my hands one night after a disastrous double truck. Apparently its to alleviate my frustrations a bit, and while appreciated, i wish someone would of just talked to me first and asked for a solution.

Damn i could go on forever, with the meat of 4th quarter rolling in i don't see how we'll pull through this year. No one seems to be on the same page here, not even the same library. We went from the best backroom in the district to probably worst in the country.

Also last rant but fuck our flow team to hell, i don't know how many times i keep having to tell our flow TL that you can't dump the trash of 20 people onto our sole backroom closer and expect it to be done.
 
Back to school was a complete fuck up at my store, didn't sell as well as management hoped, long story short I had pulled 400+ bottles of "BTS" glue off the shelf to put into back-stock, combined with alot of pencils and binders.

We're sitting on about 750 packs of crayons, 300+ bottles of purple Elmer's glue, 250 Avery binders, etc. Plano TL made me demerch BTS and stow all the dual located shit that wouldn't fit in stationery and it took every bit of 8 hours. I mean yeah I'll take the ~90 bucks but surely we could've thrown all that shit into a cart and TPC'd everything for $0.25 each just to get rid of it. But nope. As of right now leftover BTS is crowding our precious waco space and it'll probably be there well into 2019.
 
We're sitting on about 750 packs of crayons, 300+ bottles of purple Elmer's glue, 250 Avery binders, etc. Plano TL made me demerch BTS and stow all the dual located shit that wouldn't fit in stationery and it took every bit of 8 hours. I mean yeah I'll take the ~90 bucks but surely we could've thrown all that shit into a cart and TPC'd everything for $0.25 each just to get rid of it. But nope. As of right now leftover BTS is crowding our precious waco space and it'll probably be there well into 2019.
On the plus side, your store, (and mine for that matter) won't have to order for next year 😂
 
That's exactly what we had this year. We still had repacks galore full of pencil sharpeners, glue, etc from BTS last year.
That’s why you ask your seasonal TL to remove all items from Waco’s first to flex so you can sweep case packs
 
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