Black Friday

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Aug 3, 2015
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Just curious if anyone else's store is just acting like next Friday is just a normal day? We don't have enough employees, truck unload scheduled for the morning like normal, nothing ready to be put out on the floor. I think this is gonna be a disater, people wanna do the Black Friday madness...
 
Just curious if anyone else's store is just acting like next Friday is just a normal day? We don't have enough employees, truck unload scheduled for the morning like normal, nothing ready to be put out on the floor. I think this is gonna be a disater, people wanna do the Black Friday madness...

Not my store, at least in tech. We already have lots of high dollar merchandise out on "risers" without match protection for the big day. We're pulling all the cores on the cases next Monday. It'll be a free for all. Or in the words of our APTL, great bait.
 
I know our store is planning a meeting tomorrow during the day to discuss it so at least we seem to be making sure we are set.

Covid took the wind out of Targets sails when it came to BF. The social distancing regulations made it necessary for them to in essence “cancel” the BF that we all knew and loved and replace it with deals throughout the month.

Thing is guests seemed to like that, so it stuck. Do I think it will be a normal day, hell no, but do I think it will be what I’ve remembered? Also no. It’ll be interesting for sure because it’s my first time in a big store in 4 years coming from a Small format.
 
Not my store, at least in tech. We already have lots of high dollar merchandise out on "risers" without match protection for the big day. We're pulling all the cores on the cases next Monday. It'll be a free for all. Or in the words of our APTL, great bait.

Our AP is the opposite- merch pro on everything! Except our Stackout TVs because we are only putting ones that don't fit into a cart there. Cores are remaining in place AFAIK.
 
Just curious if anyone else's store is just acting like next Friday is just a normal day? We don't have enough employees, truck unload scheduled for the morning like normal, nothing ready to be put out on the floor. I think this is gonna be a disater, people wanna do the Black Friday madness...
Not surprised, This company will reap what they sow. Boy am I glad I don’t work retail anymore for Black Friday.
 
Yeah we’re not ready and normally we would have 50 hour weeks of Black Friday and cyber Monday. Not this year, they are treating it like a normal day 4 people opening, 4 people closing for fulfillment. I’m ready for us to be destroyed by the amount of orders.
God help everyone dealing with this in retail, Sounds like when I worked last year at Target.
 
Covid took the wind out of Targets sails when it came to BF. The social distancing regulations made it necessary for them to in essence “cancel” the BF that we all knew and loved and replace it with deals throughout the month.

Thing is guests seemed to like that, so it stuck. Do I think it will be a normal day, hell no, but do I think it will be what I’ve remembered? Also no. It’ll be interesting for sure because it’s my first time in
I for one think this is one of the very few good things that came out of covid. That "knew and loved" part is "knew and hated" for me so I'm glad to see that our shift schedule is somewhat different but store opening time is just an hour earlier than usual. And the season-long price guarantee thing takes away a lot of that Black Friday insanity.
A lot of my store's TMs are cross-trained for SFS so I expect a lot of them will be pulled off their usual truck push so they can pick orders instead.
Still seems that guests are enjoying their own shopping goofiness though - saw two "older lady" guests (in their 50s probably) wearing matching Christmas unicorn ??? headbands the other day. Black Friday behavior on a non-BF day - works for me.
 
Yeah we’re not ready and normally we would have 50 hour weeks of Black Friday and cyber Monday. Not this year, they are treating it like a normal day 4 people opening, 4 people closing for fulfillment. I’m ready for us to be destroyed by the amount of orders.
Cashiers prolly gonna get pulled for it, so expect to hear griping from them and the guests when the lines back up
 
Just curious if anyone else's store is just acting like next Friday is just a normal day? We don't have enough employees, truck unload scheduled for the morning like normal, nothing ready to be put out on the floor. I think this is gonna be a disater, people wanna do the Black Friday madness...
Out truck unload is never in the morning anyway, unless we're doing a double truck that day.

Our fulfillment team has definitely been shorthanded though, I stayed till midnight packing last night alongside the Closing TL after the flex team had gone home for the night.
 
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We have a million people in fulfillment, but drive up and guest services has no one and considering our DU time average has been over 5 minutes for the last 3 weeks, black friday is going to be so fun.

Cashier schedule is lighter than most years, but we’ll definitely have more lanes open than a usual day. I’m just stressed about our drive up schedule honestly. We literally have 2-3 people and I’m sure we’ll hit at least 800+ total guests.
 
We have a million people in fulfillment, but drive up and guest services has no one and considering our DU time average has been over 5 minutes for the last 3 weeks, black friday is going to be so fun.

Cashier schedule is lighter than most years, but we’ll definitely have more lanes open than a usual day. I’m just stressed about our drive up schedule honestly. We literally have 2-3 people and I’m sure we’ll hit at least 800+ total guests.
5 minutes, holy crap, ours is often 3-4, but never 5+
 
Yeah we’re not ready and normally we would have 50 hour weeks of Black Friday and cyber Monday. Not this year, they are treating it like a normal day 4 people opening, 4 people closing for fulfillment. I’m ready for us to be destroyed by the amount of orders.
I would get some popcorn, sit back and wait for the Shock and Awe to slowly set it. 🤣
 
The store I am at just doesn't have hours right now for the BF staffing of bygone days and they even want to cut 1000 hours before the end of the month. Best of luck with that. So you can't even blame it on a lack of planning; there just isn't hours. So we will see who is strong enough to make it through next week with out going stark raving mad as the trucks increase, the number of guests increases, the go-backs increase, the need to zone increases, the calls increase, the wait in line increases, the fulfillment orders increase, all while the number of hours and people decreases.

Jon Stewart Popcorn GIF
 
The store I am at just doesn't have hours right now for the BF staffing of bygone days and they even want to cut 1000 hours before the end of the month. Best of luck with that. So you can't even blame it on a lack of planning; there just isn't hours. So we will see who is strong enough to make it through next week with out going stark raving mad as the trucks increase, the number of guests increases, the go-backs increase, the need to zone increases, the calls increase, the wait in line increases, the fulfillment orders increase, all while the number of hours and people decreases.

Jon Stewart Popcorn GIF
It is a lack of planning/foresight. You can add more hours. They are choosing not to. I've had SD's who tried to make do with the payroll allotted to them. I have also had SD's that scheduled what they personally felt the store required. This was often much higher than what corporate suggested was necessary.

The ones that gave more payroll got promoted. The ones that made the store run with a skeleton crew got fired.
 
Is this the first time Target has not given any extra pay for working over the upcoming Holidays.

My first Holiday season was 2015.

I'm not counting the bullshit attendance raffle
I've been doing this for 20 years and this is the first time we weren't allowed overtime and there's too much work to be completed. It makes me wonder how horrible it will be after Christmas.
 
Is this the first time Target has not given any extra pay for working over the upcoming Holidays.

My first Holiday season was 2015.

I'm not counting the bullshit attendance raffles.
I haven't gotten extra pay on black Friday, ever. Last year was $2 extra per hour on weekends, but that was a new thing.
 
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