Archived BR or POG? Get to choose, advice please!

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I recently have been given the opportunity to choose between working for the POG or Backroom team and was hoping someone with a little knowledge or experience with one or both would be able to shed some insight or opinion.

I've been working in the Backroom for about 5 months at a pretty high volume store. Not sure where we rank, but we're in a large urban area with no other major retailers nearby, so everything does very high business volume. I've been in the Backroom for 40 hours a week at 8.25/hour literally since orientation - people quitting or slacking is rampant in my BR, which has been great for my paycheck but horrible for the work atmosphere. I do love the work back there, cleaning my aisles and playing with the WAV & Crown are fun, but getting yelled at by TLs and let down by a lazy team every day is horrible (pulling pallets for a 2900 piece truck while everyone takes an hour-and-a-half break? Aaaaaah!). I have worked a bit of POG and liked it a lot more, they're a good team and I get along with them very well.

Anyway, I'm about to move to the remodel team and POG the whole store for the next 3 months, and I've been told I can pick between POG or BR when that ends. Obviously this is my moral decision - stay with a bad team and help with the rebuilding, or leave for something easy and nice. I'll figure that out with me and my conscience, but was hoping someone with more Target experience would be willing to give me some insight on anything from hours available, is there a different paygrade, work experience as you become more experienced in POG or BR, really anything...

Thanks, Breakroom Members!
(1st post BTW, thanks all)
 
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So you say you're going to be on the POG side of the remodel for the next few months... getting valuable experience and an insight into the mechanics of setting POGs, though not the everyday routine of the plano team... and yet you want to make the decision now, ahead of time, if that job is right for you in the long term?

How is this not a decision that you should be making two months from now instead?

Alright, that being said. Having run both of those workcenters, I'd say it was a wash for me. Do you prefer the daily routine, knowing exactly what you're going to do day in and day out? BR is probably a good fit, and Plano not so much. Do you like some variety in your work? Do you excel at finding creative solutions to problems? Are you comfortable with being under constant time pressure? Are you comfortable with doing very detail-oriented work (such that if you mess up at the start of a POG but don't realize it until the end, things won't fit, and you may end up having to move a hundred or more peghooks down and to the left an inch, or something like that)? If that sounds like you, then Plano would be a good fit.

(Actually, I ran all three workcenters you mentioned, if we count Remodel as a workcenter. Just a heads up for you--I had to move plano people over to the backroom several times throughout the process, as people quit or decided they couldn't handle the schedule, or when people didn't show up to work, or whatever. So you should probably be prepared to spend a fair amount of time in the backroom, even if you are going into the project as part of the plano team. Have fun with it either way, though--remodels were the most enjoyable thing I did in ten years at Target.)
 
I believe POG and BR are the same paygrade. BR upside: no guests. Are you extremely task oriented and don't like to be interrupted? Then BR is for you. POG upside: You are all over the store. Do you like a fast paced work center that is always changing? Can you multitask? If so then you may enjoy POG. Hope that is helpful. Are you doing plano overnight during the remodel? It's much different during the day with guests and backup etc. Just something to concider.
 
Just noticed you called Plano "easy and nice". I would call it anything but easy. I've done a lot of jobs in my store in the last 8 years, but Plano is the one job where you actually have to think and make a lot of judgement calls. Corporate does not make setting Planograms easy sometimes- they make a lot of mistakes and don't offer solutions for the majority of them. It's frustrating to set an entire aisle exactly as it's planogrammed only to have to rearrange every shelf and peg because the products don't fit the way they have it set up.

That said, I love Plano. I'm a very detail-oriented, OCD person. Plano gives me the opportunity to make something perfect. And when I finish a planogram, it is exactly that- perfect. I figure every aisle deserves to look as it was intended at least once, even if the guests/flow team annihilate it the next day. It's extremely satisfying for me to step back when I am finished setting and filling an aisle and just look at what I've done. The Plano team really does fix the store. Take Toys for instance. Right now, it's a disaster. So much clearance/d-code flexed everywhere, it just looks like crap. But in a few weeks, we'll swoop through and it'll be perfect again.
 
backroom is the best position in all of target, go for backroom, no guests bothering you (more than half the time) for me i get to listen to music, i get to bring drinks, no crowds of TMs more than half the time. Backroom is just awesome, but its no walk in the park sometimes, you gotta be qucik on your feet and very accurate, pullin cafs is alot easier and better than pushing them
 
Big Blue and TiedAndDropped, You have described the perfect signing person. Have you ever wanted to do signing? lol

OP listen to PTL, she hit the nail on the head with her answer.
 
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Heh, sorry Big Blue - I didn't mean to insinuate POG was any easier a job than BR, just that I'd be working on a functional team with our POG people vs. the disaster currently in our BR. I don't mind hard work, I'm always sweating and dirty ten minutes into a shift, but the emotional and mental stress from being part of a group of people who don't want to work together (or work at all sometimes) and cause us all to fail is pretty rough. Anyway, thanks to all who replied, this was really what I was looking for. Nice to hear some helpful opinions of both jobs from people who have done them.
 
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