Archived GSA Help!

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Smiley01

Smiley01

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May 23, 2016
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I've been a GSA for a while now, and I feel like everything I'm doing is wrong! I any GSA's GSTL's TL's ETL's or LOD's have any tips I could use any information at this point. I'm a hard worker, I'm really nice and I listen to cashiers but I just don't know......
 
From the red cards thread:
Do ya wanna get a red caaaaaaaaaaaaaaard?
Saving 5% each daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay?
Don't really wanna whine; my job is on the line.
It's the only waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!
I used to give great service once but now that's gone;
What are ya gonna dooooooooooooooooooo?
Do ya wanna get a red card?
Debit toooooooooooooooo.
*Do you wanna build a snowman
redeye58, Apr 8, 2016

Also, partner with salesfloor on big items & ask electronics folks to help you reach goals. Be positive & encourage your team to succeed.
 
do you THINK everything you do is wrong? or have you been personally told you're doing things wrong? I'm sure you're doing fine.
 
That's the fun of a GSA position that you don't really understand until you do it. Everything you do will be wrong. Every decision will be questioned by someone. Everyone has an opinion on how you could do your job better. Cashiers, salesfloor, TLs and ETLs. If they haven't been there, they will view how you do your job very critically. Everyone else in the store eventually will get praise for SOMETHING...even if it's just showing up for work on time and breathing. GSAs will never get that. Everyone else in the store will be praised in huddle...even if all they did was show up and work in a busy day...but we might as well not exist.

The only other people who will understand how miserable the job is and how terribly you are viewed are your fellow GSAs. Stick together as much as you can. If you are lucky, you will have a good GSTL who will understand how badly the job sucks and how hard everyone else is on the GSAs. If you do, it makes life bearable and you are able to breathe a bit more as you muck your way through the job. If you don't have a supportive GSTL, there is little to live for as a GSA. I get it.

And unfortunately, until stores and management are willing to own up to how badly the GSAs are looked down on, nothing will change.
 
My TM will be trained as a GSA soon because she showed interest plus my ETL has been very supportive and needs help in the front end so I agreed to allow it to happen, plus my TM is really excited to learn something new. The only condition I gave my ETL was that I want my TM to still be aligned to me, I refuse to let her go down that road that so many others go through. I told her the second she is allowed to sink, I'm removing her from GSA. My ETL was like "you got it." Haha
 
And she'll always have a safe harbor to return to should the tide turn ugly ;)
 
Retail Girl said:
That's the fun of a GSA position that you don't really understand until you do it. Everything you do will be wrong. Every decision will be questioned by someone. Everyone has an opinion on how you could do your job better. Cashiers, salesfloor, TLs and ETLs. If they haven't been there, they will view how you do your job very critically. Everyone else in the store eventually will get praise for SOMETHING...even if it's just showing up for work on time and breathing. GSAs will never get that. Everyone else in the store will be praised in huddle...even if all they did was show up and work in a busy day...but we might as well not exist.

The only other people who will understand how miserable the job is and how terribly you are viewed are your fellow GSAs. Stick together as much as you can. If you are lucky, you will have a good GSTL who will understand how badly the job sucks and how hard everyone else is on the GSAs. If you do, it makes life bearable and you are able to breathe a bit more as you muck your way through the job. If you don't have a supportive GSTL, there is little to live for as a GSA. I get it.

And unfortunately, until stores and management are willing to own up to how badly the GSAs are looked down on, nothing will change.
Click to expand...

Dang. I know at my store the GSA's are kinda looked down on, but they always get recognition at the huddles for something. Sorry to hear about your experience, that sucks.
 
My GSA training consisted of the following:

1) Being shown very briefly one bitter cold night how to close the registers.

And that was it.

They promised more training once they officially promoted me but I never got it, of course. Then they'd yell at me throughout my next 6 months there as GSA whenever I made a mistake, wondering why I would have done that. Well maybe it's because you fuckers didn't train me??

I think I did pretty damn well for someone who had to learn 99% of the job duties entirely on my own, with 0 support from leadership.
 
Last edited:
Same store here. I was supposed to have a whole shift of training with my Sr. GSTL and to sponge information off of him, but because it was super busy I basically just acted as a separate GSA without any training. Since I had been cashier and Service Desk for so long, I knew how to do things like resolve price challenges, call for backup, and give change so I just did that for most of the shift until I was shown how to close registers. That was the extent of my training. \

Everything else was learned by cold, hard experience or trial and error.
 
my training (external hire, last time I had worked at Target I had been backroom so I'd never even touched one of our registers) was half an hour of register training, then a full week of shadowing my GSTL, during which time I spent most of my time on lanes as backup and didn't learn anything even when I WASN'T on registers because I didn't have any idea of what exactly I was supposed to be trying to learn. after that, I learned over the course of a month or two exactly what my job was supposed to entail by being told every single time I did something wrong, at length. frustrating, to say the least.

after that, I devoted about 15 minutes a day to just sitting in the office (with a clear view of the lanes, I'm not that irresponsible) reading Workbench and learning every single best practice and official procedure. I kept what worked and what I'd seen, I tossed what I knew would never work at my store, and I spent a lot of time at GS hanging with my fellow GSAs, absorbing their knowledge and learning how to chill out from them. perhaps most importantly, I learned how to stop caring what everyone else thought about me and just do my job. cashiers are huffy over break schedule or REDcard goals? tough, deal with it. ETLs breathing down my neck when they haven't ever watched the front lanes for more than five minutes? okay, that's great, but unless you have something to officially coach me on, get back to your zone. ETL-GE hounding me about something inconsequential that he thinks will help get RCs but in practice would NEVER work, all the while pissing off guests by approaching them and striking up long awkward conversations? oh look, GS needs me for something, BRB.

it's all about reading the situation, doing your job, and flying under the radar otherwise. would I love recognition? damn skippy. will I ever get it? HA. have I gotten over it? ...mostly! maybe!
 
Retail Girl said:
That's the fun of a GSA position that you don't really understand until you do it. Everything you do will be wrong. Every decision will be questioned by someone. Everyone has an opinion on how you could do your job better. Cashiers, salesfloor, TLs and ETLs. If they haven't been there, they will view how you do your job very critically. Everyone else in the store eventually will get praise for SOMETHING...even if it's just showing up for work on time and breathing. GSAs will never get that. Everyone else in the store will be praised in huddle...even if all they did was show up and work in a busy day...but we might as well not exist.

The only other people who will understand how miserable the job is and how terribly you are viewed are your fellow GSAs. Stick together as much as you can. If you are lucky, you will have a good GSTL who will understand how badly the job sucks and how hard everyone else is on the GSAs. If you do, it makes life bearable and you are able to breathe a bit more as you muck your way through the job. If you don't have a supportive GSTL, there is little to live for as a GSA. I get it.

And unfortunately, until stores and management are willing to own up to how badly the GSAs are looked down on, nothing will change.
Click to expand...


I love my store because management understands... I also got the team member of the quarter award. I think how well you thrive as a GSA will depend highly on the management in store and how well the store is ran as a whole. I think I'm very lucky to be where I am considering how others feel about the job!

-current GSA
 
Retail Girl said:
That's the fun of a GSA position that you don't really understand until you do it. Everything you do will be wrong. Every decision will be questioned by someone. Everyone has an opinion on how you could do your job better. Cashiers, salesfloor, TLs and ETLs. If they haven't been there, they will view how you do your job very critically. Everyone else in the store eventually will get praise for SOMETHING...even if it's just showing up for work on time and breathing. GSAs will never get that. Everyone else in the store will be praised in huddle...even if all they did was show up and work in a busy day...but we might as well not exist.

The only other people who will understand how miserable the job is and how terribly you are viewed are your fellow GSAs. Stick together as much as you can. If you are lucky, you will have a good GSTL who will understand how badly the job sucks and how hard everyone else is on the GSAs. If you do, it makes life bearable and you are able to breathe a bit more as you muck your way through the job. If you don't have a supportive GSTL, there is little to live for as a GSA. I get it.

And unfortunately, until stores and management are willing to own up to how badly the GSAs are looked down on, nothing will change.
Click to expand...

At least you have a team to talk too...

- Said every Signing TM ever... Try having literally every TL/most ETL's want something extra out of you every single day.

Hands down at my store Signing is the worst job I work in a 54m+ store and we have Two plano TM's, so you can guess who puts up the signs in this planolationship.
 
After being moved around my store a lot...I have been Photo trained, Guest Service trained, Hardlines trained, and Food Ave trained my ETL HR promised me a GSA job that I've wanted for awhile since I've been with Target for 2 years. I am very excited about this opportunity because leadership supports the GSAs very well at my store and the 2 GSTLs are very reasonable and I know both very well. However, I am a little scared about training because even though I've covered their breaks I'm unsure about a few things like overrides and closing the lanes...any tips or tricks from current GSAs that can give me insight into how training is and the hardest part of the job???
Thanks
 
CashierTM said:
After being moved around my store a lot...I have been Photo trained, Guest Service trained, Hardlines trained, and Food Ave trained my ETL HR promised me a GSA job that I've wanted for awhile since I've been with Target for 2 years. I am very excited about this opportunity because leadership supports the GSAs very well at my store and the 2 GSTLs are very reasonable and I know both very well. However, I am a little scared about training because even though I've covered their breaks I'm unsure about a few things like overrides and closing the lanes...any tips or tricks from current GSAs that can give me insight into how training is and the hardest part of the job???
Thanks
Click to expand...
Here is some info about Gs & gsa.
https://www.thebreakroom.org/forums/guest-service.20/
 
CashierTM said:
After being moved around my store a lot...I have been Photo trained, Guest Service trained, Hardlines trained, and Food Ave trained my ETL HR promised me a GSA job that I've wanted for awhile since I've been with Target for 2 years. I am very excited about this opportunity because leadership supports the GSAs very well at my store and the 2 GSTLs are very reasonable and I know both very well. However, I am a little scared about training because even though I've covered their breaks I'm unsure about a few things like overrides and closing the lanes...any tips or tricks from current GSAs that can give me insight into how training is and the hardest part of the job???
Thanks
Click to expand...
you have the training. its different though being in charge. i covered breaks/lunches a lot and was a fish out of water even with great training. its different making the calls vs just doing what someone said to do for a break/lunch.

closing lanes is easy. overrides, just make sure that they're following procedures. guest service will ask for an override and its for things they shouldn't do. i just asked them what/why are we overriding. it'll be awkward saying no to a guest to their face after an employee said sure we'll do this i just need a manager approval. then you come in and have to say well i'm sorry they said that but i can't.
 
Our GSA's get demoted to cashier if they-

  • Screw around and not stay at the lanes
  • Not motivate red cards/cheer when they do
  • Have cart attendant do their job
  • Not support SCO or GS
  • Ignore change requests from FA,SBX, and CVS
  • Call for backups or call unnecessary back ups
 
Nokiddiegloves said:
Have cart attendant do their job
Click to expand...
That's a first.

I honestly do NOT mind any of my GSAs as of current. Most have done Guest Service/Cashier for more than a year and know what's up. I just wish their memory sufficed more. I sat down and talked to each and every single GSA and GSTL(well not sat down, but talked) about wanting to soon move onto a different Work Center, specifically hardlines, and they all forgot within 10 minutes. I've asked, reminded them, etc etc but with their College and schooling taking up 60% of their brain power it's hard.

I would hate being a GSA, though. So, I can understand, and I don't blame them for anything. I get that they won't remember that I wanna move on from cashiering and get experience on the floor, I get that we need to ask more and more and push more for redcards, and you have a certain goal at the end of your shift at handoff to make and if you don't it reflects poorly upon you instead of your cashiers who aren't asking.

I'll just say a good GSA to me is one that accepted their newfound authoritarian position within the store and works.. not tries... towards the betterment of your cashiers, staying motivated yourself might motivate the other cashiers or at least put a thought in the back of their head saying they need a redcard today.

It's only hard when every cashier at my store including me hates redcards. I hate pushing them, there isn't enough incentive. "Oh I see you spent $200 wanna save $10 real quick?" and it's not the GSAs or GSTLs or anyone's fault in the store.. it's corporate's fault. Even during a week last summer where we offered a free large bag of popcorn from Food Ave upon signing up for the redcard or just for having a redcard I got more redcards than I did in one month.

With Amazon and Walmart starting to become cheaper and offer better deals, Target is kind of falling behind. Back when I was looking for a TV I found a TV at my target that was $430. I went "sweet with my discounts and everything it should all be cheaper for me!!' wrong. Amazon had it for literally $350ish. I ended up saving like $10 with Amazon even with all my discounts applied at Target. Tax included, shipping was free with prime.

I'm kind of off on a ramble but if you do good by your cashiers, your cashiers will do good by you. Make sure SCO has breaks covered etc cash requests are fulfilled, you respond to backups and call off un-needed calls, you work with what you have(say maybe your cart attendant calls in) and see what you can do to really flex your available team.
 
New GSA here and I did not have a phone interview. Maybe some stores run things differently. I did have three different interviews though.:)
 
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