Archived How is Softlines holding up in your store?

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antivibe

antivibe

Salesfloor TL
Joined
Nov 2, 2012
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417
The August playbook states that these last weeks of August are the 4th quarter for softlines.

I can honestly say that I have been feeling it. My store has huge amounts of clearance and not enough high capacities. My zones and VAs are a mess. My store doesn't POG shoes, instead we got rid of labels and fit every shoe out on the salesfloor. It is a disaster to say the least, especially with all the clearance.

As the softlines TL I feel like hiding in the mountain of reshop.

How are you guys holding up?
 
Lol. I opened a few days ago and my stl was like "hey how's softlines?" and I laughed obnoxiously then told him it looked like no one worked (on reshop, specifically) the day before. He does a thing where he asks for status reports. That day there was like 5 Zs and 4 (sorted) carts outside of the fitting room.

But umm, Our surveys until recently were mainly about the mess so we're sorta focusing on that more than anything, so the zone has been excellent, but then there's tons of reshop.
 
The three of us that have been here longest know the play and arrange ourselves accordingly. When the newbies are working though it's a mess. We never leave reshop and the zones are done to the best of our ability. This year hasn't gotten bad YET but the time is coming usually the end of august looks like a hurricane and earthquake went at it on the floor pads :/
 
They schedule all the newbs together!? That seems like a bad idea.. Not that my store is a great example of smart scheduling.
 
Carts of re wrap, miss matched shoes, carts of clearance re shop, tables in a heap, clothes on the floor, have been with this company for decades and have never seen anything like what is going on now! Have not seen a good recovery from the previous day in many months. Management is more concerned about payroll while the whole store is going to hell.
 
We have so many racks of clearance right now.
One of our SFTLs talked about one year when they had so much apparel clearance that corp had a sale where they took an additional 30% off just to clean house.
Problem was that most of it was hideous & just waiting for a salvage date.
 
redeye58 said:
We have so many racks of clearance right now.
One of our SFTLs talked about one year when they had so much apparel clearance that corp had a sale where they took an additional 30% off just to clean house.
Problem was that most of it was hideous & just waiting for a salvage date.
Click to expand...

Most stuff goes clearance because it's ugly lol. Then there's the few things that go clearance because they were cute, but they weren't 29.99 cute (or whatever the item was overpriced at). This year instead of doing the sale on clearance, they've done 20% off clearance on cartwheel on 2 or 3 different occasions. Not everyone is willing or able to get cartwheel going, so it doesn't work as well as a normal sale. Oh and one week kids and baby clearance had a coupon in the ad, or you could text for it.

I had to be the cartwheel peddler the first week of 20% off women's clearance this summer and some of the women didn't have smartphones or they didn't wanna give up any information in order to sign up. I helped a lot of people sign up and use the coupon that day, but it took me away from actual work and I didn't do it all week.
 
lookndwnonya said:
Carts of re wrap, miss matched shoes, carts of clearance re shop, tables in a heap, clothes on the floor, have been with this company for decades and have never seen anything like what is going on now! Have not seen a good recovery from the previous day in many months. Management is more concerned about payroll while the whole store is going to hell.
Click to expand...

I've been in softlines for less than 6 months, so this is my first time experiencing summer traffic. I'm so glad that swim is finally going away. I'm down to one convertible.
 
sher said:
They schedule all the newbs together!? That seems like a bad idea.. Not that my store is a great example of smart scheduling.
Click to expand...

I don't know about other stores but that's all that's left at my store. I'm the last one standing and I've been at spot for a couple of years now. (Our team lead transferred from another spot but has never worked softlines. -_- COOL. )

Softlines is a mess at our store. No one gets to the fitting room until the afternoon so it's always a mess because the closer are told to super zone every night. So either the fitting room stays a complete mess 24/7 or our zone goes to shit. There is not in between. We're way behind on adjacencies and pogs because they have brand people helping with fitting room and zone. And apparently no one can take care of rewrap so we're drowning in it. Basically I want to rip my hair out.
 
We have tons of clearance too and have had people pulled from other work centers just to sort the Fitting Room and put away reshop. For their entire shift. Why not just schedule someone for FR? Oh because you want to use those hours for a closer instead of using salesfloor hours for a closer.

Adjacencies are near impossible because they don't account for you needing 6 high capacities in RTW for clearance alone. We've had to get pretty creative.
 
Thus is my first time as a softlines team leader. I have always been hardlines... Our softlines is a big fat mess! I hate mess and I hate that I can't complete a perfect adjacency because of clearance. It's everywhere and it seems to be growing. I wish cartwheel or the store would add another % off coupon!!! Our fitting room has lines all the time and there is always an overflowing cart of reshop. We usually have semi green zones at night but the reshop stays heavy. We only have one Z rack at the fitting room so when it gets full we have the whole team come back and knock it out. I am looking forward to the day we are slow and I can actually spend time with my adjacencys and merchandising. Stay strong softliners.
 
Amly_221B said:
I don't know about other stores but that's all that's left at my store. I'm the last one standing and I've been at spot for a couple of years now. (Our team lead transferred from another spot but has never worked softlines. -_- COOL. )
Click to expand...

We have one newbie at my store and two people who don't primarily work sl. Half of our sl team has been with the store for a decade or more. I know all the younger people are looking around for jobs, though. We'll probably have a mini exodus soon.

babysitrmk said:
We only have one Z rack at the fitting room so when it gets full we have the whole team come back and knock it out. I am looking forward to the day we are slow and I can actually spend time with my adjacencys and merchandising. Stay strong softliners.
Click to expand...

We usually only have that little rack for sorting rtw, but then when there's no one on the floor and things get too packed on that rack and the handlebars of the carts for the other depts, we end up grabbing empty Zs from the back. My TLs don't really reshop. One does on the night's where she's closing. Otherwise, seems like they're always doing an adjacency or some other project.. or the sr one is LOD-ing.
 
Sometimes I feel like all I do is reshop. I will attempt to work on my adj but by lunch the z-bar and closet are full. I usually only do reshop when I close unless I have to take an area to zone. Hell even before I was a softlines tl I did sl reshop on my closing night. Oh reshop how I loathe the!
 
sher said:
We usually only have that little rack for sorting rtw, but then when there's no one on the floor and things get too packed on that rack and the handlebars of the carts for the other depts, we end up grabbing empty Zs from the back. My TLs don't really reshop. One does on the night's where she's closing. Otherwise, seems like they're always doing an adjacency or some other project.. or the sr one is LOD-ing.
Click to expand...

Very few of the TLs reshop anywhere, but SLTLs seem to be particularly...well...ha.

I always feel bad for the Softlines team at my store, because about half of them do barely anything, and the other half is always working 3x as hard to catch up. Good luck to ya!
 
Last week, after not getting any reshop from guest services in nearly a day, I took back a sorted/folded cart of infants, shoes and men's. The soft lines person told me not to bring any more back. I tried not to laugh and told her I would put the rest at the lanes with the hardlines strays. Sorry...I know they're drowning, and I feel bad, but eventually it needs to come out of guest services!
 
Retail Girl said:
Last week, after not getting any reshop from guest services in nearly a day, I took back a sorted/folded cart of infants, shoes and men's. The soft lines person told me not to bring any more back. I tried not to laugh and told her I would put the rest at the lanes with the hardlines strays. Sorry...I know they're drowning, and I feel bad, but eventually it needs to come out of guest services!
Click to expand...
Plus, you had sorted & folded it, too.
 
squirrely said:
We have tons of clearance too and have had people pulled from other work centers just to sort the Fitting Room and put away reshop. For their entire shift. Why not just schedule someone for FR? Oh because you want to use those hours for a closer instead of using salesfloor hours for a closer.

Adjacencies are near impossible because they don't account for you needing 6 high capacities in RTW for clearance alone. We've had to get pretty creative.
Click to expand...

Only six? Ive got five sections of the back wall double hung plus 7 high capacity racks. It is insane.. and 2 weeks out theres another 2000 firsts
 
our softlines is such a mess... so much is in the wrong spot and the guest say "oh that is supposed to be..." I change it but I really think the guests lie.
 
babysitrmk said:
Sometimes I feel like all I do is reshop. I will attempt to work on my adj but by lunch the z-bar and closet are full. I usually only do reshop when I close unless I have to take an area to zone. Hell even before I was a softlines tl I did sl reshop on my closing night. Oh reshop how I loathe the!
Click to expand...

I schedule TMs specifically for VA but honestly the reshop has been pretty bad. I've had to pull them out of VA to work on reshop or to recover areas. This month has been bad for VAs. I have my team just focus on the highlights of the VA and then superzone the rest - ignoring the book. Luckily my DTL and GVP haven't walked softlines, they always walk the VA and have a fit if something is out of place.
 
antivibe said:
I schedule TMs specifically for VA but honestly the reshop has been pretty bad. I've had to pull them out of VA to work on reshop or to recover areas. This month has been bad for VAs. I have my team just focus on the highlights of the VA and then superzone the rest - ignoring the book. Luckily my DTL and GVP haven't walked softlines, they always walk the VA and have a fit if something is out of place.
Click to expand...
As someone who does the VA, that annoys me. If we had the correct fixtures that the VA calls for, then everything would look perfect. Half the time I set the VA and half the product hasn't even arrived yet and flow will put the new product wherever they feel like. I've told them to please check the VA whenever they have new product, but half the time they don't.
 
What's up with the VA's missing the ism picture? It's a lot easier to visually see what sign goes up where instead of searching for the barcode numbers!!!
 
I think my store is doing pretty well right now. We still have tons of clearance but there was a doable amount of reshop when I left and everything looked nice. Well, the area I worked in did *hair flip*

I probably just jinxed it, though.
 
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