Archived How's your softline zone?

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Walmart

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Nov 27, 2015
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Our store is a mess, I do price change and have to scan each rack item individually. Not only is it not zoned, but about 30% of the hanger tag don't match the clothing size. This has been going on for at least 2 years now since our old store-op left. GaHHH....
 
Usually around the mid-day our store would look this way:

RTW: Jeans were recently completely deep zoned, and the folded tables are full right now. Our biggest opportunity is swimwear (Yeah, it would make sense that the folded tables would be worse but that is not the case usually), which is condensed to two racks and a little messy. 9/10 (This zone's location prevents it from being a 10 at any point past 8:30 AM, because it's right by the entrance in our high-volume store, so it starts getting shopped pretty heavily by this point). This is one of our best zones, because after picking up dropped product, foreign, and refolding tables, everything is still usually in the right spot and organised.

NIT: Our biggest opportunities in this zone are in Newborn-Infants. The hanging racks and clearance are pretty messy usually. For the overall zone, I would say it's usually about a 7/10 lately. Toddlers looks nice.

Intimates: Our clearance needs some care.. 🙁 Overall, this zone is decent. 6/10

Activewear: Our back wall folded yoga pants always look messy, even when folded. We have the hanging yoga pants on the back wall organised by size instead of style. It's shoppable somewhat, but it looks kind of silly to me. Leadership doesn't set aside time for anyone to make it organised, so it just has been this way for about a month now. 7/10

Hosiery: Hosiery has a lot of clearance and is the forgotten zone. The shapewear is always mixed up. It's such a small zone, but quite messy. Always. 5/10

Boys: Clearance = 🙁 but 7/10

Girls: Clearance = 🙁 and since this zone faces the checklanes, it gets shopped a little more than Boys so 6/10.

Shoes: Shoes is in a weird PTM-mode right now. Also, rows of clearance.. Definitely not the best zone in Softlines right now. And even with the best night-before zone, by noon it'd be a 5/10..

Menswear: Men's is pretty nice like RTW. The operator half tends to be maintained pretty well, and then another TM zones the other half during the closing shift. 8/10

Accessories: Our VML takes accessories very seriously. "Accessories make or break an outfit" as he would say. 10/10. More often than not, when I run through accessories there's little to no opportunities. Very often. It's awesome.
 
Overall ours is usually decent, but it really depends who you have closing. A lot of our softlines team left over the last few months, new people don't care or don't get it no matter how many times you correct something. (Apparently it is rocket science) If the closing team is me and another TM who knows what they're doing, overall I'd give it 8/10. Shoes is pretty rough right now with the combination of clearance, PTM, and sales the last couple weeks. Intimates clearance is awful because they have it all crammed onto one rack and overflowing into the activewear clearance racks. We've been doing mid-day in RTW and then some days also going through boys, girls, and infants, mostly quick pick ups but focusing on clearance so it doesn't get out of control again. I'm off Monday - Wednesday this week and it''s mostly the newer people closing, so I'm expecting it to be worse when the other good closer and I go back Wednesday.
 
Depends on the closing LOD.
If the sales floor team lead closes it usually looks good because she makes sure there's enough people and she always helps us out at the end of the night. She used to be the softlines team lead back when that was still a thing at my store which helps.
But last weekend this LOD who really doesn't know how softlines works closed and thought we would be okay with only two people there on an extremely busy Saturday night and no one in the fitting room. And then another night when we DID have enough people he forgot to put someone in BGI. The zone looked like absolute shit.
Meanwhile..shoes looks like shit unless it's been reset. It's been that way ever since we got rid of the shoe specialist position
 
It's a hot mess, but that's what happens when you don't schedule appropriately during BTS. I'm embarrassed, but Target doesn't care enough to allocate the salesfloor hours needed to achieve a pleasant shopping experience for their guests so why should I? But I do.
 
To put it nicely, our softlines zone is anywhere between embarrassing and unfathomably deplorable. It's so bad that even the softlines team can't find things sometimes. Of course, it doesn't help much that they're spending the majority of their shifts at the lanes.

Don't even get me started on shoes.
 
RTCry said:
It's a hot mess, but that's what happens when you don't schedule appropriately during BTS. I'm embarrassed, but Target doesn't care enough to allocate the salesfloor hours needed to achieve a pleasant shopping experience for their guests so why should I? But I do.
Click to expand...

Quote for truth. Same in hard lines at my store you can tell what isn't zoned or even more so overnight pushed properly.
 
Ours is bad, because the schedule is bad. The bad ones are activewear, accessories in every department, infant/toddler, swimwear in each dept, boys active, men's and women's jeans, men's pants, underwear walls. Everything else is done well enough that it's not a big problem. I know "everything else" doesn't include that much lol.

Today an etl told me my area looked good and I thought it looked bad enough that I couldn't even pretend to agree with her. I thought it looked horrible. Her frame of reference is what it looked like a few weeks ago, though.
 
I spent 4 hours in shoes today. I give it until tomorrow afternoon before it looks the same as it did before I went through there.
 
Ours is pretty bad and we're at the time of year when everyone's hours are down for SL. I have a pretty open availability and on the new schedule I have 12 hours, I'm beyond pissed.
 
Ours is usually ok other than Shoes. It HAS to be with how many hours we suck away every week to it from huddle and midday. We would often push out 3-4 Z racks for morning huddle and then for midday zone a department or two so it def got attention
 
We're higher volume, so we have our operator, 5 TMs (One in Shoes and Intimates; One in Boys and Girls; One in RTW and Accessories; One in Men's and Infants; One on Go-Backs and Active/Hosiery) for a total of 6 working in Softlines + One TL/ETL as the LOD for just Softlines. For Hardlines there's usually 4 TMs + Electronics so 5 working in Hardlines + One TL/ETL as the LOD who walks Hardlines zones. At the end of the night, the whole team walks the store together before walking to the time clock and we've found last-minute guests, empty packages, and zone opportunities, so that's why they've made the final walk involve the whole team now. A SLTM once found an empty laptop box that had been hidden (not very well) just minutes before. A guest that had fallen asleep under a clearance clothing rack in RTW was found by an LOD in fourth quarter. ._. But we still don't leave until midnight sometimes (11 PM store) and then midday TMs later that week get their shifts cut because of the lack of hours...Grr..
 
Alaska 5000 said:
How many team members does everyone have closing? We had 2, fitting room and team member.
Click to expand...

Closing we have one for the fitting room and 2 wave zoning, unless they pull one from softlines to cover a call in somewhere else. When that happens the fitting room tm and the other softlines tm will wave zone and just try to get the fitting room as clean as possible.
 
Alaska 5000 said:
How many team members does everyone have closing? We had 2, fitting room and team member.
Click to expand...
That never goes well at my store. It's a smaller store but softlines is the most heavily shopped area D:
Usually we have one in the fitting room and two for the zone (often the fitting room tm will get mens/shoes and sometimes infant hardlines) and then the other TMs get BGI/Activewear and RTW/Intimates/Accessories. On weekends we have 3 people zoning and one in the fitting room and if it's really busy we will have 4 zoners.
One time we had a closing LOD who knew next to nothing about softlines and scheduled only two closers (and no one in the fitting room) on an extremely busy Saturday night. That went as well as you'd expect hahaha
 
We are smaller too. 1 fitting room and 2 zoners. When I close LOD, I zone SL, so the fitting room doesn't have to.
 
I think my store is somewhat high volume, but I don't remember the letter or whatever the new target lingo is for it.

store closes at 11 everyday for the summer. On weekends we usually have 2 people staying until 11. The fitting room attendant is usually scheduled until 10 or 10:30. Based on current sl trends in the store, fr won't be able to help out on the floor, though. During less busy times, they would clean up rtw clearance, accessories and maybe help fold. We might also have a sl floor person or two who's there until 9 or 10.

On weekdays, usually 1 on the floor until close and 1 in the FR until 10 or 1030. There might be someone else on the floor who's there until 9 or 10. I don't work in one of those stores that makes TMs stay after close to get a perfect zone.
 
The etl I had when I started (before they combined the sl and hl etl positions in my store) was amazing af. And our closing nights were the same for a long time. She'd fold almost all the tables, because she was just so fast. I always had super clean closes because of that. I could get so much done with her help. Back then I'd close with just her pretty often. It was really dope.
 
soyaxo said:
Usually around the mid-day our store would look this way:

RTW: Jeans were recently completely deep zoned, and the folded tables are full right now. Our biggest opportunity is swimwear (Yeah, it would make sense that the folded tables would be worse but that is not the case usually), which is condensed to two racks and a little messy. 9/10 (This zone's location prevents it from being a 10 at any point past 8:30 AM, because it's right by the entrance in our high-volume store, so it starts getting shopped pretty heavily by this point). This is one of our best zones, because after picking up dropped product, foreign, and refolding tables, everything is still usually in the right spot and organised.

NIT: Our biggest opportunities in this zone are in Newborn-Infants. The hanging racks and clearance are pretty messy usually. For the overall zone, I would say it's usually about a 7/10 lately. Toddlers looks nice.

Intimates: Our clearance needs some care.. 🙁 Overall, this zone is decent. 6/10

Activewear: Our back wall folded yoga pants always look messy, even when folded. We have the hanging yoga pants on the back wall organised by size instead of style. It's shoppable somewhat, but it looks kind of silly to me. Leadership doesn't set aside time for anyone to make it organised, so it just has been this way for about a month now. 7/10

Hosiery: Hosiery has a lot of clearance and is the forgotten zone. The shapewear is always mixed up. It's such a small zone, but quite messy. Always. 5/10

Boys: Clearance = 🙁 but 7/10

Girls: Clearance = 🙁 and since this zone faces the checklanes, it gets shopped a little more than Boys so 6/10.

Shoes: Shoes is in a weird PTM-mode right now. Also, rows of clearance.. Definitely not the best zone in Softlines right now. And even with the best night-before zone, by noon it'd be a 5/10..

Menswear: Men's is pretty nice like RTW. The operator half tends to be maintained pretty well, and then another TM zones the other half during the closing shift. 8/10

Accessories: Our VML takes accessories very seriously. "Accessories make or break an outfit" as he would say. 10/10. More often than not, when I run through accessories there's little to no opportunities. Very often. It's awesome.
Click to expand...

I have a feeling we are going to see a MAJOR re-haul of our shoe department come 2017, borderline Remodel.
 
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