Is this Real Life? (A Market vent thread)

[qmosqueen]

So you say the solution is to kill Kroger and Safeway? (because the other wont happen.)

No Kroger or Safeway in my area for about 100 miles.

 

[Flow Warrior]

No Kroger or Safeway in my area for about 100 miles.

and there you go.

 

[groceryteamlead]

You have days when you have no FDC trailers. Lucky you!

You prob get smaller trucks though which is nice, is most of your stuff truck to shelf?

 

[groceryteamlead]

Is C&S a third-party food vendor for Target? They operate east and west coast stores, right? How is the quality of the produce from them?

yeah they're 3rd party, the stuff I get sometimes is just like wtf

 

[groceryteamlead]

Look we we got today, 3 days before mother’s day

Nothing says Mother’s Day like 360 Tulips.

I hate these flowers.

Was it just me or did you also get the worlds shittiest flowers, I mean I was glad we got flowers a little later hoping they wouldnt go as bad, but these fuckers went bad and droopy lmfao. I qmosed like 50. such a waste

 

[groceryteamlead]

So most of pfresh gets a reset this week.

Anyone else have to deal with squeezing 20 DPCIs into the fresh chicken bunker. We have new Perdue chicken. The old market pantry chicken breast of $5.72 for 2 lbs is now replaced with per lb crap.
Be careful I had to write on the shelf labels “/lbs”
Or guest would want a 8 dollar package of chicken for 2.99.

Also my whole produce wall from berries down to salads gets reset. I haven’t tackled that yet.

I didnt get to check the lay out yet but target always fucks up the bunker, Like why cant you guys get placement right to coordinate with labels and facings lol

 

[YoNanas]

Honestly? yes. I worked at a grocery store and its takes twice as long. I did dairy and I hated yogurt wall and the cheese wall. Why because those always sent dates that I would have to remove the entire product to put in the fresh. So its not that TMs dont care its they arent given enough time to care.

I'd rather do it the right way and save myself from a potential lawsuit or having a failed inspection and get the managers on my ass. We actually have fixtures that make it easier to FIFO but team members don't care.

 

[YoNanas]

Was it just me or did you also get the worlds shittiest flowers, I mean I was glad we got flowers a little later hoping they wouldnt go as bad, but these fuckers went bad and droopy lmfao. I qmosed like 50. such a waste

Shitty flowers at my end too. Like what is the point of Target selling flowers? Nobody really buys them to begin with, even when they don't look shitty.

 

[YoNanas]

yeah they're 3rd party, the stuff I get sometimes is just like wtf

My veggie trays come from C & S. It is listed as the vendor for them.

 

[YoNanas]

no scales at the checklanes. they come in already weighed at different prices. If they go on sale as per lb, I won't put up the sale sign, cause i don't have time to re-weigh them all.
maybe just put a 2 dollar off sticker on them.

Same shit here. And I still didn't get the new summer stickers.

 

[aetius27]

Hi everyone I'm new to this but have been working in pfresh for the last 2 years and everything just seems like it's going deeper in the pits than before. How many people are typically in your pfresh team like how many people are pushing the trucks because for the last few months, my store went from having 3 people pushing 400+ trucks to just 1 person pushing the same amount and is expected to finish everything everyday by noon and I just don't think it's possible

 

[zoned2deep]

In all honesty unlocating your produce, ambient , and eat rooms are best because they need to be rotated. As for dairy only locate casepacks in my view and then keep freezer located. We unlocated everything which is nice because we dont have to pull or backstock but keep the floor full is alot harder unless you have alot of hours. I use to work in a store where they were the first to do this and we had to constantly pour in extra hours. I felt that we were better off keep it located but I understand why they thought it was a good idea to unlocate it. I wanna relocate my freezer but my etl and stl are really avoiding it.
To keep up you have too push the pallets you get and on non truck days you must challenge your racks or you're screwed and backstock will build up and the floor will be light or empty like mine right now.

Yeah, I understand the reasons for unlocating the backrooms, I believe most grocery stores use that approach. But if you are 4+ pallets behind in C&S and 6+ uboats behind in dry, there's no way in hell you are going to be able to challenge the metros. So unlocating the backrooms for us just means we aren't being forced to pull any of the product by autofills and CAFs, so now it can all just sit back there and rot.

My STL has recently been pushing for us to push C&S pallets selectively, to sort the outs from the pallets and push those first. Well, it turns out that when you have several pallets of C&S that arrived on Thursday and are still sitting in there on Sunday, almost all of it are outs! But at least the STL can pretend he is somehow problem-solving by telling us to spend extra time trying to assess which specific 4 ft sections are low and sort through C&S pallets to create inefficient disorganized uboats.

Multiple ETLs and Sr. TLs have said to Market TMs pushing C&S: "Well, you should be able to get it all done, you've got two people helping you!" Like, you understand this job used to be done by a team of 8-10 people working for 4-6 hours in the early morning before the store opens??? (Those numbers might be off a little, I almost never work opening Market shifts so I was rarely around when flow was working in the old system.) But if you allocate 3 people to work for 8 hours (and that's when you are lucky), at a time when the store is open, and TMs working C&S are having to cover Hardlines, back up Starbucks for long periods of time, etc., SPOILERS: IT WON'T GET DONE.

Leadership has a wildly skewed idea of what kind of workload Market has, exacerbated by the "out of sight, out of mind" effect caused by the fact that they almost never look inside the backroom coolers.

As for smart huddles, it's true, every time we *have* been caught up in the last 6+ months, it's because there was a big smart huddle and we've gotten lucky in other ways (no callouts, etc.). Usually it's been because things have gotten so catastrophic that even the leadership has taken notice, or because there's a food holiday about to come up, or because there's a visit. But that's not a real solution. All it does is reset things, and a backlog immediately starts accumulating again, because the system is fundamentally broken. After all, every day that a pallet of C&S sits untouched in the backroom is missed sales and one day closer to expiring.

I talked to an Uber driver who worked as a consultant for grocery stories, he would go in and help make their receiving and stocking processes more efficient, to minimize the time product spends languishing in the backroom. When I told him about the situation at my store, he was honestly shocked, he thought it was absurd and way outside of the norm, compared to the companies he had consulted for. This. is. not. normal. This is not how you run a grocery department.

 

[Planosss]

Yeah, I understand the reasons for unlocating the backrooms, I believe most grocery stores use that approach. But if you are 4+ pallets behind in C&S and 6+ uboats behind in dry, there's no way in hell you are going to be able to challenge the metros. So unlocating the backrooms for us just means we aren't being forced to pull any of the product by autofills and CAFs, so now it can all just sit back there and rot.

My STL has recently been pushing for us to push C&S pallets selectively, to sort the outs from the pallets and push those first. Well, it turns out that when you have several pallets of C&S that arrived on Thursday and are still sitting in there on Sunday, almost all of it are outs! But at least the STL can pretend he is somehow problem-solving by telling us to spend extra time trying to assess which specific 4 ft sections are low and sort through C&S pallets to create inefficient disorganized uboats.

Multiple ETLs and Sr. TLs have said to Market TMs pushing C&S: "Well, you should be able to get it all done, you've got two people helping you!" Like, you understand this job used to be done by a team of 8-10 people working for 4-6 hours in the early morning before the store opens??? (Those numbers might be off a little, I almost never work opening Market shifts so I was rarely around when flow was working in the old system.) But if you allocate 3 people to work for 8 hours (and that's when you are lucky), at a time when the store is open, and TMs working C&S are having to cover Hardlines, back up Starbucks for long periods of time, etc., SPOILERS: IT WON'T GET DONE.

Leadership has a wildly skewed idea of what kind of workload Market has, exacerbated by the "out of sight, out of mind" effect caused by the fact that they almost never look inside the backroom coolers.

As for smart huddles, it's true, every time we *have* been caught up in the last 6+ months, it's because there was a big smart huddle and we've gotten lucky in other ways (no callouts, etc.). Usually it's been because things have gotten so catastrophic that even the leadership has taken notice, or because there's a food holiday about to come up, or because there's a visit. But that's not a real solution. All it does is reset things, and a backlog immediately starts accumulating again, because the system is fundamentally broken. After all, every day that a pallet of C&S sits untouched in the backroom is missed sales and one day closer to expiring.

I talked to an Uber driver who worked as a consultant for grocery stories, he would go in and help make their receiving and stocking processes more efficient, to minimize the time product spends languishing in the backroom. When I told him about the situation at my store, he was honestly shocked, he thought it was absurd and way outside of the norm, compared to the companies he had consulted for. This. is. not. normal. This is not how you run a grocery department.

Spot has figured out a way to be more profitable, it has also discovered a great source of waste. Its employees.
See if spot doesn’t pay alot of employees, they are saving money and thus being profitable.
Those who spot does employ are modern day slaves, getting paid just enough to eat and have shelter. With no prospect of achieving anything in life.
This new business model will surely sink Target. The writing is on the wall, its only a matter of time. We all see it during our shifts, that things are only going downhill everyday , with no prospect of improvement at all.

 

[aetius27]

Yeah, I understand the reasons for unlocating the backrooms, I believe most grocery stores use that approach. But if you are 4+ pallets behind in C&S and 6+ uboats behind in dry, there's no way in hell you are going to be able to challenge the metros. So unlocating the backrooms for us just means we aren't being forced to pull any of the product by autofills and CAFs, so now it can all just sit back there and rot.

My STL has recently been pushing for us to push C&S pallets selectively, to sort the outs from the pallets and push those first. Well, it turns out that when you have several pallets of C&S that arrived on Thursday and are still sitting in there on Sunday, almost all of it are outs! But at least the STL can pretend he is somehow problem-solving by telling us to spend extra time trying to assess which specific 4 ft sections are low and sort through C&S pallets to create inefficient disorganized uboats.

Multiple ETLs and Sr. TLs have said to Market TMs pushing C&S: "Well, you should be able to get it all done, you've got two people helping you!" Like, you understand this job used to be done by a team of 8-10 people working for 4-6 hours in the early morning before the store opens??? (Those numbers might be off a little, I almost never work opening Market shifts so I was rarely around when flow was working in the old system.) But if you allocate 3 people to work for 8 hours (and that's when you are lucky), at a time when the store is open, and TMs working C&S are having to cover Hardlines, back up Starbucks for long periods of time, etc., SPOILERS: IT WON'T GET DONE.

Leadership has a wildly skewed idea of what kind of workload Market has, exacerbated by the "out of sight, out of mind" effect caused by the fact that they almost never look inside the backroom coolers.

As for smart huddles, it's true, every time we *have* been caught up in the last 6+ months, it's because there was a big smart huddle and we've gotten lucky in other ways (no callouts, etc.). Usually it's been because things have gotten so catastrophic that even the leadership has taken notice, or because there's a food holiday about to come up, or because there's a visit. But that's not a real solution. All it does is reset things, and a backlog immediately starts accumulating again, because the system is fundamentally broken. After all, every day that a pallet of C&S sits untouched in the backroom is missed sales and one day closer to expiring.

I talked to an Uber driver who worked as a consultant for grocery stories, he would go in and help make their receiving and stocking processes more efficient, to minimize the time product spends languishing in the backroom. When I told him about the situation at my store, he was honestly shocked, he thought it was absurd and way outside of the norm, compared to the companies he had consulted for. This. is. not. normal. This is not how you run a grocery department.

My store has become the exact same way as you just described. Almost all the ETLs have thrown "well you should be able to get it all done, you've got two people helping you!" and it irritates me to no end. I have no idea what's going on with their logic but our market team used to run both dry and pfresh with just 3 people in each section working full shifts from 4 am but ever since we got a new STL a few months ago, all of that changed and we're reduced to having just 1 person pushing the truck that's between 3-5 pallets while dry market got taken by the overnight team and still having at least 4 people working there. We don't have anybody to cover for us or help us when we're behind so once we fall behind for one truck; we're screwed for the rest of the week.

I'm usually the one opening in pfresh and is the one expected to push the whole truck by noon, backstock and do the order on top of whatever whimsical desire that comes across any LOD's mind like push reshop or zone an area unrelated to market or stop and clean a spill on the floor etc. I barely have enough time to finish the truck 100% and do the order before my time is up so it is usually up to the closer to somehow purge the dairy cooler, receive the truck and break it down for the next opener. I don't think anyone has even touched freezer in a while because it's so jammed packed with uboats of backstock and pallets of push along with the metros and racks.

None of this is working out very well because we're getting burned out fast and the workload just ends up piling on each other but no one is listening to our complaints or even trying to lessen the load by adding 1 more person so we can finish sooner and start doing other things on the list. Steritech is going to hit us pretty soon and I'm sure we're going to get a red on that based on how much there is to do. We're just waiting for the other shoe to drop at this point

 

[zoned2deep]

Oh yeah, we've gotten yellow on our last several Steritech visits, and that's only because of cutting corners and such (like one TM quickly falsifying cleaning records a few minutes before the Steritech guy looks at the binder), we deserved to get red, I think.

Fortunately, I'm going to be going back to school this fall, I got a scholarship so my tuition and living expenses will be covered.

 

[zoned2deep]

Spot has figured out a way to be more profitable, it has also discovered a great source of waste. Its employees.
See if spot doesn’t pay alot of employees, they are saving money and thus being profitable.
Those who spot does employ are modern day slaves, getting paid just enough to eat and have shelter. With no prospect of achieving anything in life.
This new business model will surely sink Target. The writing is on the wall, its only a matter of time. We all see it during our shifts, that things are only going downhill everyday , with no prospect of improvement at all.

I mean, I'm glad that Target is increasing base pay.

It seems to me there are two main possibilities:
1) The changes to Market were always intended to be a way to justify huge cuts to payroll by pretending that the new system represented a massive increase in efficiency. (I do genuinely believe that this way of running Market would be better... if they actually provided the necessary payroll. On paper it all makes sense. But all along I knew that if they only used it to justify deep cuts to payroll, it would be a dumpster fire no matter what.)
2) Corporate intended to change Market in order to run it better, but when the pressure from WalMart and the overall economy forced Target to finally start paying their TMs more, suddenly the math no longer added up. Rather than significantly increase the costs of operating under the new model, they had to make deep payroll cuts to Market that they did not originally intend to make. In other words, the sacrificed their specific goal of making Market run better in service of increasing base pay company-wide, rather than just do both simultaneously.

I'm curious what y'all think about that.

 

[Shadowski]

The day of reckoning has arrived.

There was a 7 hour power outage today.... and tomorrow we must purge the floor (all out of temp), purge the coolers/freezers to replenish, receive a food truck (with frozen), do CAF, and still zone at the end of the night. Oh, and there was leftover push in the ambient room because everything stopped to try and save the food on the floor.

I have 4 TMs scheduled all day including myself. Help me...........

Positive things: My DTL has written me a blank check to get team in and staying past for the moment, and out backroom cooler/freezer stayed in temp along with all of frozen on the floor. And we somehow saved Milk.

Pray for us.....

 

[Shadowski]

Oh yeah, we've gotten yellow on our last several Steritech visits, and that's only because of cutting corners and such (like one TM quickly falsifying cleaning records a few minutes before the Steritech guy looks at the binder), we deserved to get red, I think.

Fortunately, I'm going to be going back to school this fall, I got a scholarship so my tuition and living expenses will be covered.

The idea that we can get all the cleaning done on shifts is a joke. I only get 5 hours for a PA every day, as the rest go for a single TM to do CAF, a TM to do the food truck, and if I am lucky, 2 to do the Dry truck from the morning including unload. I dump and refill my cleaning tote when another store tells us Steritech is in the area. We never get a chance to clean. And the PMT-BP is up our PMT's ass to make Market clean the milk coolers daily. Fucking not possible. We're lucky to get the truck/CAF done in time to get a zone done which our DTL is always in our face to get done.

 

[aetius27]

The idea that we can get all the cleaning done on shifts is a joke. I only get 5 hours for a PA every day, as the rest go for a single TM to do CAF, a TM to do the food truck, and if I am lucky, 2 to do the Dry truck from the morning including unload. I dump and refill my cleaning tote when another store tells us Steritech is in the area. We never get a chance to clean. And the PMT-BP is up our PMT's ass to make Market clean the milk coolers daily. Fucking not possible. We're lucky to get the truck/CAF done in time to get a zone done which our DTL is always in our face to get done.

We only get either 4 hours or 5 hours 45 min to do our shifts as a whole and that's barely enough time to finish our truck push and backstock; zone while we push so at the very least it won't look all that bad until guests come in and ruin it all in a matter of minutes. I think my TL has pretty much given up on the thought of even trying to keep up with the cleaning at this point since we're so short on hours that she has to get involved with everything while we're all getting chewed out by our ETL and STL for not meeting their standards. The struggle is real...I'm tired of them asking every single fucking day "are you going to finish everything by 12?"

 

[BackroomBear]

The day of reckoning has arrived.

There was a 7 hour power outage today.... and tomorrow we must purge the floor (all out of temp), purge the coolers/freezers to replenish, receive a food truck (with frozen), do CAF, and still zone at the end of the night. Oh, and there was leftover push in the ambient room because everything stopped to try and save the food on the floor.

I have 4 TMs scheduled all day including myself. Help me...........

Positive things: My DTL has written me a blank check to get team in and staying past for the moment, and out backroom cooler/freezer stayed in temp along with all of frozen on the floor. And we somehow saved Milk.

Pray for us.....

They can write off the hours spent on this stuff to insurance, so a wise STL/ETL will call all TMs available and use them to pull all out of temp items and refill, maybe even to a state better than before. So they really should be calling an all hands on deck so they can take advantage of those "free" hours.

 

[Billybobjoe]

Oh yeah, we've gotten yellow on our last several Steritech visits, and that's only because of cutting corners and such (like one TM quickly falsifying cleaning records a few minutes before the Steritech guy looks at the binder), we deserved to get red, I think.

Fortunately, I'm going to be going back to school this fall, I got a scholarship so my tuition and living expenses will be covered.

Ours was worse. We had team members skipping their breaks, hitting their 5ths and doing a punch correction so it wouldn’t look like they did. STL knows about it and nobody cares because we get green.

Also these same TMs worked 1 hr off the clock when hour cuts were really bad and they’d try to talk me into it. Hell no.

 

[Greenandred]

Heard today that TINV is no more. Ours was coming up but it was canceled. Did anyone else hear this? What would replace it? Hire an outside company like REGIS to come in and do it? Seems like a dumb cost cutting move.

 

[qmosqueen]

Heard today that TINV is no more. Ours was coming up but it was canceled. Did anyone else hear this? What would replace it? Hire an outside company like REGIS to come in and do it? Seems like a dumb cost cutting move.

haven't heard this yet, ours was this past April 23, 2018, So we aka I just did it about 5 weeks ago.
I am guessing the Audit app and doing research in the pfresh valley every day will take this place.

I check about once a week and qmos aka toss a bunch of salads, bananas, apples, berries that are off with the on hand numbers.
I also check the fresh meat and chicken almost every other day to make sure the on hand numbers are accurate. If they are off i find it better to qmos those instead of research.

 

[pfreshdude]

I mean, I'm glad that Target is increasing base pay.

It seems to me there are two main possibilities:
1) The changes to Market were always intended to be a way to justify huge cuts to payroll by pretending that the new system represented a massive increase in efficiency. (I do genuinely believe that this way of running Market would be better... if they actually provided the necessary payroll. On paper it all makes sense. But all along I knew that if they only used it to justify deep cuts to payroll, it would be a dumpster fire no matter what.)
2) Corporate intended to change Market in order to run it better, but when the pressure from WalMart and the overall economy forced Target to finally start paying their TMs more, suddenly the math no longer added up. Rather than significantly increase the costs of operating under the new model, they had to make deep payroll cuts to Market that they did not originally intend to make. In other words, the sacrificed their specific goal of making Market run better in service of increasing base pay company-wide, rather than just do both simultaneously.

I'm curious what y'all think about that.

Totally agree with number 1. Ive said that to my coworkers..The process is good....if you get hours for it. My problem with this process is trucks take forever at our store. We are a fairly lower volume store and today we had 500 piecees of dry market push and the last C&S was 600 pieces. It takes ALOT of time and payroll to push, zone, research and backstock that shit

 

[pfreshdude]

The idea that we can get all the cleaning done on shifts is a joke. I only get 5 hours for a PA every day, as the rest go for a single TM to do CAF, a TM to do the food truck, and if I am lucky, 2 to do the Dry truck from the morning including unload. I dump and refill my cleaning tote when another store tells us Steritech is in the area. We never get a chance to clean. And the PMT-BP is up our PMT's ass to make Market clean the milk coolers daily. Fucking not possible. We're lucky to get the truck/CAF done in time to get a zone done which our DTL is always in our face to get done.

I always laugh when cleaning is brought up. Im just like...seriously? You gonna give me the hours to clean then since we cant even get #%#% CAFs pulled since the trucks are taking almost ALL of our time