Archived Losing my bale truck

[Going with the Flow]

So now we are losing our bale truck and will be sending out cardboard bales back via the sweep truck. A few questions I have are where do you all store your bales while waiting for sweep day. We have plenty of steel and a huge receiving area but its still going to be a pain. Any ssuggestions on how to make this efficient so sweep day is not a disaster? We can't store them in our old garden center because its on the complete opposite side of the store.

 

[Bosch]

We have stacked them outside on the side of the building when we needed more space than we had inside. Not sure if it was right/wrong but they have been there more than once when I go home.

 

[backroomdude]

Yea, losing mine as well. Sucks and got so much going on I haven't even found space for them yet.

 

[commiecorvus]

They always put them outside at my old store.
Sometimes there would be twelve to fifteen of them out there.
During the winter they would be ice blocks.
The real fun was if someone didn't wire them properly, the cardboard got wet, froze and swelled, then they had to bring it back in for the truck.
BOOM!
One bail exploding all over the loading dock when it hits the door frame.

 

[EMFlow]

I didn't know stores had bale trucks, since I started at my store we send them on the sweep but we do have 2 sweep days (Tues/Fri). Usually we have room to keep them all inside (double stacked), only during 4th qt we put them outside.

 

[cihyfthedoor]

Bale truck? What the hell? Ours always went out on sweeps. $65M store.

It was not possible for us to put them outside, due to the shapes and layouts of things. We double stacked them and left them in the storage trailer (permanently docked trailer at the third dock). My store had 4 sweeps per week, so it wasn't a big deal. At worse, the bales need a couch to crash on for only two days, so to speak.

 

[Going with the Flow]

We won't be putting them outside because we can't even leave vendor pallets outside due to theft. I've been talking to my BR TL and were working on it but we were wondering what other stores do. How many do you have a week? We are a high C volume and have one sweep per week right now. I'd say we make at least 2 bales every truck day (4) and one every non truck day.

 

[cihyfthedoor]

We usually had two from the flow process, and we had a truck everyday. There was usually one that built up from open-hours activities (pushing, salesplanners, plano). Then on p-fresh truck days, which were three times per week, we had a whole f*ing bale of cardboard just from that.

So it varied, but some days it was 3 per 24 hour period, some days it was 4. Which is why my ETL-Replenishment fought the DC so hard to make them give up their stinginess with trailers and let us have a 4th sweep day each week.

 

[backroomdude]

They always put them outside at my old store.
Sometimes there would be twelve to fifteen of them out there.
During the winter they would be ice blocks.
The real fun was if someone didn't wire them properly, the cardboard got wet, froze and swelled, then they had to bring it back in for the truck.
BOOM!
One bail exploding all over the loading dock when it hits the door frame.

Our city ordinance wont let us put them outside. Some city code enforcer came by a few months back ticked off because of a random bread vendor rack sitting outside, gave us 24 hours to remove it or be fined.

 

[PureZero]

Our city ordinance wont let us put them outside. Some city code enforcer came by a few months back ticked off because of a random bread vendor rack sitting outside, gave us 24 hours to remove it or be fined.

Very true. I worked at a store that made us get rid of our outside storage trailers because of city ordinance. That made a nice mess in the backroom for quite awhile!😱

We send our bales out on the sweep truck. Long ago we used to have a third party that came and picked them up. We now just store them on any available steel with an empty spot. We are scheduled for two sweep trucks a week and the bales we send back for each truck can vary between 5 - 12 depending on the season, resets, etc.

 

[Dave Johnson]

ive never even heard of a bale truck... lol.. we've always put them on the sweep truck...

we usually keep the bales around the receiving area, double stacked if need be till sweep day.... it is a pain because you are constantly moving them around and about during different times in receiving when things are going on...

 

[Going with the Flow]

Thanks for the input team!

 

[kingpin003]

We put ours up in the steel so they're out of the way.

 

[DotWarner]

I'm not sure what we do with them at the Wally where I work. I know we store them outside but I'm not sure if they're picked up by the DC or a 3rd party. I do know that one night some local kids were fooling around in the parking lot and set a bunch of the bales on fire.

 

[JC4950]

We send them back on our sweep trailer once a week. We usually make 2 on GM days (3-4 a week) and 1 on FDC days (4 a week). We had taken a few finger aisles out last year and we stack the bales there. We have space for 4 bales on the ground and then double stack them. Once we fill that space the rest move around, we tried triple stacking them but our STL didn't like that. We usually stick the extras between the dock doors and move them as needed. We have 1 dock door we don't use so they sometimes get stacked there, our SFT doesn't like that either because of the weight being stored on the dock plate. It gets to be a mess by the end of the week.

 

[billmoney20]

We had a storage trailer in an extra bay. I am assuming this is what is meant by bale truck. Supplies and bales were thrown on there in between sweeps. Our store was not allowed to leave bales outside either. If that was full of junk, the bales were just double stacked in the extra aisle of steel we had or put up above.

 

[sigma7]

We got approved for a storage trailer at one of our docks after our remodel, but they're taking it away at the end of this month. We've gone back to double stacking our bales and putting them either on the line or at the end of a receiving aisle. We're fairly space constrained, but not space constrained enough it seems.

 

[cihyfthedoor]

We got approved for a storage trailer ... but they're taking it away at the end of this month.

This boils the s*** out of my blood. I was at a high volume, severely space constrained store. I'm talking 16,000 sq.ft. of backroom space or less in a $65M store. We used to have a storage trailer, but then a few years ago they took it away. We had to actually go and perpetually rent a storage trailer from some third party company.

Meanwhile, a few miles away at a store with similar volume to us, but more than TRIPLE the backroom space, has always had this OFFICIAL Target storage trailer permanently docked. It's a real Target trailer, and it even had "Storage Only" painted on it. God my blood still boils when I think about it.

 

[Pflipper1]

We have sweeps 4 days a week so our bails dont add up other than on weekends and we just move them around (usually one or two). Our br is so small that we actually have 10 third party shipping containers behind our store that we store fixtures, seasonal over flow and bulkier stuff like cribs. We had a remodel last October that added "mobile shelfing" to gain us 6% more space and get rid of half the trailers but we still at this point have all 10.

 

[Going with the Flow]

Well according to my brilliant never wrong ETL-LOG and my super intelligent STL and her side kick the ETL-OPS (sarcasm...sorry) the Workbench memo did not apply to our store even though I told them the truck that docks there belongs to an independent carrier that swaps out when full. So I went ahead and ordered a new truck and it just started filling Friday ... we will see what happens next. I will let you all know if there are any new developments.

 

[Unreturnable]

Man do I get jealous of some of your backrooms...my store is right around the $55mil mark in sales with a tiny backroom. We have our bulk steel 100% full every day of the week so we can't put bales there, our newest ETL says it is a fine to put them outside so we can no longer do that (we had been doing that for like six years I was told) - and we generate several bales per day, 4 or 5 on a truck unload. So what we do with our bales between sweeps: we shuffle them around and get miserable. We double-stack them if we can get the stacker near the bales, but most times there's too much backstock, vender merchandise, and unpushed truck pallets in the way, so we can't move anything effectively. We all just sit around and get grumpy at each other, with lots of bales everywhere. Love me some Target.

 

[konk]

Wow. I guess I don't have it so bad. We can put them outside and they get picked up by a third party. Steel is usually only full before a seasonal reset, although we could use a better PIPO system.

 

[Hardlinesmaster]

Man do I get jealous of some of your backrooms...my store is right around the $55mil mark in sales with a tiny backroom. We have our bulk steel 100% full every day of the week so we can't put bales there, our newest ETL says it is a fine to put them outside so we can no longer do that (we had been doing that for like six years I was told) - and we generate several bales per day, 4 or 5 on a truck unload. So what we do with our bales between sweeps: we shuffle them around and get miserable. We double-stack them if we can get the stacker near the bales, but most times there's too much backstock, vender merchandise, and unpushed truck pallets in the way, so we can't move anything effectively. We all just sit around and get grumpy at each other, with lots of bales everywhere. Love me some Target.

I am thinking , we lost bale truck too. I had counted 6 bales sitting in the back room...