There's a whole lot Target needs to do...
We do about 25% of our SFS yearly sales between Thanksgiving and the Thursday after Thanksgiving. Cramming that much into 7 days is just asking for things to go wrong. Target encourages this, too, with their cyber Monday and Black Friday advertising, encouraging people to do their online shopping one one single day of the year. Then acting surprised when stores can't keep up with the demand, which is about 30 times busier than normal.
Needing to hire seasonal people isn't a problem in itself, but throwing a new person onto the SFS team on cyber Monday is unfair to both them and their trainer. For the new TM it's obviously not fair because they have an incredibly steep learning curve and most people are too busy to help them. The trainer is likely one of the more experienced TMs, so having one or more trainees will slow them down tremendously. I also prefer to have pickers to have at least 2 sales floor shifts and at least experience backstocking. Having to explain about planograms, backroom locations, upper/lower case stock, and all that in addition to packing is simply too much to cover in one day.
Do I even need to go into how inefficient the picking process is? With over 2000 items to gather, why does it seem to do a selection from every area in the store? Why not pull out all the single orders from one area and batch them together? If 100 of those 2000 items are from section A, make 3 batches of around 33 items each. Batch all single softlines items together (and add a couple bucks to the paycheck to the poor sap who gets this one). So much time is wasted trying to move on the floor, especially when people block aisles with carts / bodies / children. I'm genuinely curious how long a 30 item batch takes to pick in the larger, busier stores in December.
Leadership is a problem too, and I'm sure my store is not unique in this regard. My store put the plano TL in charge of SFS despite him saying that he didn't want the position. So far he has done nothing relating to SFS besides maybe scheduling, but I think the BR TL or Log-ETL does that. The obvious choice of temporary TL would have been me since I have the most experience, and all seasonal TMs and most of the regular TMs agree. Most of the ones who don't are already Sr.TLs, and that's mostly because they think that they should be the ones in charge back there despite their only experience on SFS is packing. Meaning they don't know how many supplies to order, how to fix errors, a good ratio of pickers to packers, or anything of the like. (This was apparent because when I took a week off once, when I got back a Sr.TL had ordered 1 of everything on the audit form. 1 of each box pallet, 1 box of collates, 1 box of WAT tape, etc...). You cannot have leaders arguing over processes, and especially shouldn't have the most big-headed TL telling new hires to put all clothing in a 439 box because that's what the collate says.
Imagine if Amazon acted like Target. "Here's an order for an item. It's in the warehouse somewhere." Or "Here's an order for a $3.00 Christmas decoration. It's on one of those 25 pallets on the top shelf but we're not sure which one. Likely in an assortment box, so no looking at the DPCIs." Sometimes I'll INF an item because I simply give up, or just know how inefficient it'd be to remove the pallets one by one and take a look in each box.
Also, why offer discounts on orders for store pick up? 20% off Christmas trees, but only if you get it as an SPU. I'd rather give the discount to people who get it themselves! This just makes more work for the flex team when they're already swamped, and I'd wager that a good chunk of the people are only doing it for the discount. WALL-E should not be a prophecy.
admittedly there are worse things you could spill on your clothes but still, come the fuck on people
