Archived Your store's equipment situation

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This has been such a problem with our store that it's becoming near impossible to do simple tasks. Our store of some 200 TMs has a grand total of ELEVEN LPDAs/PDAs. Now don't get me wrong, we used to have a decent number in the high 20s, but we have slowly been losing more and more PDAs as time goes on, and we haven't been replenishing them. Every morning the only ones who are allowed PDAs are the electronics flow TM, one flow TM in softlines, the backroom TMs, price change, 1 maybe 2 in plano, the GSTL/GSA, and the LOD. The rest of flow uses price scanners, in-stocks hardly do their scans anymore and ends up just helping flow, and the rest of us have to mooch off those with the PDAs on their breaks and lunches in order to accomplish what we want to get done.

Our Best Team Survey's worst score, by far, was lack of equipment. Our leaders response under the "Action" header? "Strictly enforce equipment sign-in/out practices" and "Delegate PDA use more efficiently." Not in those words but you get the point. Nothing is being done to get our store more PDAs. I know they're expensive but wow when a store like ours has 11 total, you have got to invest money in some more. This has got to be a corporate restriction but I still cannot believe they can allow a store to run like this.

Walkies are pretty rare themselves, but at least we get them in fairly often. And we can do without a walkie, PDAs on the other hand...

I just don't see how we can even afford to lose another PDA, but maybe there are stores out there in a worse situation. How is your store's equipment situation looking?
 
My store has been enforcing the equipment sign in/out method this last month. We are also missing a lot of PDAs. The few that we have aren't even working correctly, they randomly reboot themselves. The issue with the PDAs isn't too bad, except for the morning when the only people with PDAs are flow, plano, GSTL, and the LOD.

Are walkie supply is pretty good right now. A couple of months ago we would have teams with no walkies so we started to miss call buttons and we didn't have backup cashiers. That issue was fixed pretty quickly.
 
PDAs are usually okay, though for GS, I usually have to wait until noon-ish to get one. Walkies are crazy short. By the time I come in for GS an hour after opening, I have to beg to get a walkie (hard to do operator without it). Black Friday is going to be a mess with the walkies. For a while, we had an ETL who was ready to start giving out $5 to each person who found an extra walkie to turn in.
 
We're OK on PDAs, but we've been having issues with them rebooting for no reason at all...or locking up.

Walkies. We were great with them, but the last month they seem to have been disappearing. Early this week we didn't even have a single walkie up front.....GSTL or GS.

I'm glad that on Black Thursday/Friday/Saturday/Sunday I am a cashier so I won't have to deal with the shortage!

Our LPDAs haven't been working properly for our GSTLs either....they don't get any information on RedCards for the day, nor do they get information when a cashier requests change.

Oh, some of our registers lock-up when we try to do a merchandise locate look-up.

You know, maybe it won't be an advantage being a cashier without walkies.....instead we'll be cashiers without working cash registers! Won't this be fun on Black Thursday/friday/sat/sun!

The more I'm seeing with this coming "holiday shopathon" the more I'm thinking that calling off could be a great idea!
 
Every time I do a merchandise lookup on a register, I hold my breath. GS registers aren't so bad, but on the lanes, I seem to have about a 50/50 shot of the register crashing.

Of course it is extremely helpful to have a walkie when the GSTL/GSA is impossible to find with the help buttons/lane lights, but in the end, cashiers are lowest priority for walkies, and I'm totally okay with that.
 
The only time a cashier gets a walkie is when a GSTL or GSA goes on break or lunch.....which makes sense, but when there is no walkie up front...that's a different story.

Our GS area very seldom has a PDA for use.
 
Does your store have an equipment captain? As my stores equipment captain I make it my mission to ensure we don't have any shortage. Being a AA+ we have about 30 LPDAs and PDAs total. One thing that has helped is that we have dedicated GSTL LPDAs, which we may have fudged the numbers so we could afford to do so... Since it is the fourth quarter I will send out ANY equipment, even if it is just one card reader. I recommend your store appoints an equipment captain if you haven't already done so. Something else that may help is to have a central location at the HROC for any broken equipment so that you can have it all in one place.
 
The only time a cashier gets a walkie is when a GSTL or GSA goes on break or lunch.....which makes sense, but when there is no walkie up front...that's a different story.

Our GS area very seldom has a PDA for use.

How do you do qmos, return license plates into the system and double check license plates before before boxing up defectives?
 
How do you do qmos, return license plates into the system and double check license plates before before boxing up defectives?

I don't know if it's the same at his store, but at mine Grocery and Produce are responsible for QMOSing stuff.
 
No produce...but we do all qmosing at GS for market, which I hate, because if it the longer it takes to get to it, the trashier the area looks.
 
I love how the AP department has it's own labeled Walkies.. Why spot can't dedicate and properly label the others, I'll never know.
 
I love how the AP department has it's own labeled Walkies.. Why spot can't dedicate and properly label the others, I'll never know.

because spot is an actual person - who has several other captainships, has to write business walks(vibe BS), do interviews, hold huddles, run the store until the LOD gets there, write reviews, run their own team and workcenter, cover other workcenters on their breaks and lunches and vacations and call offs, and deal with whatever other crap I forgot to mention.

If keeping track of 30 something walkies, and 20 something PDA's and their assorted batteries was easy, everyone would be able to do it. Especially when TM drop them into the compactor, leave them on the baler, in random carts, and lockers.

I label everything I can get my hands on.

And then we find them in the strangest places - and the labels have been taken off.

yea
 
If keeping track of 30 something walkies, and 20 something PDA's and their assorted batteries was easy, everyone would be able to do it. Especially when TM drop them into the compactor, leave them on the baler, in random carts, and lockers.

I'm not blaming you. I've just pondered the idea of Walkies Labeled Front End,Hardlines,Softlines,ETL/TL,etc.. Just every department having there own assigned quota of walkies for use.

At my store, they were left out, and the early birds always grabbed them. They were never signed in/out..
 
Back in my GSA days, we had 2 PDAs labeled for our use. We had our own charging cradles, etc. Then other depts started 'borrowing' them & - as Annie pointed out - removing the labels so we had no idea where ours WERE much less WHICH ones were ours.
 
Back in my GSA days, we had 2 PDAs labeled for our use. We had our own charging cradles, etc. Then other depts started 'borrowing' them & - as Annie pointed out - removing the labels so we had no idea where ours WERE much less WHICH ones were ours.

You can't remove the label on our AP ones. It's printed on..
 
We've been signing out our equipment forever, but we have major equipment issues.........some don't sign out their junk, some do but lose it, some can never get equipment when needed, & it's basically a free-for-all when everyone arrives at the same time & getting equipment becomes an olympic sport.

For the most part, I get equipment when needed, but there are times I need it to do my job & have to search or ask someone to give some up for the cause.
 
Walkies are ok at my store except during Q4 when we actually have a team in the store. PDAs, on the other hand...

"Team, does anyone have a PDA they can give to Backroom?"
"LOD has mine for the PCV."
"I gave mine to Instocks because theirs crashed."
"What about P-Fresh and GSTL?"
"I just started doing the order, it'll be about 30-45 min."
"Food Ave has mine because they're doing their order too."
"Operator?"
"[name] is using mine to pull an item for a guest, and I'm inundated with defectives back here."
 
It's hard to believe that there are Targets that don't require you to sign out equipment. I think it's asinine to not sign out the equipment. That's like not signing out keys.

We have 50 walkies and 45 PDAs and I always grab one of each because, obviously, as an Electronics TM, I need a PDA to pull/check to see if things are in stock. I feel like we are fortunate with the amount of equipment we have.


As a side note, when flow leaves for the day, we give some walkies to the younger cashiers who can't do alcohol ring outs so they can call for someone instead of waiting for a GSA to notice the lane light. We don't give one for every one of them, but some of them we do. Also, TargetMobile gets a walkie but I'm not sure of the other little conglomerates inside Target do.
 
Oh Lord....we are having serious issues with people not signing out keys, either. It's been such a headache for people coming up to ask for keys, there are none in the box, and none signed out.

I've actually seen TMs tell their LOD that they aren't signing out the walkie because they don't want to. Why, I don't know. That was right after we had a pda end up in a cardboard bale. I don't think the TM did herself any favors with that declaration.
 
How do you do qmos, return license plates into the system and double check license plates before before boxing up defectives?

Don't know what qmos is, so have no idea who does it.
For return license plates to the system the GSA or GSTL does it using the registers at GS.
We don't double check license plates....we just separate them (RED, Yellow, Green.) and box them up.
 
We're pretty good with signing out keys....especially since our AP has relabeled them and the keys to the lock box are only on the GSTL key ring...or with the LOD master keys.
 
Our store simply doesn't care. They will have a shortage, and get all worried about it and try to enforce signing things out. THEN we'll somehow get a bunch of new equipment, and instead of enforcing the sign-out culture, they get lax and lazy and then they wonder why the equipment disappears again! It is laziness from the ETL level down. they will take pdas from one team for another making signing things out an exercise in futility. It's simple - enforce the sign-out culture. that's it. write people up who don't. when i first started people were scared to not have equipment properly signed out, or to lose it because there were actual consequences. now, there is nothing so there is no point because at the end of the day if leadership doesn't want to A) enforce it, or B) participate in it (oh, i'm a TL, or an ETL so i'm above that) then you are just sabotaging your own system. that's it. its very simple. also - don't just blindly label your equipment. get your serial numbers, create a log, and link the numbers to the serials. thats it. if you have four #4 walkies you are not helping yourself.
 
We had two of the same number for a while. One night an LOD went around and relabeled everyone, because he couldn't take it anymore.

Side note, I find it interesting how different stores sort defectives. You do it by color....we do it by "toss", environmental hazard, crc (ok, that's a color) defective salvage, and missed salvage. And the toss or defective salvage aren't necessarily one color or the other. And the crc and defective salvage need to have all license plates double checked and initialed before pick up by the LOD.
 
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