September 19, 2015 - cashier
Literally Everything Wrong with My Store (Lengthy List)
[INTRO]
It’s hard to describe Target as a whole since each store can vary greatly depending on who works there and how they do things. But here is what mine is like:
I currently work as a Sales Floor Member, doing everything from my primary job to assisting others far across the store with guest and non-guest related things. My Target tends to be much busier than many others (considered a class B I think), so easy days are not very common.
[LACK OF WORKERS]
First issue, It’s no surprise that once I clock in I am immediately told to hop on a cash register to assist backed-up lines before I do anything else, regardless if there are other sales floor members or not to handle calls or assist people who need help. Only sometimes I can get down to what I am supposed to be doing early on in my shift. It seems every day, only just the right amount of cashiers are scheduled to work. That means if just one calls out, we’re all screwed regardless of how dead the rest of the store is. It’ll be fast service every two minutes. The same crap happens on days predicted to have lots of sales too. Only three cashiers will be scheduled for the evening and they expect that will be enough to handle the crowds of people every night. And depending on who’s working that day, I tend to be the only one going up there for fast service most of the time because softlines is pretending to not hear their walkies. We lag behind and they start complaining to themselves that we aren’t done yet.
[DOING OTHER’S JOBS]
Other times, I have to help with tasks not related to what my job entitles. This may include doing what our backroom members should be doing, as well as our cart attendants, market members, POG team, and etc. As a result, I am not able to get my job-specific roles done until very late in the day, resulting in extra stress and time constraint. This is probably the biggest gripe about my Target store. Being on the sales floor, I am told to do many tasks that another person already has a job to do, but is not in my job description. Like now Hardlines is expected to do most if not all backroom pulls every day, before it was supposed to be backroom members doing it. Meanwhile, the electronics member gets very little traffic and can pretty much stare at their phone all day while getting paid more. Not that they don’t work hard. But it doesn’t make sense I’m running around the store multitasking and the next guy just has to sell attachments and SRPs. Which is relatively easy. When I cover their breaks or meals I usually get one or the other.
[MANAGERS]
New managers come and go, unfortunately. I’ve had quite a few awesome managers who know exactly how to prioritize tasks and just know how to do things correctly. Then there are the others who guess all the time on their decisions and things ends up just really screwed over time and time again. Then the managers who are doing very well will be told by someone higher up that their way is wrong, and to stick to a method that is basically counter-productive to one or more areas of the store. So they either have to conform to someone else’s way or find another job. Something else that is sort of related, there are many small things that can be changed by our STL to make our jobs easier, but don’t do it. For example: When the deodorant aisle finally got to the point where all the spring loaded levers were breaking making product sit horribly on the shelves, new ones were finally ordered, basically because she had to at this point. But there are other things they can also apply that to to make zoning MUCH easier. Such as the pain and sleep med aisle. Every night I have to spend about 15 minutes trying to carefully align and stack the pill boxes because they’re just sitting on the shelf. And literally every minute of work matters in my department. The only thing separating them are those clear plastic dividers that just stick on. If they had the same type of thing as the deodorant shelves, so much time could be saved trying to make them look neat. Instead we always have to stay later than our scheduled time because the most important things took too long to accomplish. It’s just a bunch of small things that management refuses to do. Like recently they just bought a whole bunch of new fancy and specially protected box cutters instead. I guess because the new guy accidently cut himself with the standard one. I just don’t understand how they figure out what’s important and what isn’t.
[GIVING AWAY MONEY]
The bad apples will also over-ride just about anything the guest has a problem with at the service desk. If someone is trying to return 70 units of printer ink at one time, that’s not suspicious, let’s accept it anyways. Someone uses a picture on Instagram to prove there was once a sale on an item $50 off but is not current, that’s okay let them have it. Oh the guest is cussing us out? Let’s continue to be super nice and still give him/her that $10 off because the customer is ready to kill. They practically give merchandise and money away for free and our store manager is still wondering why we’re doing badly on sales… We’re all expected to be their bitch regardless of the situation, because the customer is always right!!!
[GSA]
Going back to the part about doing other peoples jobs without proper compensation; management seems to think it’s okay that they have people work for Guest Services but don’t technically give them the title, so that they don’t have to give the extra pay increase. They want all their employees to be able to do everything and not pay them for the job appropriately. Guest Services Assistant is supposed to have about a 30 cent raise from everyone else. However with four different people (three currently), the non-official GSAs are considered filling in for the position. The first GSA about a year ago had quit because of this and right before she left, made management backtrack to all the times she’s worked to pay her for what she should have gotten, had she been paid appropriately. So right now there are only two other people who are technically GSA. The others are being treated unfairly.
[CO-WORKERS]
Just like my managers, there’s good and bad workers of course. However for some strange reason, my store tends to keep the people who call out for half their shifts. It’s as if the only way to lose your job there is to no-call-no-show three times or to steal something. Otherwise you can be the worst worker on earth, only having ten hours a week, and always call out, but still keep your job until you quit. Although most of the people are cool to talk to, work ethic is the main problem point here.
[REDCARDS AND SALES]
The main issue with how they want us to promote RedCards and focus on making our sales goal is… we’re not rewarded for it. Yeah it’ll affect our yearly raise slightly. Maybe 10 to 15 cents. But places like Best Buy (who has an amazing business model btw) actually rewards their workers for making or exceeding their monthly sales goals with compensation worthwhile. Yeah they also have a rewards card, but from my experience they’re not shoving it down my throat like Target does to everyone. Hell no one is as bad as Target when it comes to advertising that tiny percentage. So they can’t blame me when I’m at the store till 12:00 AM on a super shitty day, and I roll my eyes when the LOD goes “Well at least we’ve exceeded our sales for today. Good job everyone”… And that’s it. Even our cart attendants are expected to get at least two Red Cards a day, from what I’ve been told. Failing to meet the quota gets you “The Talk”. I was about to get one of these when I was still a cashier, but luckily I transitioned to the sales floor just in time.
[TECH]
On a final negative note, their technology sucks A LOT. It wasn’t until about a year ago that our store got new card readers that compared to other retail stores. The MyDevices that can be used to scan barcodes and whatnot, do not work half the time. I frequently have to keep logging in, scanner stops working, or some other weird bug happens rendering it useless. And because it’s an apple device, every few minutes I have to swipe the screen sideways and enter the password which makes it reload the app every time. Which is annoying and increases the chance that one of the aforementioned problems will happen with it. The POS computers for the cash registers are exactly that; Pieces Of Shit. Don’t know how many times a week those things freeze up and takes a whole 9 minutes to reboot. Also, now that our card readers have the chip reader enabled, it takes even longer to finish transactions. An extra 30 seconds at best, given that people know how to use them right away. There’s also a few other major issues with them but I won’t get into that. Oh and the EHR…. That ridiculous site that has to be shut down for maintenance every day at the most inconvenient times. About two hours a day which is ridiculous. Basically saying, “Sorry, you can’t change your schedule or request time off. Try again when you’re not working because that’s the only window of opportunity you have when the site is functioning”. And as of recently, the online schedule doesn’t work. I go to check it on my phone and it says something about KRONOS server not responding. Now when I try to login, it makes me change my password, but the button to actually apply the new one doesn’t work on the site! So I cannot view my schedule online whatsoever. Get with the times Target. If you’re going to make us advertise your Cartwheel, at least make us use technology that actually functions and allows us to do our (actual) job.
[CONCLUSION]
Life at my store is like a prettier Walmart. Many people think the standards are better there when really, it’s still not great. It’s a bunch of smaller issues that can only be seen after several months of working there, and adds up to one big horrible experience in retail. I’d rather get paid less at a different business where these problems don’t exist rather than put up with it all and get slightly higher salary. If only the job market was better…
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I worked at BestBuy until our store was shit down because of high property rent. Each quarter the store in the district with highest BBY card enrollments received compensation. I'm taking all the employees in the store got a bonus, even if they didn't enroll a single person in the BBYcard. It was something along the lines of $115 for all part time employees $200 something for full time employees, and probably some absurd number for managers and the GM. Target is too cheap to do that though, they don't care about employees. Especially with that crappy 10% discount. At BBY it wasn't a set number, it differed for every product but man was it amazing! You got a bigger amount off BBY products (Dynex, Rocketfish, etc...) One time I paid like $4 for some $20 item because of my discount.
When my BBY store closed the STL of the SuperTarget came in to recruit us to the store. I saw it as a miracle that I would be getting severance and a new job immediately. Little did I know what a horror it would be to work for the big Bullseye.
lol if you worked at their sister company future shop before best buy shut it down, you get commission as well. Not sure how it works since i never worked there before, but I did hear people managed to make towards 100k a year based on commission alone. Whoever sold the most useless shit to customers got paid the most. Of course I'm guessing they had to do their homework to be able to make a sale or they'd get no paycheque.
I did hear that there was a dude who managed to sell a crazy ton of shit did have a phd in psych, so he was probably using the customers as his test dummies for his theories or something. And he made a crazy amount of money apparently.
I know. at my store, if a guest says well it said second shirt 25% off. Ok. But that a $80 item came up and they said no way no no that's 50, sign said back there!!! I said ok I can't change that much myself we'll need a supervisor. He or she comes GSTL, Ok what's the problem, I let the guests talk I don't even talk anymore on this crap, GSTL says umm umm well ok here you go. WTF? WTF? Losing thousands of dollars everyday!!!!!! AND YET THE NEW PAPER FOR CASHIER COUPON AND PRICES REVIEW WE HAVE TO READ ABOUT SAYS EXACTLY THAT IF A PRICE IS CONSIDERED BY ANY GUEST OVER $20 DOLLARS THAN WE DO NOT EXCEPT THAT! But oh no, oh no, the GSTLs will change the god damn price for any freaking person in the god damn world! WTF CRACK ARE THEY ON?!?!?!