August 27, 2012 - Ramsesthegreat
Ohh Target
Well I no longer work for target after several years and I am glad to have left. Like many of you I have experienced incompetence from the ETL staff and the clueless mentality of the management staff in general.
My first several years working for Target was pretty good I started off as a regular team member and i ended up working up to a TL which was in hindsight a mistake. They place unrealistic expectations upon the TL’s and they are the true workhorses of the store. There were countless times when only TL’s were scheduled on the floor to complete tasks, projects, and provide guest service due to “hours being tight” . ETL’s would walk the floor knowing that the sales floor was light but still give out more tasks to complete. They would constantly say to “delegate to your team” but there was no team scheduled to delegate to. Also don’t forget the pointless business walks, contribution forms, coachings, corrective actions, and leadership statuses they request from you as well.
They will create a bunch of crazy schedules with new hires with ZERO training closing or opening in your department and expect you to have trained them even though you have never worked with them. They will ask for more tasks to happen in your department even though you will require a PDA to complete it but there are none available until hours after the time limit they want the task completed. If you do manage to get equipment such as a PDA/LPDA, walkie, portable printer, or keys they are probably broken or damaged and end up slowing you down.
In a period of about 2 years I had 6 different ETL’s(not counting 4 different HR, 4 SLs,4 HLs ETLS and 2 STL) who all had NO CLUE how to run and operate the store on a daily basis. They would focus on pointless aspects of the store instead of tasks and projects that actually mattered. If you are looking for a company to get promoted in please steer away from Target. If the ETL team likes you they will sign off for you as a TL but you might as well forget about being promoted past that. It’s much easier for them to hire people outside of the company regardless if you are qualified or not. Out of all the ETL’s i had 1 of them was fired for being a r****d and the rest ended up quitting once they realized there was no where to go. Thats right even the ETL crew won’t ever get promoted to a STL because thats just the way Target operates.
It’s pretty obvious that Target doesn’t actually train ANYONE including the ETL’s since no one really knows how to do anything in the store correctly. They will spit out “best practice ” over and over but if you challenge them on it they will print out a piece of paper several hours later instead of telling you on the spot. I had to learn EVERYTHING on the fly from the backroom, to instocks, to electronics, to the front end. They will constantly talk about team work but rarely ever schedule a team with you or when they do its on a super slow day in a week where not many projects are happening at all. Then they just start sending people home early shafting you even further.
Do i even have to talk about red cards or attachments? I mean seriously you can’t sell an attachment with EVERY item you sell even if you offer it. Yet they will still give you speeches and threats about increasing your numbers or you’ll get a corrective action or termination for failure to complete your job. Maybe if you stopped offering gift cards with IPOD touches or IPADs people would stop buying the unit and then using the gift card on the next transaction preventing you from getting an attachment! It sets you up to fail! Not everyone needs a freaking HDMI cable if you are buying a TV ( i have several and i would never buy one in the store when i can get one online for under 5 bucks)
I thought it was just my store but obviously from reading the posts this happens everywhere. Target needs to get their stuff together or they are going to fall apart within the next few years from mismanagement.
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The one thing that cracks me up, is how everybody that tells their story tells us about how the position they held in the store is the worst position. Everybody loses that battle to the cart attendants. Nobody has it worse than them. Especially in the winter. Now that you froze your ass off collecting the carts, go clean the bathroom...somebody took a shit on a wall. 🙂
Dude. One time I covered a cart attendant shift, and I was like, "Hey, no biggie...I'll just bring my iPod, listen to some tunes, push some carts...."
Yeah...
WRONG.
I ended up mopping up vomit in the men's bathroom, and when I went to put the mop away, the mop handle got stuck on the door and consequently I was left with sopping puke water all over my feet. To add to the fun, the drain in the cart attendant room was clogged, so it was ultimately up to me to fix it.
Which I fuckin' DIDN'T. Screw that. I decided instead to head down to a nearby gas station to grab a beer after my hellish encounter with someone's regurgitated salad. I let the security guy know where I was going, and to make some bullshit up if I was called over the walkie.
As I was sipping from a tall boy of Coors Light, pulling back into the parking lot, the pharmacy called me on the walkie to bring them some more baskets. Thankfully, i am a great multi-tasker and was able to steer my car, drink a heaby .40-oz beer, and respond on the walkie. Boom.
After shotgunning the Coors, I brought them their damn baskets that they so rudely interrupted beer time for, and then I was done.
The moral of my story? Cart attending sucks. Only perform tasks of cart attending while drunk/inebriated.
Drinking while doing the carts? You took it further than I ever did. But it doesn't surprise me, since the most fucked up stories almost always come from the cart slingers.
Uhh...is there any other way to be a cart attendant? If you're cart attending and not drinking, then there's something wrong with you. Unless you like cleaning baby shit up off of the changing tables while you're sober............
Rage has been my source of energy. It helped me get the job done, although I had to make sure to keep it in check and not start beating somebody up, preferably a boss. I'll get to some of that later.
But once I was home, I got hammered. Name any brew that's English, Scottish or Irish, I had it in a pint glass...more than once, many times minutes apart. Or if I was aggravated more than usual...Jager.
I do find that Target induces a lot of alcoholism, depression, homicidal rage, etc. I know that when I worked there, there were several employees I was rather concerned about, as far as them shooting up the joint. Especially this one guy named Paul...holy shit, this guy was a ticking time bomb of rage. He blew up one day and called a "guest" a whore, stormed off, and of course didn't get fired. Probably because the ETL's were afraid he'd come back with vengeance on the brain.
He did come back with a gun case a short time later....they finally made him open the case, and it was empty. But with his mental capacity being that of a 6 year-old, coupled with him bringing a gun case to work? Yeah...my butt puckered a little bit.
They shouldn't call it "going postal" anymore...it should be called "going Target". haha
Love this man. Thats fucking awesome.
This is all sooooo true, amen. Target is the worst job I have ever had.
This is exactly how I and several friends that work there feel. It's good to know our store isn't the only shitty one, but then again sad that the entire company does things this way. How have they been around so long?!