Any of you who have worked in retail this time of the year know the stress that comes with the job. It starts off with Black Friday, and from then on it's hold on for your life!
I've worked in retail for 28 years, and I currently work as an assistant manager for a National retailer. I've seen Christmas come and go for 28 years. I actually thought that I'd experienced the worst stress that the season could deal out during those 28 years, however this season threw me some curve balls that I had never seen before, or at least at these levels.
Our store has always had employee turnover, however we have always been able to keep a core of experienced employees onboard to train any new faces that we bring into our workforce. We were experiencing quite a bit more employee turnover than normal before Thanksgiving, so considering this fact, I put together 10 personell files for new hires just in case. The writing was on the wall and I thought that I was prepared, but it soon became worse.
I used up all ten of the personell files within two weeks after Thanksgiving, and since then I have used five more. When I got off work this last Sunday, we had 22 employees. Of those 22 employees, only four had over a year's experience. From there it gets even worse. Amongst the other 18, the most experienced has only eight months experience, a few more only have three weeks experience and four have only five days experience. I was off on Monday, and when I came back to work on Tuesday we were down to 18 employees. Do the math here because quite frankly I'm too tired to do it. I'm sure that you can see that we don't have a lot of experienced employees left at this point. Considering the massive onslaught of customers during this time of year, inexperienced employees are not a good thing at all.
I had never experienced this level of turnover before. There had to be some sort of internal problem at our store that was causing this, and after I spoke with a few of our former employees, all fingers pointed towards my boss being at the root of the problem. The words " d^&k head " and " as#& hole " as well as " I don't have to take that kind of bull s#*t from him " were commonly used by our former employees.
The last four that I hired have hung in there. They were basicly thrown out to the wolves with very little training. Thankfully all of them have retail experience, so they were able to survive with little to no training. Also, I scheduled all of them to work on my shift. So far I've been able to keep them from working with my boss, but that won't last very long since I'm taking a vacation next week.
I called all of them together before we got off work tonight, and I commended them for hanging in there through some tough times. It's probably all for naught though. When I come back from vacation, they will probably be gone after they have been exposed to my boss. Heck, I've also thought about quitting myself after the first of next year. Six years of working for this disorganized butthole have taken their toll on me as well.
Untill then, I have a few days off. I'm heading down to Fulton, Ky on Sunday to spend some quality time with my Dad and Stepmother. I'll sort things out when I get back.
Season's Greetings to all, and to all a good night ! And thanks to all of you who have read and commented on my articles !
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Comments: 12
Hope you have better weather than we currently do... it's 46F and pouring rain here tonight and scheduled to last all day!
Have a nice Christmas and safe trip
Catherine...You're correct. People won't put up with a jerk for low wages.
Rhonda...We'll start getting ready for inventory also. Who knows, maybe we work for the same company ?
Signing off now and heading for Fulton.
Merry Christmas everyone !
I'll be the first to say that I'm glad he's gone. On the downside of this, I'm the only salaried member of management left at my store. We do have an hourly key carrier, but she is new and has a long way to go. I sure hope my company sends us some help soon !
BTW...There is now way in hell that I'll accept the store manager's position ! There is already a lot of speculation over me taking the store, but I've been there..done that and I'll never do it again.
This Christmas was rougher than any of the others I've spent in retail, it seems. The customers were rude, almost as though WE were inconveniencing THEM by making them come to the store. Usually you see a few like that, but it really seemed like that was the general sentiment this year.
Every Christmas is trying on the staff in retail, but I haven't decided yet if this is the one that breaks the camels back or not.
I'm glad you survived the Holiday Crazies!
Another thing that I noticed this year was tha a lot of customers were avoiding Wal-Mart this year, and in turn they were shopping the smaller retailers such as the company that I work for. The problem is that small stores such as the one I work in just simply can't handle that kind of volume. We only have 5 cash registers, and there were times that all of them were backed up 10 to 15 customers deep. Then God help us if all 5 had a price check at the same time ( which happened ).
We had healthy sales increases throught the season, but at times we had more buisness than we could handle, which became counterproductive if that makes any sense.
Still most of our employee turnover seems to be directly traced to my former boss, though some of it can be attributed to what you mentioned.
Maybe at last I will get to be just an assistant manager ? No more " Hey Tim " no more " Tim, what do you think? " no more " Tim, what should we do?" no more " Tim, will you hire my friend?" no more " Tim, Tim, Tim " no more " Tim, are you the manager?" no more " Tim, you scheduled me to work during one of my classes" no more " Tim, please help me " no more " Tim, I need a job. I'm a worthless peice of crap and nobody will hire me. I'm desperate for a job, please hire me" no more " I'm an illegal immigrant, will you hire me?"
Maybe I can be just an assistant manager at last ?