Archived Backroom Nightmare

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At my store, the pricing team and others pulled a lot of the diapers ahead of time so that the backroom team wouldn't have ginormous price change pulls.
 
At my store for the past month, the BTS and diapers price change batches have been staged on pallets, but they have been steadily worked, and we finally got rid of the BTS clearance as of now! What's kicking the backroom in the butt this time around is the turnover of team members, and the store is in the process of hiring the seasonal team (right now we have 3 new backroom and 5 new flow TMs). A lot of our veteran backroom and flow TMs are cross-trained between the two work centers, and our instocks team is comprised of only our most promising flow and backroom TMs. Some of the morning team is even lending help ticketing all of the clearance that has been piling up. Some weeks this past summer we have had trouble pushing and backstocking 2500-piece trucks just because TMs were close to reaching 40 hours a week or limited availability. Our backroom and flow team leads have been running the morning operations since the logistics ETL left after working for 15 years in the position. Hopefully the new team members that are hired can keep up because the morning team leads run a fast and tight show.

The backroom team lead is getting frustrated this time around because things are not being neatly backstocked or STO logic is not being followed (mostly due to things being done so quickly and less attention to detail), especially since inventory is coming up in a couple weeks.
 
I can't believe some of you guys are doing inventory at this time of year. That sounds like a nightmare. We have ours in the middle of February, when it's dead.
 
Right now isn't too bad actually. There's a nice breather between BTS and Halloween where you don't have too much freight in the back to mess with (other than clearance). Ours was in July a couple of weeks after BTS set and we were transitioning most of softlines. I felt sorry for the poor bastards that had to count (and recount) the seasonal aisles in backroom.
 
We do our inventory in Mid-November if I remember right....after the halloween stuff is gone.....not the best time, but at least before the full brunt of black friday hits.....

And our new ETL I mentioned earlier in this thread.....seems now the backroom is a main focus, and nothing is going right right now, so going to be interesting to see how they try to change things.....considering our old TL didn't work nights, and the ETL-LOG hadn't really seen dayside before flow moved to 4AM....this could be fun....not, especially heading into the holidays.....
 
StackerMistress said:
I can't believe some of you guys are doing inventory at this time of year. That sounds like a nightmare. We have ours in the middle of February, when it's dead.
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We just had ours last night. It may be dead in February, but we don't have enough hours that time of year to schedule TMs to prep for it.
 
I know I'm bumping an old thread, but holy shit our backroom is horrible. Our overnight team recently switched to the morning-early afternoon, so there’s now lines of pallets and boxes COMPLETELY blocking entire aisles of the backroom. There’s sections of the stockroom that are literally inaccessible to reach, and I can’t even walk through. There’s certain things that if a guest wants, I’m not able to get it for them because it would take me 15 minutes to move all the pallets around.

There’s also dozens of pallets on the Salesfloor due to overnight working during the day now. It’s only a matter of time before a guest gets injured by tripping on a box. I’ll take a couple pictures next time I’m working.
 
dannyy315 said:
Our overnight team recently switched to the morning-early afternoon
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There was a time when flow got push done, cleaned up, and left - shelves were stocked, trash was taken to the back, everything on the floor was neat & tidy. And my TL would get after me about de-trashing and sorting cosmetics before pushing any of it because "there are empty pegs and guests are shopping!" (So glad he's no longer my TL. He never pushed cosmetics ever; when he helped push anything, it was case packs only, with a handy-dandy pick label, never what came in a repack.) Now, who cares if it takes all day to finish the truck. There are TMs on the floor to provide more guest service. Ok, except providing all that guest service means the stuff stays in boxes and doesn't get pushed. Or maybe it does, but no one has time to back stock, so we have no empty vehicles for the next truck. And we aren't even to 4th quarter.
 
FlowTeamChick said:
There was a time when flow got push done, cleaned up, and left - shelves were stocked, trash was taken to the back, everything on the floor was neat & tidy. And my TL would get after me about de-trashing and sorting cosmetics before pushing any of it because "there are empty pegs and guests are shopping!" (So glad he's no longer my TL. He never pushed cosmetics ever; when he helped push anything, it was case packs only, with a handy-dandy pick label, never what came in a repack.) Now, who cares if it takes all day to finish the truck. There are TMs on the floor to provide more guest service. Ok, except providing all that guest service means the stuff stays in boxes and doesn't get pushed. Or maybe it does, but no one has time to back stock, so we have no empty vehicles for the next truck. And we aren't even to 4th quarter.
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And the sad thing is that those extra team members on the floor aren’t even helpful at all to the guests at my store. Around 80% of them only speak Spanish and no English, so they ask me to help the guests. I’m not even exaggerating.

I miss the days when overnight was still overnight and all that pushing got done by the morning. Now it’s one big clusterfuck during the day.
 
StackerMistress said:
So, maybe I just have a really bad memory, but I can't remember the last two Augusts+Septembers being as bad as this one. We've had a perfect storm of a bunch of the logistics team quitting at the same time + absurd amounts of clearance (including salesplans that were never originally set! :wacko:) + 25-2600 piece trucks every GM day (that's big for our store) + big Pfresh trucks being worked out by only 2-3 flow team members. And the ever-present "We don't have payroll" and "Nobody's applying for logistics positions."

We can't seem to finish pushing the truck, like... ever. Freight's been sitting around on pallets and flats for ages because we can't get caught up on it. There's probably over a dozen shopping carts of softlines from the truck that's clogging up our large furniture aisle, and good luck getting to any large bags of pet food because the entire aisle is blocked with pallets of clearance that STILL need to be ticketed. The line can be completely clear of green-clip pulls and I still don't have any vehicles to put things on. No joke, there are still three 3-tiers of PTM back to school hiding in a corner behind a bunch of clearance and leftover freight. Tons of salesplans were set last week and the SUBT999 backstock from them is practically a safety hazard at this point.

Sunday was horrendous. Two people scheduled in the backroom for AM... they had to push the 4 am fill. One of them stayed 12 hours. A flow team guy scheduled in instocks was instead moved to the BR to backstock the Pfresh truck after a grand total of three flow TMs pushed it. Considering he's had maybe 4 backroom shifts his entire Target career and has never backstocked Pfresh, you can imagine how well that went. He left at 12:30 with the dairy and freezer full of backstock still (can't really be mad at him, though, he tried). I was the only dayside TM that day (as in, it's just me and another guy right now, and he needed a day off, so it had to be me alone), scheduled 11:30-8. There's only 1 salesfloor TM until 4; she was up at the lanes all day. The ETL-LOG has been doing 12-16 hour days, every day. Thankfully she was around to help with pulls because every single hour would have rolled over, otherwise. Didn't have time to finish pulling price change, again. Went home and fell asleep. Good news, we made sales that day! :senile:

Sorry for the rant. I know a lot of you guys probably have it worse at your stores. Feel free to share and commiserate. Sympathy, empathy, words of wisdom, and tips for staying afloat while we stumble into 4th quarter are appreciated.
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Its a problem with your stl, this used to be my store until stl, talked about in other posts, was fired. Now our store is spotless as far as freight goes and all of it is done same day.
 
In the last month I have racked up more OT, than I have in my entire history working for Target (7 years). I work at a Super Freaky BTC store, but with Toys R Us, Macy's, etc, etc, closing in my 400,000 market (and one Target store), which last year, were open. I expect Q4 to be a complete shit show, (What is worse than a shit show, we need to coin a new term).
 
dannyy315 said:
I know I'm bumping an old thread, but holy shit our backroom is horrible. Our overnight team recently switched to the morning-early afternoon, so there’s now lines of pallets and boxes COMPLETELY blocking entire aisles of the backroom. There’s sections of the stockroom that are literally inaccessible to reach, and I can’t even walk through. There’s certain things that if a guest wants, I’m not able to get it for them because it would take me 15 minutes to move all the pallets around.

There’s also dozens of pallets on the Salesfloor due to overnight working during the day now. It’s only a matter of time before a guest gets injured by tripping on a box. I’ll take a couple pictures next time I’m working.
Click to expand...
Only a matter of time before employees get hurt.
 
With how back to school as a super freaky tier store made the backroom look, I genuinely fear what the backroom is gonna look like come 4th quarter... and that’s with a solid backroom team trying to keep things neat. We had points where if you wanted tvs or furniture from the backroom there was no way to get to them because of all the pallets of freight from rolled trucks under the new process.
 
BigEyedPhish said:
In the last month I have racked up more OT, than I have in my entire history working for Target (7 years). I work at a Super Freaky BTC store, but with Toys R Us, Macy's, etc, etc, closing in my 400,000 market (and one Target store), which last year, were open. I expect Q4 to be a complete shit show, (What is worse than a shit show, we need to coin a new term).
Click to expand...
Clusterfuck, soup-sandwhich, etc.
 
BullseyeBlues said:
With how back to school as a super freaky tier store made the backroom look, I genuinely fear what the backroom is gonna look like come 4th quarter... and that’s with a solid backroom team trying to keep things neat. We had points where if you wanted tvs or furniture from the backroom there was no way to get to them because of all the pallets of freight from rolled trucks under the new process.
Click to expand...

My store calls that Tuesday. It's that bad everyday.
 
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