Archived Black Friday was a "bust" at my store so far...

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Same here on the West Coast. At 3am, the store was a ghost town. Sales have got to be down from last year.

The pulse & line management was a great improvement over last year.
 
Left my store at 8pm. had 300k on a plan of 420k.. soooo probably not happening..
 
Last of the "main" line in electronics ended around... 6:00am-ish? It had died down far sooner for the front lanes, though - in the end, many people ended up asking to be escorted up to the front with their iPod purchases and whatnot, so they didn't have to wait for the electronics line to get their turn. :lol:

It was still sort of dead when I left around 8am-ish, but there's still the rest of the day, too... so I don't know. We may or may not make sales? I think we were forecasted around 500k as well, and might of been at around half that when I left.

Most amusing part was hearing about a nearby WalMart having to be shut down for a bit because of how insane/crazy it got there.

And, yeah, I loved how orderly our store was!
 
My store died at about 3, spent the next 6 hours doing re-shop, picking up re-shop of the floor and screwing around. Per ETl and STL they couldn't release team members for fear that we may get a rush after another local retailer opened at 5am. It never happened, long day but far from bad.
 
No idea what our goal or actuals were, but my story is this. I showed up at 8am for a cashier shift, and there was literally nobody there. the first half hour I rang up 3 people, and did a figure 8 around the lanes about 20 times. So I asked if I could go help out in Electronics, and oh holy crazy, it was insane. I actually almost lost my voice because there was just such a crush of people and I just kept talk talk talking.

However, when I'd head to my breaks and cross by the front lanes, it still remained pretty ghost towny. However, when I left at 6:30, it seemed like there were quite a bit of people there
 
ULV store, forecasted less than 300k and when i left at 8am we were barely at the 50k mark. Unless something major happened i dont see us making anywhere near that forecast. Around 4am or so sales floor zoners were left with nothing to zone. The lines outside were in the store by 12:30am and check out lines dwindled at about 1:30am. Nothing too rough happened except guests trying to rip the ad from my hands. Our team had no idea where anything was. everyone came in at 11:50pm with very little to no time to familiarize ourselves with where product was located.
 
Elandora said:
ULV store, forecasted less than 300k and when i left at 8am we were barely at the 50k mark. Unless something major happened i dont see us making anywhere near that forecast. Around 4am or so sales floor zoners were left with nothing to zone. The lines outside were in the store by 12:30am and check out lines dwindled at about 1:30am. Nothing too rough happened except guests trying to rip the ad from my hands. Our team had no idea where anything was. everyone came in at 11:50pm with very little to no time to familiarize ourselves with where product was located.
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This part about knowing where product was located!! On the master schedule, I was scheduled in softlines. I got in right on time and had NO clue what was going on. So I grabbed a walkie and met up with the team in softlines. At 11:57pm, I took a glance at the break schedule and discovered I was supposed to be in toys!! with no equipment. I've been softlines/photo/front end for the past year. I have no freaking clue where anything is in toys. I kept my walkie on me and then ended up with the break schedule for toys, an ad, and a PDA...I was also the runner between the floor and the backrooom, too. One thing I'd like to see next year is either scheduling TMs to come in a half hour before and getting briefed or knowing before Thanksgiving where they're going to be so they can be better prepared.
 
Scheduled 10a-7pm in photo, but my lab is located behind mmb, so I usually bounce between elec and photo. Ended up staying until midnight, so did a 14 hour electronics shift. We had 5 openers in electronics, 1 pulling from the stockroom, 1 doing video games, 1 in mmb, 1 in photo selling ipods/ipads, and a cashier. Two of the openers left at 6, and 2 more came on. The other 3 left around 11/12ish, leaving myself and the other two until 2pm. Then, it was just one person and a cashier. Stupidest thing I've ever seen. LOD had to come over at one point, because the other two people were on break. Between getting video games, pulling from stockroom, calling BR for TVs, and answering questions about whether or not the GPS can speak russian, I was swamped. Ended up doing a wave zone through stationary and mmb in the last 45 mins and knocked out just about all of our reshop.

Phew. I'm opening photo in the morning, so I'm going to bed!
 
We actually blew our sales out of the water. Keep in mind, I know at least in my district the sales accumulator wasn't updating until after close, and it froze up around 10 this morning. When we left tonight, we were $300K ABOVE sales.
 
I was scheduled 10:30am to 7:00pm as a cashier. When I came in was told I was in SLs instead. Was there for 3 hrs (up for backup once) then they had me up to the register to stay. It was busy but not crazy busy. Then after my 30 when I came back at 3:30pm I was sent over to electronics as a cashier. It was really crazy busy over there! I was really glad to be done when 7 came.
 
My store wasn't bad... I'm not sure what our goal was but no one ever seemed worried about missing the goal and even seemed enthused. I'm sure we had slow bursts here and there but it was, to my knowledge, never to the point of sending people home.

I did go in at 12:15 and the line moved pretty quickly in... High Fived my STL, greeted my friends in Starbucks and the Cafe and made my way around the packed store. The line to check out was weaved all the way through A and then turned at the back wall and was wrapped further. It was absolutely crazy!
 
This seems to be the widespread picture for EVERY store that I keep reading. Ours was the same. Slammed for the first 3 hours, then dead by 4am. I wonder what the outcome of this will be????
 
We had the same-ish thing but it was actually really nice. line and store dead by 5, 3 hours of recovery, and by 9 it was super busy again. Everyone was super worried at our store right around 8 when it still wasnt busy, but we just figured people went to sleep. The afternoon hours saw huge increases in sales vs. last year.

We beat our goal of ~900 but I don't think we quite got to the mil mark unless pharmacy went crazy.
 
I think the 12am opening was actually pretty good. Get the lines in make 3/4 of your projected sales in about 4 hours, then you have lulls for recovery so that the closing team can leave on time and there will be no stores keeping the closing team much past 12.
 
Our original goal was $350k but they changed it to $400k (probably our DTL's doing), and we did $386K. I didn't think we'd make it at all, to be honest.
 
Hardlinesmaster said:
Our closing teams left at 2am.
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ours too. after noon they were pulling the caf pulls but couldn't get anyone to push them since everyone on the SF was helping guests. We walked in to about 15 carts in ELE of push from the cafs and reshop from the front lanes. Then massive pulls on top of that. We had 6 people in ele. Two people were pulling til 230am, two were sorting everything by aisle until 430 am (we started at 11pm), one of the people doing pulls started the security stuff as soon as they were done, the other started backstocking right away. Once we got everything sorted it only took 2.5 hrs to push it all. The sad thing is, the guy backstocking was one of our slower guys and he was keeping up with 5 people pushing. That's how much of this stuff went out into the SF.
 
Right, Target basically just pushed the first, biggest wave, earlier into the middle of the night. Our store didn't hire enough seasonal TMs and we chose not to do split shifts, so our smallish closing team was swamped. But at least we were well-rested, so we were up for it.
greatteam said:
I think the 12am opening was actually pretty good. Get the lines in make 3/4 of your projected sales in about 4 hours, then you have lulls for recovery so that the closing team can leave on time and there will be no stores keeping the closing team much past 12.
Click to expand...
 
Ditto here.

Super crazy till 4am and then dead.

Doubt Target will do the midnight opening again. The hours spent to staff an empty store for 5 hours are simply not worth it.
 
MollyC said:
ours too. after noon they were pulling the caf pulls but couldn't get anyone to push them since everyone on the SF was helping guests. We walked in to about 15 carts in ELE of push from the cafs and reshop from the front lanes. Then massive pulls on top of that. We had 6 people in ele. Two people were pulling til 230am, two were sorting everything by aisle until 430 am (we started at 11pm), one of the people doing pulls started the security stuff as soon as they were done, the other started backstocking right away. Once we got everything sorted it only took 2.5 hrs to push it all. The sad thing is, the guy backstocking was one of our slower guys and he was keeping up with 5 people pushing. That's how much of this stuff went out into the SF.
Click to expand...
We had 7 folks closing hl. The rest were ncns. Gtc to them!
 
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