Is this Real Life? (A Market vent thread)

[TAGtheWEINIES]

My store also makes us zone dry grocery on top of pfresh (since they seem to only ever have 2 closers at night, including the electronics person). However the closers to choose from are two guys who aren't actual PAs and are regularly hardlines (but they're also the only 2 allowed to close pfresh). They get pulled very often for other misc global bs (also the part where there is no one else on the floor) and usually never get to actually zone pfresh or freezers whatsoever, and very little of the dry, which is what they're made to focus on. I finally zoned dairy for the first time in a week last night. I used to almost be able to finish the whole market zone before they did that to us and stopped giving us a regular mid. Usually I just half zone dry by pulling forward on the first 2 sections of each aisle and then do the whole aisles of cereal and granola bars and juice, since those are the hardest shopped ones. Paper also became part of 'G block' and they expect us to do that as well. Since it isn't made of food I ignore it.

Though we were told the 'Consumables - Hard lines' title literally doesn't mean anything anyway. It's basically a way to combine hardlines and pfresh and overall gives us less hours to work with than we already had, since now it gets split between regular team members. Since it includes any area with exp dates (food, baby formula, medicine, etc) it's just sort of all inclusive. No one under consumables at our store is expected to work pfresh unless they're a PA or the two guys who close.

We also got those dorky little 3.99 sandwiches in at our store. I'm confused as to why there are no dates on their packages even though there's literally no reason for them to not have it printed on them (it's not like they come out of the freezer. I had to throw all ours away because we didn't realize we had to tag them and we had no proof of when they were received at that point). The italian one is alright without the cheese but who's going to pay that much for a sandwich lol. I expect them to be regular qmos.

 

[pfreshdude]

IDK how all of your store layouts are but wait until they start asking you to zone paper as well...our G1-G5 section is the paper products, ex: toilet paper/paper towels and trash bags/ziploc bags. Its hard enough getting just an average zone done or getting through the entire zone but hey heres some more for you guys to do..sigh

 

[TAGtheWEINIES]

That's what happened with ours. They used to just make whoever was zoning HBA/chem (our section A) do it, since it used to be part of that before our remodel, but they decided that 'G = grocery and you're responsible for all of it' which includes the toilet paper, kleenix and tupperware (kill me). Sometimes I look at it and think someone should really do something about it but I don't have to throw away toilet paper if it doesn't get zoned properly. I'll get abandons and touch it up if it's really awful but I've enough on my plate as it is

 

[doxie71]

So far my store has gone back to having a closer zone through G. They do all of dry market, skip all the temp sensitive items, and move on to paper. The only thing I tend not to get zoned is freezer because it's always a mess. We have a checklist we have to follow at my store and I do freezer until the designated stop time, or if there's other stuff that needs done, I'll do that instead. Zoning everything else is easy. Although there is one PA at my store that almost never zones anything & it's frustrating to come in to an area that looks like crap all the time.

On another note:
Who checks for outdated products in the backroom at your stores? I'm not talking SDA, but going through & checking in produce for salads, veggies, etc. We don't put those items in the SDA and just pull them at night when we cull. I seem to be the only PA who will regularly go through produce & pull outdated items. I've done this more lately because we started donating those items and I want them to get used rather than tossed or sit and go bad. It's just frustrating that no one else does it, and I know once I'm gone that stuff is just going to sit there.

 

[Bosch]

I know this isn't a market issue, but I am a PA and i was schedule under instocks, today we rolled out the new instock process. and after 11 i went to the fixture room to print out my subs & i checked the gun to see where we were with batches & there were 43 in the gun!!! and all our PTM batches still in the gun some PTM batches were in there from yesterday! sooo frustrating. whats the point of scanning when its gonna sit in the gun. ughhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

11am there should be some of those batches sitting on the line for you. Where was backroom? The 11am CAF doesn't drop until 11 or close to it, so did they just not schedule a backroom person to pull research/EXF(depending on what you shot)?

And this sucks since a lot of that will drop into the CAF batches as well, welcome to back stock city. I have seen this more and more on weekends. Frustrating since backroom gets peeved I bring back research pulls since they push CAFS first. I come back from lunch to research pulls and a lot of chem and paper comes back.

 

[Owl]

Random question: what is a PA? What are their job duties and how are they different from a regular market TM? Because my store has a PA (I think?) but the last few months he's been working in all other areas of the store (as scheduled) and is hardly ever in market. Therefore my team leader is doing most of the opening shifts, but whenever she takes a day off, I have to do them. Meaning I am doing the food order/milk order, and TPC's, etc. Should I be doing these things? Because for one thing, I'm not very confident about my ability to do them right. For another, correct me if I'm wrong, it seems like a PA gets paid quite a bit more than I do and it's not really fair to expect me to do his job when he's not there.

Thanks

 

[pfreshdude]

So far my store has gone back to having a closer zone through G. They do all of dry market, skip all the temp sensitive items, and move on to paper. The only thing I tend not to get zoned is freezer because it's always a mess. We have a checklist we have to follow at my store and I do freezer until the designated stop time, or if there's other stuff that needs done, I'll do that instead. Zoning everything else is easy. Although there is one PA at my store that almost never zones anything & it's frustrating to come in to an area that looks like crap all the time.

On another note:
Who checks for outdated products in the backroom at your stores? I'm not talking SDA, but going through & checking in produce for salads, veggies, etc. We don't put those items in the SDA and just pull them at night when we cull. I seem to be the only PA who will regularly go through produce & pull outdated items. I've done this more lately because we started donating those items and I want them to get used rather than tossed or sit and go bad. It's just frustrating that no one else does it, and I know once I'm gone that stuff is just going to sit there.

How do you not get the zone done when all you have to do is freezer, coolers and pfresh??? When we first launched pfresh it was like that for me because of all the extra stuff I had to do for closing like all the cleaning and receiving the truck at 7pm which always took like an hour. The only thing I hate about freezer is all the boxes fall over and its impossible to properly zone half the items because of it.

Do you have a large section or are a high volume store or something. One of my fellow PAs always does a pretty poor job on zoning freezers most of the time and it usually doesnt get a really good zone until I go through it. Might be that he zones everything else first but when I close I usually start on the back wall and zone all the way down hitting dry market, beer, freezers, coolers with milk and then zone up pfresh and the freezer areas. I always leave dry for last because that is the area that takes forever if you are actually doing an honest zone that will hold up for more than an hour

 

[doxie71]

@pfreshdude The store I am in is high volume. We also have a ridiculous checklist that our CTL made that we have to follow as well that doesn't allow for much extra tasking.

 

[pfreshdude]

@pfreshdude The store I am in is high volume. We also have a ridiculous checklist that our CTL made that we have to follow as well that doesn't allow for much extra tasking.

Totally makes sense then haha. I was going to say for lower volume you should be able to do it but higher volume plus a bunch of stuff your ctl wants you to do probably isnt easy then. What extra tasks do you have to do. We had moved all the cleaning to the morning and usually had filled milk before the closer got in so they wouldnt have to worry about it either.

 

[pfreshdude]

Random question: what is a PA? What are their job duties and how are they different from a regular market TM? Because my store has a PA (I think?) but the last few months he's been working in all other areas of the store (as scheduled) and is hardly ever in market. Therefore my team leader is doing most of the opening shifts, but whenever she takes a day off, I have to do them. Meaning I am doing the food order/milk order, and TPC's, etc. Should I be doing these things? Because for one thing, I'm not very confident about my ability to do them right. For another, correct me if I'm wrong, it seems like a PA gets paid quite a bit more than I do and it's not really fair to expect me to do his job when he's not there.

Thanks

I think its a 1.00 pay increase to be a PA but I could be wrong. Extra things a PA has to deal with is Vendors, doing the Vendor Survey, Ordering, Researching, doing TPCs. A PA is basically the market TL while on duty. We actually dont even have a market TM. We have 3 PAs and thats it.

 

[doxie71]

@pfreshdude
I'll post the checklist either tonight or tomorrow. Actually at work right now haha

 

[doxie71]

@pfreshdude

Here are our checklists

 

[Hardlinesmaster]

Somebody can not spell openning shift more than once.

 

[Cel]

That actually looks like our market responsibilities checklist except micromanaged to hell. We're expected to do all those things they're just not itemized out as much. Also Owl I'm an occasional market TM and I have to do everything a PA does except vendor scorecard. For less money. These days I get scheduled almost entirely front end, but I've done tons of opening/closing shifts in pfresh. Hell I've had ETLs and SrTLs who thought I had been a PA previously who moved over to GSA.

 

[doxie71]

@Cel our CTL said we had to have the checklist "until everything on there happens everyday, consistently" meanwhile both routines were a complete overhaul of what we originally did & sometimes things just aren't going to get done.

 

[vendordontmesswithme]

On another note:
Who checks for outdated products in the backroom at your stores? I'm not talking SDA, but going through & checking in produce for salads, veggies, etc. We don't put those items in the SDA and just pull them at night when we cull. I seem to be the only PA who will regularly go through produce & pull outdated items. I've done this more lately because we started donating those items and I want them to get used rather than tossed or sit and go bad. It's just frustrating that no one else does it, and I know once I'm gone that stuff is just going to sit there.[/QUOTE]
No one does because it is not figured in to MY TIME. HQ team members know how to manage time and tasks better than Team members and Exec in actual the building.

 

[BRguy]

When I worked backroom I never had the time to check and it'll take time to go through all of produce. Majority of the time the pfresh team does a great job rotating the product so there is no need to check for outdated product. Rarely, I have come across outdated product. A good pfresh team will rotate thus eliminating the need to check yourself.

 

[doxie71]

Our problem is we get too much of some things & they will go bad in the backroom, such as salads & veggies. Since we check those dates everyday on the floor, we don't put them into the SDA. Oh well. I have 2 days left of dealing with that madness.

 

[looseseal]

Has anyone had issues with getting the audits to drop into the PDA after Pfresh inventory? Or how to troubleshoot this at all?

 

[qmosqueen]

even with all the PDA problems today, my persistence paid off. I got the PDA to work and BCODE worked on the second try and got all the ambient and meat pallets bcode'd and sto'd by 9:30 Am.

and the entire 11 pallet truck was finshed around 10:30 AM, it was a great day nad things went smooth today. We are training another PA today from a store about 13 miles away that will get PFresh on July 6th, she wants to transfer to our store cause the TM's are much more nicer. She told me that she was surprised to see the ETL out actually pushing truck, that never happens at her store.

Hope everyone else's PFresh truck days goes as smooth as mine did today.

 

[pfreshdude]

Anyone else struggling without having a CTL now....I am basically in role CTL as a PA but with no pay increase obviously or the title of TL.....which I could rant about endlessly but whatever.

Today I had to spend idk how long dealing with Vendors...Bread Vendor 1 had 32 outs!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Bread Vendor 2 had 18 or so outs with a lot of critical lows.

Because I now have to deal with Vendors on a constant basis I have to dive deep on Online Planogram looking at what they have coming up and any flexing or adjustments that need to be made and what days to bring in product. Having to spend time doing Planogram work is yet one more task to do, as if I didnt have enough. Just another thing that takes a chunk of time.

One of the bright positives is my receiving TM is probably one of the best in the company. Great Communication and Great with Dealing with all the Vendor BS that comes up. If they werent so good my job would be even more harder on the vendor side of things.

Was also asked by the flow TL who was working C+S to backstock C+S dairy even though they were going to finish on time and they could of done it themselves. I always have to backstock morning pulls on truck days too because once 9am rolls around C+S needs the green racks for backstock.

I think the only example where Pfresh is ran effectively would be a store who has a Rockstar PA running the show and Super Hi-Potential Rockstar Market TMs and PA with no weak link on the team. Either that or your store rains down hours upon the market workcenter. My store only gets around 100 hours for market I think. Even then it would probably still be a struggle. I would challenge anyone to find a more stressful and demanding area than Market for what Target actually wants done over there and what additional tasks the ETLs throw on like its nothing.

I have gotten our 4 week rolling Market score to solid green and I think we have been borderline top 5 group for the last couple weeks along with green YTD now so I must be doing something right haha

 

[Produce Queen]

Pfreshdude I feel your pain. Sounds like you're doing a great job though, which means they will continue to pile responsibilities on you. Unless your area is red, you just won't get any help I've found. Pats on the back, yes. But that's all. Luckily I have a great food truck team, asst PA and the receiving TM is really helpful with vendors. I'm trying to mentally survive by being okay with some things just not getting done. Sucks to have to compromise my own standards but we simply do not get the hours anymore. Just know that you are certainly not alone in your frustration.

 

[pfreshdude]

Pfreshdude I feel your pain. Sounds like you're doing a great job though, which means they will continue to pile responsibilities on you. Unless your area is red, you just won't get any help I've found. Pats on the back, yes. But that's all. Luckily I have a great food truck team, asst PA and the receiving TM is really helpful with vendors. I'm trying to mentally survive by being okay with some things just not getting done. Sucks to have to compromise my own standards but we simply do not get the hours anymore. Just know that you are certainly not alone in your frustration.

Ya...cleaning is probably just gonna be left alone for a while haha.

 

[looseseal]

I was thinking of this last night... So what is the point of having a phone in the ambient room that isn't connected to a line and can't make or pick up calls? Is anyone elses' as non-functional as ours is? Is it even supposed to work? So many unanswered questions....

 

[doxie71]

I know we had a phone in the ambient room that they had intention of making work. But they never did. The phone just ended up shoved under the table in the ambient room.