Those opti carts are awesome. They all come out of a DC in New Jersey called the “flow center”. Every Waco in the cart is sorted for a specific aisle. All the case packs we receive are sorted onto half pallets for specific custom blocks. All hanging softlines comes pre broken out and sorted on Z-racks from the DC. It’s definitely a streamlined process and makes life so much easier. These stores get two trucks everyday no matter what is in it, sometimes they’re empty in order to sweep back the opti carts. Flow center stores can sweep back Rachel’s instead of vendor cases packs allowing us to to get rid of over stock or items no longer being sold in our store (NOP but not yet disco). I’ve noticed a couple hiccups with the process and the couple big ones being
1.) SHIPPERS!!!! The flow center is trained to minimize case packs so I assume what’s happening is they are tossing all our shippers, the EC ones and the little single item shippers that hold the product to stand up on a shelf.
2.) communication.... the flow center is like fairytale land and no one there communicates with the transportation center. I’ll call for updates or cancelled trailers and they can’t tell me anything and always have to call the flow center to get an answer and they barley ever answer.
