Archived Look what I found.

[OneGoodEar]

This was before my time (working fir Target) but I believe at one time Target employee badges were square shaped and the men managers wore dress shirts and ties.

 

[YourPPTL]

This was before my time (working fir Target) but I believe at one time Target employee badges were square shaped and the men managers wore dress shirts and ties.

Yes they did when I first started. We also wore what we wanted just a red vest and no jeans.

 

[OneGoodEar]

We were talking at our store how they have cut the staff by more than half through the yrs. With more to come.

When they first cut down on staff, I remember the talk sbout too many chiefs and too little indians. Now it looks little chiefs and indians.

 

[can't touch this]

If I remember right all they did was give you the price right? And lest we forget beepers for each dept. If you were covering someone else's dept you could have 2 or 3 beepers on.

looool that's cheesy as hell

I remember seeing the ancient beige proto-scanners someplace when I was a kid, probably Walmart, and the employees had to physically connect a serial cable to a printer if they wanted to print some labels. I bet those cables got lost all the time. WLAN master race.

 

[redeye58]

I remember the CRT terminals & the Ranger printers that hooked up to the PDTs with a cable.
PA used to wear these tool-belts to hold the holster & the printer, like wearing bricks on either side if you turned too quickly.

 

[oath2order]

The people at my store will never know the horrors have the beige POS systems.

Long live the touch screen

 

[can't touch this]

I've used a lot of different POS systems and I've found that their shittiness has less to do with hardware and more to do with how well or poorly the software is coded. Walmart's POS boxes were really old and beige but almost never crashed, I think it happened maybe twice in three years and both times they were able to pull up the transaction and complete it on another register. Their backend servers were running IBM's AIX when I was there and I don't recall anything ever being down except during rare power outages.

But my last job used much newer touch screen systems based on Windows 7 Enterprise Embedded, and while they weren't bad specwise (Intel i5, 4GB of RAM) the custom POS software was absolute dogshit, crashed to the Windows desktop at least once or twice a day and when that happened I was screwed and had to start over. It originally ran on much older hardware and since the company was too lazy and stingy to update it, they had it running inside a virtual machine (!) and if it crashed you had to reboot the shitbox to get it to run the batch script again. Total amateurish kludge.

tl;dr I would rather use an old beige box running good software than a shiny new touch screen system that runs ass software. I haven't used Target's POS because lol cashiering.

 

[can't touch this]

When I first started if we wanted labels we wrote down each dpci and went to the computer and typed in each number. What sheer hell it was trying to make labels for all of a flexed out toys in 4th qtr. When portable printers and batches finally came into existence I was filled with eternal gratitude. It was like going from making your own soap, walking 2 miles to the river and washing your clothes with a scrub board every day to a high capacity washer and dryer.

yeah but those huge teams and those hours tho

Our modern equipment is undeniably light years better, but efficiency came at a price...give me the 90's hell of writing down labels by hand in exchange for 40 hours every week and busywork with a full team. Notice how things being less efficient benefited everybody (TMs got hours, corporate still made money) but when things got more efficient it only benefited corporate. RIP

 

[RunForACallBox]

Yes they did when I first started. We also wore what we wanted just a red vest and no jeans.

I where my red vest now with whatever underneath.

 

[commiecorvus]

yeah but those huge teams and those hours tho

Our modern equipment is undeniably light years better, but efficiency came at a price...give me the 90's hell of writing down labels by hand in exchange for 40 hours every week and busywork with a full team. Notice how things being less efficient benefited everybody (TMs got hours, corporate still made money) but when things got more efficient it only benefited corporate. RIP

And corporate still made money in those days.
More people had decent jobs and you could find someone if you needed help.
The staff wasn't as stressed out because they could pay their bills and could get through the day without feeling like they were in constant whitewater.
There was a better sense of camaraderie and the company did things like picnics to support that feeling.

I'm the last person to knock technology.
I think the advances we make are great but I do think we need to evaluate the costs to people.

 

[IWishIKnew]

Was trying to look something up for a guest today but (as usual) the wifi was crapping out and the guest said "the Telxon isn't working!" Man, that was a blast from the past.

 

[REDcardJJ]

Starbucks has a touchscreen POS, so now I want it too even though I've got all of the K keys down to muscle memory at this point

it'd make training new cashiers a lot easier imo

 

[Yetive]

Yeah, whenever I ring on the lanes, I press the screen instead of keys. Every. Single. Time.

 

[Guessed Service]

A guest once remarked how cool it was that I could type in the number keypad without looking at it, which mostly confused me because, come on, its not hard to memorize.

 

[EchoFoxtrot]

NOP ...someone once told me it's "NOT OUR PROBLEM" which I liked...then a month later a TL criticized me for not knowing what to do with not on plano...SORRY FOR YOUR SHITTY TRAINING BY THE OTHER TL....lmaofuckdfkljsdalkfadslkjasldkj

 

[EchoFoxtrot]

When I first started if we wanted labels we wrote down each dpci and went to the computer and typed in each number. What sheer hell it was trying to make labels for all of a flexed out toys in 4th qtr. When portable printers and batches finally came into existence I was filled with eternal gratitude. It was like going from making your own soap, walking 2 miles to the river and washing your clothes with a scrub board every day to a high capacity washer and dryer.

Sad part is at my store and I assume many others...TMs just zone, push reshop and backup cashier. There are maybe two or three who know how to set an endcap properly and they are our best zoners and pushers so they are wasted setting POGs while they just let the bad TMs zone sloppily and push abandons lazily while the few good ones work their ass off to set 8 endcaps in 8 hours which is unbelievably stupid to expect unless that is their ONLY task. So guess what? The ones who should be making labels and and flexing and fixing things with a portable printer...they don't even want to grab one. They aren't instructed to do so. Shit they are barely criticized because they didn't zone enough and their reshop is still full 2 hours 'til close and they should've went on their last break already. Fuck they don't even deserve that last break. Most of 'em wasted those 15 min shooting the shit around the store and need to get their asses in gear. Lol I was making 13 an hour years ago at a diff work environment and working way harder. Now these fucks are gonna get paid 12 an hour to sneak under the rug and do the minimum. I say banish them to the fastfood wasteland. Those kids usually can't hold a job in retail and deserve the greasy air they breathe. LOL /ENDRANT edit: damn that was harsh my bad

 

[EchoFoxtrot]

Signing Specialist wasn't a bad deal until they decided to take that away too.

I know a few stores that still have a plano team and signing specialist included with them...I'm confused as to why it seems they won't be gone anytime soon...and the signing specialist I know works their ass off on that wave those signs come in damaged so often its ridiculous...smh DC...like seriously the plano room is bad enough without having defective signs that need to be thrown out and re ordered? is that a thing? I dont even know what they do with those signs that are all bent up to shit