Logistics The Flow/Inbound thread: Until We Yeet Again edition 🤙

Stores are given containers because of the amount of merchandise Target has purchased for this holiday season. That means freight will be incredibly heavy. Your STLs should have known that if they were one of the stores receiving containers and how many..
 
My dudes/dudettes, I'm slowly becoming overwhelmed with Lovecraftian dread as the holidays get closer and closer. Mainly because of those fucking uboats. We already know that they don't hold shit, we already know our broom closet sized receiving has no fucking room for the constant swapping out of uboats that will be needed, and we definitely already know that more and more uboats will end up in the backroom piled with backstock and be unavailable for the unload anyway. Everybody on the unload team will be grouchy as fuck and my mellow will be perpetually harshed every single day. The new unload process is mind-boggling in its sheer awfulness, and last truck day we had a couple people on flow openly admit that it was the last straw for them and they'll be walking out soon. It's terrible enough when everybody shows up, but now I'm legit scared that a few people quitting will cause a domino effect where more people get fed up and quit too. If we lose our throwers then I'll have to throw myself, and I can't afford a doctor visit for the inevitable back injury I'll get from that.

💀💀💀💀💀💀💀

The worst part is that my store is on track to make historic sales this year, which will mean we get another ETL and "more" payroll, but I can always count on them to squander it by hiring too many extra people and spreading the extra payroll more thinly between more people instead of giving those of us who are reliable more hours.
 
I'm not too worried about SFS because our SFS is very low volume, one TM can handle it all even well inside the ninth circle of Q4. Homeboy up there talking about 100 seasonal SFS, our store doesn't even have 100 TMs total lol.

@Ashfromoldsite posted a pic of her(?) store's SFS pack area which is literally 80% the size of our entire backroom. I can at least count myself lucky that my store is on the lower end of low volume. The extra sales will still kick our asses though. Last Saturday we did 43% over forecast.
 
can't touch this said:
My store doesn't get double trucks, you can tell because I'm alive to post this
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Its not fun
The day starts with us pushing the day befores truck and then we start the 1st truck and we normally finish just before lunch and then after lunch we start the 2nd truck and finish the entire unload in 8hrs with 5 people including TL and the rest of the team focuses on push the entire day and then when we get back the next day we push the second truck from the day before that was unloaded but not pushed. What were going to do when we start the 2 trucks every day schedule im not sure yet.

We get a max of 15 flow tm only 5 stay more then 4hrs and 3 focus on softline break out all dayand 3backroom tms a day
 
These flow kids are really starting to get on my fucking nerves. I really do think they're all going to quit en masse and fuck me over very soon.

"Hurr durr my car won't start" IT'S ALWAYS THEIR CAR. JESUS, HOW SHITTY IS YOUR CAR?! If you crushed it at the junkyard, would lemonade squirt out???

Their problem is that they sleep in until 10 minutes before it's time to clock in and stumble out of bed at the last minute. Car trouble is exactly why I get up and around 30-45 minutes early in case my car isn't starting so I have time to get an Uber.
 
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can't touch this said:
These flow kids are really starting to get on my fucking nerves. I really do think they're all going to quit en masse and fuck me over very soon.

"Hurr durr my car won't start" IT'S ALWAYS THEIR CAR. JESUS, HOW SHITTY IS YOUR CAR?! If you crushed it at the junkyard, would lemonade squirt out???

Their problem is that they sleep in until 10 minutes before it's time to clock in and stumble out of bed at the last minute. Car trouble is exactly why I get up and around 30-45 minutes early in case my cart isn't starting so I have time to get an Uber.
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Im so glad that my flow team is a really tight knite group and if one of them calls out its guaranteed that the rest of team well give them shit for it when they get back.
I think we get a max of 2 call outs every other week. Even then they well still show up half dead from being sick and the store has to send them home because they didnt want to let the team down from them calling out
 
We get doubles at least 5 times a week.
Anything we need to pull is limited to what we can squeeze onto a 3-tier that we grab early because every vehicle is filled before getting half-way into the second truck.
 
Do you guys really leave backstock on the U-boats? Now I’m starting to see why everyone thinks this process is so terrible... it’s been really smooth sailing at my store and flow has actually been finishing much faster then before. We have pallets down in front of each fill group now for backstock and flow simply unloads the backstock off their U boats and onto the pallets.
There’s definitely a downside to this, as it is annoying how they’re in the aisle, but you get used to it pretty fast, it’s definitelt worth having the vehicles got unload.

If you guys have any say in the process at your store, suggest this. It’s pretty easy to throw down a dozen pallets in front of their respective backeoom aisles and have flow unload onto those.
 
HLN13 said:
Do you guys really leave backstock on the U-boats? Now I’m starting to see why everyone thinks this process is so terrible... it’s been really smooth sailing at my store and flow has actually been finishing much faster then before. We have pallets down in front of each fill group now for backstock and flow simply unloads the backstock off their U boats and onto the pallets.
There’s definitely a downside to this, as it is annoying how they’re in the aisle, but you get used to it pretty fast, it’s definitelt worth having the vehicles got unload.

If you guys have any say in the process at your store, suggest this. It’s pretty easy to throw down a dozen pallets in front of their respective backeoom aisles and have flow unload onto those.
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Our problem is that we don't have enough people to do the backstock. Whether we dump the backstock onto pallets or leave them in vehicles doesn't matter. Shit is just going to sit there until someone has the time to do it. The store doesn't have the payroll to make things work. We don't do much SFS because there is a DC in town, but whenever one does come in the one TM assigned to backstock has to stop everything he's doing and fill the order. This just doesn't work well.
 
HLN13 said:
Do you guys really leave backstock on the U-boats?
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- not enough payroll
- not enough Zebras
- not enough hands
- not enough time

If I had to backstock everything that was brought to the backroom I would be stuck at the store for 12+ hours every day, which I would actually be fine with if the ETLs didn't have a stick up their asses about O.T. You have to keep in mind that almost everyone on our flow team just does the bare minimum they can do without getting in trouble and phones it in every day. If offered an 8 hour shift (6am - 2:30pm) they turn it down because "I gotta get home to watch THE BIG GAME". I'm one of two people on flow who know how to make a bale, and big Q4 trucks require multiple bales in one shift which is more time that I can't spend pushing or backstocking. Add in time lost with guest interaction and being sent on scavenger hunts/carryouts, and more time lost due to Zebras that randomly die at 80% battery. Let's say I get done with my assigned custom blocks before lunch break, there's still push on the line for other blocks waiting for me when I get back, some of which I have to leave there anyway when 2:30 rolls around.

So even if I get a 40 hour week, which is pretty often during Q4, there's simply too much to do and not enough time to do it all.
 
And also keep in mind that our new BRTL is a shitcunt with a sore ass and attitude from hell. The second anyone even made the suggestion to line up pallets (assuming our backroom wasn't the size of a broom closet and we had room for that) he would spray blood out of his eyeballs like a horned lizard.
 
Why are TMs leaving backstock at all? One of the big things for modernization as I was piloting it was that a TM only works one vehicle at a time, push, throw away trash, and backstocks it. There should never really be piles of backstock, just freight that’s waiting to be worked and freight that is being worked and freight that is backstocked. My group director would be okay with freight on the line, but there shouldn’t be vehicles everywhere piled with backstock. No one is ever going to touch it. Now I don’t think that the way modernization is being implemented is all that great, but owning your vehicle start to finish is a core component to the process. There really shouldn’t be a back room team.
 
If the store is short on zebras then that’s on the leaders and the team for poor equipment control routines. We originally got 33 and when I moved 7 months later we still had 32 and everyone was in the lookout for that missing one. CSC was no help bc it was dead. We didn’t have enough zebras for everyone to have one, but we had more than enough to share a few between each workcenter. Not everyone was backstocking at once. The only time it got dicey was during the couple of weeks after Black Friday when SFS blew up.
 
sigma7 said:
Why are TMs leaving backstock at all? One of the big things for modernization as I was piloting it was that a TM only works one vehicle at a time, push, throw away trash, and backstocks it.
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Well, yes, this is how it's "supposed" to work. Except that's not real life. I've been told on some shifts by my TL to just keep pushing and someone else will do the back stock. (Which is sort of a bummer to me because I actually like back stocking. But oh well.)
And hard lines ETL told the Beauty TMs to leave their back stock because they're supposed to be out on the floor selling product.
 
We don't know how to backstock. The only hardlines people who do are those who have been there for years. Honestly, if they made us backstock then push would never get done. Barely enough hours to finish it as is.
 
Corporate sent us too few Zebras to begin with back when our sales were much shittier and before we had DriveUp, and they failed to replace the lost ones and dead ones that we sent back, or send us extra to account for the extra workload that comes with a huge comp % and e2e. Zebras get lost or die, that's just a fact. Equipment control only means that whoever loses one might get in trouble or fired, but it's not going to make a lost Zebra reappear in a puff of white smoke. Sometimes they get dropped too many times and stop working, accidents happen. If you work at a company that issues laptops and your laptop shits out on you, you just call IT and they'll issue you a new one. Target on the other hand says "lmao idk figure it out."

What's annoying about it is that you are expected to complete many tasks that are much more difficult or impossible without a Zebra of your own, but naturally they don't give us the equipment we need to do it. "Hey everybody, we're end-to-end now so you'll be responsible for your own backstock" Ok great, let me just use my Zebra to...oh wait, Guest Service snatched it for DriveUp because the one they had died on them and won't boot even with a new battery. No big deal, I see Danielle has one that I might be able to borrow for an hour, oh wait she's using it for pricing. No big deal, let me just connect to the WLAN with my brain waves and scan the waco labels with my eyeballs instead.
 
If your broken zebras that got shipped back weren’t replaced then your GE or GSTL or whoever sent them back probably didn’t actually create the work ticket in the zebra portal and probably just shipped it off somewhere. You can track zebras shipped from the moment you create the ticket through shipping/receipt/repair/shipping back to store/received. It’s also not hard to lose zebras. Use the holster and that will help. If you have strong equipment control and people are actually logging in and out, it’s not hard to do a count at the end of the night and research who was last logged in. Every LOD in my store could do this along with GSTLs/GSAs. 1 goes missing and it’s a corrective action for negligent conduct. They probably won’t go missing again after that. It’s a little tougher in an O/N store, but you just have to account for the ones that are signed out by O/N team.

There are a lot of things that HQ is out of touch with. The old iPod my devices were flipping awful. But lack of equipment rests entirely on the store for losing them. You want to get upset with someone about it then get upset with your team for losing them and your leaders not giving a crap. Equipment control is not really a corporate problem. I’m speaking from experience as my store was awful with equipment control before the zebras. We all committed as a team to take care of them and committed as leaders to strong equipment routines. Feel free to disagree.
 
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