Archived Why does Target seem to struggle to make ends meet. Especially with having enough employee

[NPC]

Yeah, but ... NO!

Disagree all you want.
Tell someone you think they are full of it.
But there is a point when you are crossing a line into, "Hey, we can't walk away from this".

Try thinking of it as the what kind of comment would I make to my cellmate in prison test.
You know, the person with no neck who took out four cops with their bare hands after being tasered.

Well I guess it depends. What if I took out 5 cops while being pepper sprayed?

 

[Kartman]

What, dancing ? Dinner?

Where would you take them?

 

[HRZone]

Or an STL with promotion aspirations being called "payroll captain" and is all to happy to continually gut our store. I don't see an A+ store with only 4 cashiers scheduled for the entire day so our E2E team is constantly on the lanes while freight sits unworked in the backroom for several days as "performing well". There's nothing I love more than hearing "we made sales for the week by over $30,000" be almost immediately followed by "every work center needs to cut 50-100 hours".

Payroll captain is not what you think it is lol. It's just the one who follows up when stores are not monitoring overtime or have too little or too much payroll.

STLs aren't dumb. If they don't spend payroll their store looks even more awful. If they don't spend their payroll they get even less the next year.

I am a regular team member and I know the nasty emails our dtl sends when we dont use payroll. Im not going to post them here but you can continue to be obtuse. If your store doesn't have hours they are probably overspending on logistics like most stores.

Payroll must be met monthly. I've seen multiple stores in our district struggle, and since we are exceeding payroll we support out for a week over there. Or vice versa, last 4th qtr, our store struggle and we got some support from other stores.
I'm sure this is to please our DTLs obligations with payroll. I'm sure the STLs see the benefit come review time.

It benefits both stores. For a store down on payroll they now make payroll and for the store with extra hours, by letting another store charge them for it they don't lose hours next year for making payroll by too much.

 

[Fluttervale]

If the leadership team wants to see what a real store looks like, they should stop announcing their visits and just show up randomly. Of course the store is gonna look amazing when you have twice the normal amount of people closing the night before, and you have your star TMs there during the visit. I can’t count the amount of times I’ve closed the night before the visit and was back the next morning in case they wanted to ask the TMs about end to end. Maybe random visits will lead to changes.

They don't want to see what a real store looks like. I assure you, every member of the leadership team knows. What they want to see is that the team cares enough to present the store well for them. They look at numbers for those stores after their visit. It's a sign of respect for the exec and the company to pull out all the s

Our layouts are similar since our most recent remodel. The only real difference is that we are a Super Target so our grocery side is much larger than theirs.
I know this. That's why I think the "$200 for every hour of flex payroll" (I forget the exact number) is stupid. Stocking $200 of cans is far longer than a $200 game console. Also, almost 40% of our sales comes from grocery.
We're both showpiece stores. They are relatively new, we just got remodeled.

Might be set up wrong in the system. After several months at a previous employer, getting practically no hours for a department, we found out something significant was set up totally wrong. And poof it all got better as soon as we corrected the system.

 

[Backroom81]

Payroll captain is not what you think it is lol. It's just the one who follows up when stores are not monitoring overtime or have too little or too much payroll.

STLs aren't dumb. If they don't spend payroll their store looks even more awful. If they don't spend their payroll they get even less the next year.

I am a regular team member and I know the nasty emails our dtl sends when we dont use payroll. Im not going to post them here but you can continue to be obtuse. If your store doesn't have hours they are probably overspending on logistics like most stores.



It benefits both stores. For a store down on payroll they now make payroll and for the store with extra hours, by letting another store charge them for it they don't lose hours next year for making payroll by too much.

You basically answered my question.

It's just the one who follows up when stores are not monitoring overtime or have too little or too much payroll.

by letting another store charge them for it they don't lose hours next year for making payroll by too much.

Sister store gets to overspend, we pay for it. And our store does look awful once you look past the stupid amount of flexing everyone does. The floor looks decent on the surface but good luck finding anything in the right place. Working SFS is borderline maddening. The backroom is a disaster ever since we went E2E.

 

[SrGSTL86]

Store modernization is working fine at my store....I don't get how some of your stores don't get the zone or research done. That's the first thing our team does when they come in...truck takes a backseat to zone, research, and stray. Many days truck isn't even done being unloaded completely until 12. We started killing it in sales after we nailed this process down. Been up over 30k on fri, sat, and, sun. Almost 5-10k on normal weekdays. All out TM's are really starting to own their areas ( HL still struggles a bit but they are getting there). We got rid of people who were taking 3 hours to push an hours worth of freight and everything starting falling into place. Even our cashiers know how to pull and backstock lol.

 

[BREAKITOUT]

The things you listed are considered when formulating payroll. TM experience, turnover and important metrics are included as well. Ultimately, it's up to the DTL where the hours go. If a DTL has a poor performing store, I wouldn't be surprised if that store received additional help, as far as payroll. If a store is performing well, I wouldn't be surprised if a DTL trimmed that store's payroll and redistributed it throughout the rest of the district.



The key is under payroll. You can achieve golden contribution if you are 1 hour under payroll or 1000 hours under payroll. However, as multiple other have already pointed out in this thread, the more hours you save, the more negative consequences arise.

Again, STLs are not rewarded for saving a lot of payroll. Sure, every store needs to be fiscally accountable and not spend more payroll than you are allocated, but saving a ton of hours is not beneficial to anyone, including STLs. Ask @Rock Lobster when the last time they or their STL received any sort of benefit from repeatedly saving 30% payroll.

As long as we are on the topic of payroll, I might as well point ot these 2 recent changes: stores can no longer lose payroll by missing sales forecasts, and flex hours gained during the first half of the month are not all lost if your sales tank during the second half of the month. (Flex hours are hours of payroll gained by doing more sales vs forecast).

wait so I'm trying to follow and learn about how payroll works -If NOT making sales doesn't hurt payroll, how does making sales or not making them affect us? Like in the short term as well as long term?

 

[SrTLall]

wait so I'm trying to follow and learn about how payroll works -If NOT making sales doesn't hurt payroll, how does making sales or not making them affect us? Like in the short term as well as long term?

Stores are given a set amount of payroll each month. Previously, as recently as about 6 months ago, if your store was not making sales for the month, that store had to cut payroll to compensate for the lower-than-expected sales. Now, if your store doesn't achieve its forecasted sales, it does not have to reduce payroll.
On the flip side, if a store does more sales that forecasted, that store earns payroll it can spend for the month. It gets sort of tricky here, because if a store beats sales the first half of the month but doesn't make sales the second half of the month, that store essentially broke even and wouldn't receive any extra payroll. However that changed recently as well. Now, if a store exceeds sales during the first half of the month, they get to keep, at a minimum, half of those earned hours (also known as flex hours) no matter what the store does in sales the rest of the month.

Hope that makes sense, I have an interview waiting for me.

 

[HRZone]

Even our cashiers know how to pull and backstock lol.

Right...

 

[Backroom81]

truck takes a backseat to zone, research, and stray.

Which is what we do and it's stupid. If an item is on the truck, in the backroom, and needed on the floor; the most efficient way to fill the shelf is to send it straight from the truck to the floor and leave the stock located in backroom alone (unless it's a perishable item). The method your store and my store does has us pull the item from the back, stock it on the floor, then take the case from the truck and put it back in location.

Before E2E, acknowledging a truck would subtract anything on the truck from Autofills and research was not shot until all truck was worked. This was to reduce the amount of times a box was touched before getting to the floor.

 

[SrGSTL86]

Right...

Believe it or not but I send em back there to pull and backstock for my endcaps all the time .

Also, the team members do pull what they need off the truck what they need for outs.

 

[jenna]

Some of our cashiers can barely even cashier.

:struggle is real:

 

[Digi_E]

I know their E2E is somewhat different which is why I look at their total payroll vs ours. Our E2E is across the board and all sales floor does their own backroom (stupidly inefficient and the metrics have tanked to reflect that). No area in our store is getting a special focus for payroll. Sales floor does their own FF and our SFS uses a dedicated team (only team that actually gets enough hours to complete their work too).

I've asked around and the most common answer from my store's ETLs is that our payroll is used to help the district meet payroll with a large portion of it going to our sister store.

as in they are being allocated payroll meant for your store? ETL's shouldnt even be able to get that info if thats the case so they could be assuming. I know end to end affects your hours given to your store as stores with certain levels of end to end are given more by HQ, i know my store gets an extra 400 each week from the DTL because of our end to end being almost full store vs other stores that are either half way or quarter of the way there.

 

[Rock Lobster]

I haven't been with Target long but there are a lot of factors that affect payroll hours. These are probably the biggest.

• Layout of the store. They factor how long a task takes by how many steps the associate completing it has to take. Two stores with the exact same sales can have a difference of a dozen or more hours just because the coolers are very far from the dock in one store and close in the other. Then there's everything else step based.
• What they sell. Two stores might have the same topline sales, but if one store contributes a significant amount more from a higher labor department, they can get a lot more hours that way. For example, $1000 extra in sales gets more hours in Starbucks than it does in Grocery.
• If you are a showpiece store. Your district manager has a certain level of control on who gets what hours. They will choose the stores that do the most with what they have, and the stores that visitors want to see. So if you have a big store that's just been remodeled and has new stuff, execs will want to see it. The DTL will want it to run with a few more hours so that frenzy isn't as bad.

While I understand that these somehow factor into the total payroll, I get concerned that these algorithms are too convoluted to function at all. I am convinced that the stores do not receive payroll based on workload at the store level itself. The total store payroll seems to be independently allocated based on what the company can give, and then the algorithms attempt to break apart the pie based on workloads (resulting in something getting the shaft every week based on minimum staffing requirements).

 

[Hardlinesmaster]

Believe it or not but I send em back there to pull and backstock for my endcaps all the time .

Also, the team members do pull what they need off the truck what they need for outs.

Are you fully staff?

 

[RightArm]

Are you fully staff?

Stop reading my mind. LOL I was just thinking the exact same thing. We have good leadership and if we had the staff to go with it we'd be killing this E2E thing too but it's hard to do the work of 10 people with only 5 to any amount of success.

 

[Tyrant]

as in they are being allocated payroll meant for your store? ETL's shouldnt even be able to get that info if thats the case so they could be assuming. I know end to end affects your hours given to your store as stores with certain levels of end to end are given more by HQ, i know my store gets an extra 400 each week from the DTL because of our end to end being almost full store vs other stores that are either half way or quarter of the way there.

Wait, I thought the entire point of E2E was so corporate could slash hours. Why the hell do E2E stores get extra? How is that in any way efficient? Here's more hours to get the same end result as before?

 

[Backroom81]

as in they are being allocated payroll meant for your store? ETL's shouldnt even be able to get that info if thats the case so they could be assuming. I know end to end affects your hours given to your store as stores with certain levels of end to end are given more by HQ, i know my store gets an extra 400 each week from the DTL because of our end to end being almost full store vs other stores that are either half way or quarter of the way there.

We've been fully E2E for months and haven't seen anything close to an increase in payroll.

 

[HRZone]

Wait, I thought the entire point of E2E was so corporate could slash hours. Why the hell do E2E stores get extra? How is that in any way efficient? Here's more hours to get the same end result as before?

Kind of a fallacy. Stores are getting the same hours but they are allocated differently.

While a lot of work centers are losing hours. Apparel, Beauty and Electronics are getting more than ever before. I don't think there is a person in my store who gets less than 30 in those areas unless their availability sucks.

End to end has hurt our logistics tms, market tms, front end, speciality but not the ACE

 

[HRZone]

We've been fully E2E for months and haven't seen anything close to an increase in payroll.

I talked to my district lead about this. A DTL can give a store extra hours but it's not because they "take" from one store. Generally a DTL will see their district is under for hours for the month so the last week of the month they will give one district more hours so they can hire and onboard people etc or get projects done.

Any good stl worth a salt would fight for that

 

[Backroom81]

While a lot of work centers are losing hours. Apparel, Beauty and Electronics are getting more than ever before. I don't think there is a person in my store who gets less than 30 in those areas unless their availability sucks.

Even some of our TLs have only been getting 25 the past month and have been burning through their vacation to make ends meet. Our dry grocery, dairy, and frozen are under a single work center with a forecasted workload of ~375 hours and only get scheduled 200. They just finished Monday's truck last night and finally started on Tuesday's.

Any good stl worth a salt would fight for that

Our STL is great at covering everything up. The floor is flexed to the point where item search is worthless and any hint of a visit means all the freight under the line goes into the truck and the pin lock is "accidentally" switched or shoved down the stockroom aisles. Visitors only walk into receiving, see an empty line, and walk straight back out. They NEVER walk the coolers so it's no big deal if freight from 3 days ago is still back there. District thinks our store is a model for how others should operate because they don't bother to actually look.

 

[Dragronak8er97]

Well, as of next week our hours are inthe toilet, drastically. The highest hours I seen were like 34 I had to take someone’s shift just so I can make ends meet at home. It’s quite depressing. My hr told us that the hours will be back for the holidays and once that’s over the hours will dwindle down to nothing because the holiday season is over. Why do they do this I don’t understand the ideology behind hurting your employees to the point that we have people flipping out about receiving less then 20 hours.

They say no OT and we can’t add any extra hours (I ask because I really need them) but all of my lods have 7-10 hours OT. But what’s really funny is that they will call you in a panic at 6 am on your day off to say “we really need you today, can you come in at the earliest you can.” Hmmm, be petty and hurt myself financially or hurt them and go back to bed.

 

[HRZone]

Even some of our TLs have only been getting 25 the past month and have been burning through their vacation to make ends meet. Our dry grocery, dairy, and frozen are under a single work center with a forecasted workload of ~375 hours and only get scheduled 200. They just finished Monday's truck last night and finally started on Tuesday's.

Yeah sounds like you guys are having store specific issues. Why is your stl letting market be drained so many hours?

TLs are supposed to be guaranteed 32. Thats odd.

Your store sounds like a disaster

 

[Anelmi]

The last 2 weeks were pretty low at my store but hours have bounced back up this next week because...November and a new month.

 

[Backroom81]

Yeah sounds like you guys are having store specific issues. Why is your stl letting market be drained so many hours?

He's the one who's refusing to give them the hours. When market first went E2E and they were only given half of the forecasted hours, our STL told them they have to prove they can do the work in the allotted time before he would give them more hours. My response was, "So if they do it in half the time they are supposed to use, how can they believe you're not going to spend those hours elsewhere?"

TLs are guaranteed 32. Thats odd

That was my understanding too. I stopped being a TL a few years ago but I could have sworn that was policy.

Your store sounds like a disaster

I am eternally grateful that I stopped being a TL and went part time when I got my current job. I would hate to be at my store any more than I am now.