Just another day at the office

So yesterday, I got to work all day. Lucky me, that's a whopping $28 an hour. Sweet. I feel for the serving staff in New York that only get what, US$3.50 per hour. I wonder if they get paid per hour that their lousy customers stay after close? See, one of my major gripes about The Company, is that they don't pay us to cash up. Or come in early, but I beat that by coming early enough not to get in trouble for being late, and then sitting around (eating breakfast, going to the loo, etc) until 9 or 10AM. I then, and ONLY then, proceed to count my cash and ready the store to be opened for business. Hey, that might take me 10 mins or so depending on the state of the cash and all (like, NOT BEING ABLE TO FIND IT at two of the stores I covered at. Who puts the money there anyway!? Since when do we ever put money there overnight?!) So if I open up the store at 10 past and you've been waiting ever so impatiently outside, hey don't get snooty at me, I don't get paid to come in any earlier. That explains why my vacuum cleaner is sometimes still out at 11 on a Sunday. Yes, I am vacuuming now, cos I'm not gonna do it before or after trading hours, cos The Company sure ain't gonna pay for it.

So, yesterday I was rushing to get to work and just made it at 10. As I was walking towards my store, I noticed a couple walking around near the Cafe, not customers of the cafe, but just suspiciously enough to arouse my attention that they may be early birds. I always hate the first customers in. It's just customary. Sure enough, when I pulled open my door at 5-10 past, they were right outside and waltzed right in as I was pulling my racks out.

What was so urgent that they had to hover outside early on a Sunday morning, you ask? A few pairs of boxers and socks. Really now. $14.85 worth, to be exact. At least they didn't take a plastic bag.

So I did manage to clean up a bit from the night before, and even got to vacuum up all the killer dust bunnies. I was on a roll. Sure, it got busy, and what can you do but sit back and watch the mayhem unravel when it's so busy with no sale stock. Oh well. Shrug and busy yourself with tidying.

There were 2 issues from yesterday that I must blog about: staffing and new trainees and sales and advertising.

Let's discuss new trainees first.

I was aware that I was to work with Jen, a new casual staff member, and I was to assist her with cashing up and closing for the day. No problem. But when she arrived, she told me she hadn't even finished her training yet. WHAT THE?! Whaddya mean, haven't finished?! Well, I knew Andie, my manager turned fellow casual (she's gone back to study) didn't want to train any more staff. Heck, she trained me and look how I turned out! hahah! Nah, the fact of the matter is, as a training manager, you aren't allowed many extra hours to train your staff, in many cases, you're training more than one person, sometimes they are at different levels in their training, as you may have to train them at your store, and split the responsibility with another manager at another store. So, no extra hours to train your staff, and yet you are still expected to complete all your regular store tasks as well.

Our training is all on-the-job. This is good in that you get a real life perspective of your actual job and what responsibilities it entails. However, this can also be somewhat detrimental, given the daily stresses and pressures that we're put under. So at the moment, we have something of an end of season clearance, so needless to say, we are all very busy and our stores are swarming with customers. We still have stock to unpack (if you're so lucky. I'll get back to this point later), prices to change and customers to serve. We have a six point policy to follow with each and every customer. Yeah right. So, being the only staff in the store, how do we manage to serve customers, scan in stock, unpack it, price it and security tag it, and serve customers at the same time? We can't. If we're going to prioritise, we'll either pick the customers or the stock. Guess which one I pick. So, throw in a couple of new staff trainees, some of whom have had no retail experience, and what do you have? A very overwhelmed manager (or casual) and some seriously freaked out trainees. There's a whole lotta bureaucracy and paperwork to be taken care of at our place, and lots of procedure and theory about materials, clothing, footwear, etc that must be learnt as well. Think of it, a casual after 2 weeks of training is going to be left alone in a store to run it all by themselves. Yikes? No kidding.

Needless to say, Andie didn't have much time to train the two newbies. To add fuel to the fire, she didn't even know she was supposed to be training. Turned up to her shift, busy catalogue sale, and then two staff turned up to be trained. WHAT THE!? They were dumped on her by our AM because, quite honestly, there was no one else to train. All the other managers in our region are new, or haven't trained new staff before. The other stores don't have managers. haha. So, being so busy, what was she to do? Teach them how to transfer in stock and greet customers and set them to work doing that. Not much time to learn how to do things like laybys, manual sales, refunds, etc. New girls Jen and Shannon had previously been unceremoniously 'dumped' on Caroline (another ex-manager turned casual) at Innaloo for training. Surprise, surprise, she didn't know she was supposed to be training either. Oops, how did that happen? Same dealio with their training at Innaloo with Caroline and at our store with Andie.

So, yesterday, I was expecting Jen to be fully trained. New, but trained at least. It was pretty busy by the time she arrived and I was more than ready to go out for lunch. I was a bit worried about leaving her on her own in the store, seeing as she'd only worked (trained) there briefly once before, and hadn't even finished training at that. So she didn't know where anything was and I was afraid she wouldn't know how to do things or deal with the customers' questions/requests/demands. So I called Caroline at Innaloo, she was busy as over there as well, and she filled me in on what had been happening with the newbies. Called our AM for help, cos I didn't want to stress Jen out any more by leaving her alone in the middle of a rush, and it was then that I was made painfully aware of the state of The Company.

We're in the weeds. Many of our stores are now without managers, and the ones that do have managers, are new managers. So, as more and more staff quit (in disgust, presumably) and as our timetables and availability change, they need to hire more staff to fill in the gaps. But how do you train them with no qualified managers? You can't. So you need to rely on the ex-manager now casual (with significantly less responsibility) to pick up the slack. Otherwise we'll all just sink. With no new blood, we can't possibly survive. So even though they don't want to do it (lack of appreciation for efforts and even fines for things not done according to procedures and deadlines), they have to because there simply is no one else. The Company needs them.

So after such dire situations, do you think upper management would for a minute consider how this could all come about? How did things get this bad? As if they could give a flying f#$%.

Sidenote: It turns out that Jen actually handled it all quite well. She'd done more training than I thought, and although I was also expected to help fill the gaps (more than happy to, most of the time), at least our training cash up was paid! Yay! We actually get paid to perform tasks that are part of our job description. So cash up took half an hour (after some LATE customers- grrr) and I was paid a handy $14 for it. Great!