I was fairly busy with inventory work after my first two stores. I
guess I wasn't as completely horrible at it as I thought, because I
scarcely got a day off the first couple of months I was there. Of
course, January and February were the busiest months of the year for
RGIS, with many stores wanting inventories so that they could see how
well they had done during the holiday season. My district hired over
a hundred people in January one year, and I think about 3 or 4 people
ended up staying for more than a couple of days.
This busy time was great for us auditors, as we could really rack
up some serious overtime hours and come away with nice fat paychecks.
Even at $ 7.50 an hour. TM Ethan said that when his mom used to work
for RGIS, she made enough money one January to buy a really nice car.
So the work was fairly steady, the hours were flexible, and as I
did more inventories I improved my counting skills and my confidence
grew with each inventory I did. I began to actually enjoy the process
of counting aspirin boxes and pans of eye shadow. I even liked doing
the scan-only inventories, where clothing boutiques made you scan
each individual blouse and pair of pants in the store. It didn't
require much if any thinking, so you could just scan like a robot
while you let your mind wander away to more important things.
Of course, a scan-only inventory could be a real pain in the ass
when it came to a store like Victoria's Secret. I mean, can you
imagine scanning a round table loaded with hundred of pairs of
panties? One table with over six hundred pairs of panties, all
carefully laid out in neat rows, and you had to search in each
frigging pair for a miniscule tag to scan, over and over and over
again. Oh, and let's not forget the racks of bras on the walls.
Dozens crammed onto tiny metal rods so that when you reached for a
bra tag to scan about 25 of them fell off the rack and landed on the
floor. And then you had figure out which ones you had already scanned
and which ones still needed to be counted, and...fuck it. Just jam
'em all back onto the rack and hope that no one noticed.
There was a dirty little secret to counting in Victoria's Secret,
and a few other stores as well. It was that while out on the sales
floor you had to at least appear to scan every single item
(fragrances and cosmetics excluded; those you could quantity count),
in the back room you could batch like crazy. By batching, I mean we
would take one bra and scan it like 50 times. This method of counting
was expressly forbidden by RGIS, but of course it went on all the
time in my district. No Manager or Team Leader (except Ethan, who
used to encourage me to batch all the time) would ever come right out
and say it was okay to batch, it was just sort of implied that it was
necessary sometimes in order to finish the inventory on time.
So what we would do in a Victoria's Secret back room was this: We
would make ourselves as comfortable as possible on the cold linoleum
floor, sitting cross-legged and gathering several garbage bags and
huge cardboard boxes full of underwear around us. Then we would dump
it all out on the floor. We would pick up a bra, scan it say 50 or 60
times, toss it back into the bag or box and grab handfuls of
unscanned underwear and throw them in too. This was a much faster way
of counting than having to search and sort through piles of tangled
bras, looking for that elusive bar code tag to scan, only to discover
that the tag was missing and you had to call "SKU check!"
and wait forever until some clerk dragged her ass away from the
fascinating conversation she was having with a couple of her
coworkers out on the sales floor. I mean, who has time for that crap?
If we counted everything the way we were supposed to, we'd have been
there forever. Not that I wouldn't have loved the fatter paycheck,
but did I really want to spend 10 hours sitting on the floor in
Victoria's Secret? No thanks. So, we would batch the hell out of the
place, and no one was ever the wiser.
(A side note about Victoria's Secret: a friend of mine shopped
there quite frequently, and I used to tell her about some of the
creepy people I worked with. I would say, "You know that new bra
you bought the other day? Just think, some sweaty oily old man was
probably pawing through it, looking for a tag to scan." My
friend would be suitably grossed out.)
So as I mentioned earlier, batching was supposedly against the
rules at RGIS but it went on all the time. The reason it was
forbidden was because the store couldn't get an accurate inventory if
you batched. For example, if you were counting cosmetics in a store
like Long's Drugs, you couldn't just pick up one tube of Revlon
lipstick, scan the bar code and then quantity count the rest of them.
If you did that, then when the area was printed out, it looked as
though the store had about 756 tubes of the "Love That Red"
color, and no "Pink in the Afternoon" or "Berry
Brown." Only red. Oops! Busted.
Not that my managers cared. If they thought they could get away
with it they would let batching slide. RGIS' official slogan was
"Accuracy Is Our Primary Concern." Hah! In my district it
was "Our Primary Concern Is Getting In And Out Of The Store As
Fast As Possible, And To Hell With Accuracy." My district's
inventory reports were never quite up to par, so there was ever
increasing pressure on the managers to improve. Of course, that meant
more pressure on us auditors to count faster faster faster! Faster
counts meant better-looking inventory reports. Better looking
inventory reports meant bigger bonuses for the managers. But what did
it mean for us lowly auditors? Not a whole lot. If we were fortunate
we might get a laconic "Thanks" as we closed out our audit
machines and headed out the door. Oh sure, we might get a little
raise now and then, but that's nothing compared to getting a nice fat
bonus. Or benefits. It really sucked that the managers had medical
and dental benefits and a 401K plan AND bonuses, and all an auditor
got was maybe a 25 cent raise once a year, if your manager remembered
to give you one. I was fortunate that DM Kenny was a happy drunk,
because I think that's why I received five raises my first year with
RGIS. Two 50 cent raises, two 75 cent ones and one $1.00 raise. I
think that in his drunken state he kept forgetting that he'd already
given me a raise the month before and then would go ahead and give me
another one. Thank goodness for Coors Light.
But back to the subject of batching. When I was a newbie it really
used to bother me to see people batching in an inventory. I would
think to myself how unfair it was that I was taking the time to count
things properly, and others were just blowing through shelves and
areas, counting all the different flavors of fruit juice as one. I
also felt bad for the store too, in that they weren't getting the
kind of inventory that they had paid for (meaning an accurate one).
But as the years passed, and my cynicism towards RGIS grew, I
eventually stopped caring so much about accuracy and fairness and the
customer getting screwed over. Fuck it. If the AM and DM didn't care,
why should I? And if the store's employers were too stupid to figure
out that they were being had, then that was their own fault.
Batching figured into an auditor's APH (Average Per Hour). In most
inventories a record of how many items or dollars you had counted was
kept. When we were in one of our Long's Drugs cycles (2 weeks worth
of Long's stores, about 1 per day), the DM would print up a list of
how many dollars everyone had counted in the previous inventory, make
copies, and pass them out at the beginning of the next day's
inventory. Of course, if you batched, your APH would be much higher
than someone who counted legitimately. Printing out our APH's was
supposed to be a sort of incentive for us to count faster, as in
"Hey! So-and-So counted $90,000.00 worth of stuff, and I only
did half that. Gosh! I had better count faster this time, so I can do
as well as him!" What a load of crap. I mean, who gives a damn,
right? What did we get out of it, except for bragging rights? Are
bragging rights as good or better than getting a bonus? Hell no.
Screw bragging rights.
Besides,any idiot there knew that if you got stuck counting in a
crap aisle like fishing tackle, with their millions of tiny bags of
$1.99 lures (at cost), you would have counted a ton of stuff and
ended up with a very low dollar amount. Whereas some ass
cherry-picking could score the vitamin aisle and load his machine
with over $10,000.00 in one section alone. (Cherry-picking bastards.
Another thing that went on a lot in my district. People were supposed
to take the next available aisle or gondola to count, but some jerk
auditors would take a peek at the next aisle, see that there was too
much crap to scan, or too few dollars in it to mean much, and skip
over that one, leaving it for someone else to count.) So the posting
of everyone's APH didn't mean much to us. Who cared? Give us auditors
a bonus or benefits, then we might have cared. Somewhat.
(Coming up: More RGIS crap.)
31 comments:
I find the Victoria Secret inventories the more amusing ones, I have a 10-list on my LiveJournal about that actually.
Actually you CAN do batching if allowed by account procedures. I never have because the VCs we do, store mangement organzines everyone for us and that makes its much better.
We have a seperate army of auditors that do the VC backroom that come in about 2 hours earlier, sign in on a different time sheet, and have a different supervisor.
The sales floor, everyone speeds through that and we get done in 3 to 4 hours. I forget when the back gets done, buts its usually long before we are done.
Actually, there's a few store chains we can do what you described at Long Drugs. Price Chopper up here, we can do a "flavorless" inventory at all stores except the few that are on perpeptual inventories.
And also now, for scan-only inventories, there's a way to prevent people from batching intentionally.
Yeppers, I know about the VS experience. I ran 2 of those stores, and boy was I glad I was running them instead of counting them! Yep, I was one of the suckers that actually scanned each piece. Oh well, they are pretty lax, and I'm still hourly, so they can run as long as they want! I'm not really pressured to turn in good numbers, and my fellow co-workers are a pretty unruly bunch. Man, I can 't help but chuckle at some of the characters you have discussed. Man, it brings back so many memories. My first district manager was a freaking nut! You ever hear of a Hector Ortiz?
This one made my stomach turn. Batching? Like that? That's so wrong! I hope your district was the exception and not the rule. I have not observed such blatent practices in my district, which is not to say it doens't happen. I just hope it doens't.
You make a very good point, unfortunatly. You're ability to count fast is all that matters, and the means to the end is not considered. The slow and accurate counters will not be as much in demand, and they will not get raises as readily as those with speed, even if those with speed make mistakes and, dare i say it? Batch.
I can't say I never batch. I can't say batching doesn't happen. But there is a right way and a wrong way to batch. Victorias Secret, yes you get a big box o' size 38 DDs and you can easily batch that. Scanning the box of panties where the sizes are pretty much sorted out, sure you can get away with it! But when you have a mix of sizes, batching is just wrong! If I had a peg of bras just fall to the floor, I'd delete the whole area and scan it again if I didn't know what was scanned and what was not. My solution, leave it on the floor. It's either the "counted" pile or the "uncounted" pile depending on what direction I'm going. And there is the search feature on the audit machine if it's not too huge a mess.
I think Victorias Secret is one of the easiest stores to count. Everything is in order for the most part. They have boxes of bras and panties in the back, sorted by size and color. On the sales floor in the drawers and on the panty tables, pretty much sorted by size and color. Same with bras, etc. It's so easy!
Except the thongs and g-string panties. It's amazing with some of those panties how the security tag on is bigger than the actual panty! And some of them are so small you think anyone that size has no business wearing a sexy thong or g-sring. Those are a pain to scan when also trying to keep them neat. Now when you get in to the bras and the granny panties, peice of cake! When it comes to panties, though, nothing is easier than a plus-sized women's clothing store!
We always start Victoria's Secreat back rooms a few hours before the salesfloor starts. Maybe as many as four. I can't remember, as it has been a long time since I've been in a VC to count. We have the same supervisor and crew for the entire inventory. But we do have the back room crew that go in early to count the back room and then stay to count the sales floor, and then the sales floor crew comes in.
And lets talk SKU checks. Sure, call a couple for good measure. But sometimes it's just easier to scan something else. There are stores where what the sku is truley does matter. Others, it's all about number of peices, or dollars. When you come across your 10th tagless item in your 3rd area, you start to think "well, if they didn't care enough to make sure everything had a tag and the store was prepped, then why should I care?" Sad but true. Sometimes if you do care too much, you will be there all night or day!
Single scanner (mostly) and proud of it! My APH is quite hight too.
I finally decided to put a name on myself. I posted a commnet on one your earlier postings describing myself as a former Team Leader. I had worked for RGIS for 11 years.
I have enjoyed reading all the postings. This latest one about batching brings home alot of memories. Now, I think batching pretty much goes on in every office. I am sure there are some exceptions.
I worked for one of the the busiest and most profitable offices in the company. It was d356 (Boston South). We batched all the time. Not that it made the inventories inaccuarate. At least not all the time. For instance, if you were scanning a table of shirts at the Gap the shirts would have little plastic size stickies on the fold. So if you seen that the next five shirts were a size M, then you could scan the first M shirt 5 times and if the stickies were wrong, then at least in your mind you could feel less guilty and but the blame on the store.
There were also some chains that in their contract with RGIS would require us to scan each item, but upon careful inspection we would find that UPC or SKU did not change per size or color or what
ever.
Our district was very careful not to mention batching to newbies. Those of us who were veterans knew when to batch and when not to.
Some of the stores that paid really good money to RGIS for their inventory had checks in place to make sure that their inventory was taken correctly. One of those stores was Home Depot.
I use to run the portable at the Home Depot inventories when the districts ran them themselves. (Yes, I was one of those brats who got paid for tearing off printouts all day.) I would stay after the counts with the managers and Home Depot would merge the totals in our portables with their computers. They had a name for this process but I forgot it. Anyway, what would happen would be that a report would run letting them know if there were any descrepencies over a certain amount. For instance, we counted 4 bags of cedar mulch (I have spring on my mind), and the store's inventory is telling them they should have 100 bags. We would then have to go searching high and low looking for the remaining 96 bags to see if we counted wrong or if the store had their inventory incorrect.
This was a great tool for Home Depot, most of the time the large discrepencies were caused by an auditor scanning an item and then thinking that what was behind that item was all the same (imagine that). But there was also problems in some Home Depots with theft in certain areas and shipments being logged in wrong to begin with.
Home Depot was the exception, most companies were not able or willing to pay the high price for this type of service and believe me (I use to help out in the office), they paid alot of money for the inventories.
Another item that gets batched alot is greeting cards. In some stores we would do financial counts on them rather than scan even if we were scanning everything else in the store. Those counts were usually way off. The way we were taught to batch cards were to take a card from the middle row and then keep keying 6 on the 6k key for the whole row going across. I remember recounts would never come close.
At my district our mangers also had a look the other way attitude, but they knew what was going on, especially since almost all of them started out as auditors and did the same thing. And you are correct they do love those bonuses, although I have heard through people that still work for them that those bonuses are no longer the amounts they use to be.
Well, like I said earlier I have enjoyed this Blog and all the postings. I will try and post again soon.
You guys, most of your districts sound like they're better and a lot more efficient than mine was! For Victoria's Secret, we never had a back room and a sales floor crew. One group did the whole store. We did the sales floor first, since most of the VS stores were done in the morning, around 6:00 am, and the store wanted the sales floor done before the customers came in. Plus, the overstock in the back rooms were NEVER organized. That is, different size and models of bras were not sorted into separate bags and boxes. All of it was jumbled into huge garbage bags and boxes, neon green zebra-striped bras and red satin thongs and everything. So if we tried to actually count it all accurately, it would have taken forever and the TL or AM who was running the inventory would get into trouble for taking so long, and then he of course would take it out on us by not scheduling us for as many stores next month.
Agentskelly, what's the way that RGIS has now to keep people from batching? I'm curious.
Core Everything: No, I haven't heard of a Hector Ortiz. What, did he have some kind of a weird reputation? Do tell!
8:52 pm: OMG, if we ever did what you described in VS, or any store, about how if a rack of bras fell to the floor, and if you couldn't figure out which ones had been scanned and which didn't, you would just delete everything and start over? We would have been ridiculed, or the TL or AM would have yelled at us for wasting time, and you can bet that whoever did that in my dist. wouldn't be working there for very long.
But lol! about the thongs. I remember some of them being about postage stamp-sized, and TL Eric putting a black one on his head and wearing it like an eyepatch.
jkat: Thanks, I'm glad you're enjoying this blog. I'm having fun writing it, it too is bringing back a lot of memories for me, both good and bad. Please continue to read and comment, everyone. I enjoy hearing about other districts and the way they do things.
The batching that you described, like in the Gap stores, well, I don't think that's as bad as what we used to do. If we could get away with batching different UPC's and SKU's, then we would do so, with tacit understanding from the managers that to do it was okay, as long as you weren't too obvious about it and didn't get caught. And that's bad for the stores.
Wow, Home Depot would make you guys search for "missing" merchandise? That's not fair. That should be the store's job.
Oh yes, greeting cards. We did those financially too, and of course batched the hell out of them. Each auditor had their own system to batching cards. I would usually just take the first card in front (starting at the bottom), and count up one row to the top, at all the same prices. The stores usually didn't check the card section printouts (if they got printed out at all), just the higher priced stuff like cosmetics and OTC.
You could say he had a reputation! He was a self-proclaimed "Crazy District Manager". He took pride in the fact that he had the most driving imfranctions in the company. That guy was the biggest jerk/fruit loop/psycho that I've ever had the disprivilege of working for.
I knew I was in for it from the 2nd day on, when I asked him a question, and he just went off on me. From that time on, I learned that approaching the guy was the last thing I wanted to do. However, yes, as I progressed much later, I did get to know the guy, and he kinda had a small renasaince, which didn't last long.
But ok, Rep... oh yes... The guy was just out of control. If he didn't take his meds, I'd say he was potentially dangerous. The guy did so many unsavery practices, like taking off tenths on timesheets, not giving credit for drive times, and just so many other things. I've seen him mistreat customers and heck, many employees had nightmares about him years after he left.
The guy was just a hypocritical self-absorbed and self-righteous human being. This is dispite the fact he was supposedly religious, which IMO, makes it even worse. LOL, both his wives he met at RGIS... that should tell ya somethin g, and yes, I've been on a trip with the guy, and um ya, when I got up form the very little sleep I had, and was waiting by the van...
Area Manager from some Cali Distirct: This isn't what you think it is...
LOL
Yep, you guessed it! Hector pimpin'... lol...
Ya, sometimes the guy was hillarious, and very passionate about the job, and I will say that he probably did pretty well, but like nobody enjoyed working for him at all. Everyone was practically throwing a party when he finally had enough and moved on.
Yep, I guess a guy like that is a product of moving up too fast in a company. A family disappointed that he dropped out of college, and didn't finish, and well being short, and being porto-rican with a chip on his shoulder. He always felt he had something to prove, which was ridiculous, cause if only he was nice, he had people that would have done a lot for the guy, but the guy just couldn't keep it together.
I regret that I wasted 4 years of my life under his crazy reign, but now I have moved on, and things are really moving for me, however, with all these crazy things going on around RGIS, and ya, the fact I put in sick hours, I can't really do anything else, so it's kinda on hold, and yes, what I plan on doing is kinda on hold too. It's still a good situation though.
core everything:
You were in a CA district? Did you participate in the class-action lawsuit against RGIS? I did, and received a very nice five figure check!
Your old manager I think has to take the cake for the worst and weirdest ever. And that's saying a LOT for a RGIS manager. How on earth did he manage to keep his job for any length of time? I mean, all of that stuff that he did to you guys, and to the customers as well. Scandalous!
Lol, about him being short. I've noticed that about short guys. It's like they feel as though they always have to overcompensate in manner and voice, to make up for their lack in height.
Batching controls...
Some stores have a printout. If there are more than say, 50 of the same SKU in one area, a printout can be generated stating the area number, the questionable SKU and the number of times that SKU was scanned. The last store I did, the prinout areas were their massive pre-list, so no surprize there, and their cologne, again, no surprize there.
Then there are stores where after you scan the same SKU 5 times, or 10 times, whatever the company chooses, the audit machine will buzz each and every time you scan the same SKU again. Then you either have to A)press the minus key each time you scan the SKU to force it in, or B)Find something that has a different SKU, scan it, and then go back to the original SKU until you hit that magic number again. It's very annoying to say the least.
I've even done a store where every single SKU in the store is different. If there is no tag on the item, you can't find another one in the same size and color and scan that ticket. You won't be able to close out. Annoying!
Yeah, the batching controls is what is used now at certain inventories, works pretty good actually.
Jkat, your were also in Northeast Divison like me. Boston South, thats the one thats actually in Rhode Island right?
Oh, Jkat, the term you are thinking of is the variances. We do those for certain stores, like Michaels.
To agentskelly, d356, boston south is not the district that covers RI. That district is the Seekonk MA office, I think it could be D363, but I am not sure of district number.
D356 use to cover part of Northern RI but that was many moons ago. It now covers from the Attleboros in MA up to the Natick MA area and east to the Taunton area.
Yes it its part of the Northeastern Divison and from what I hear, just lost their Operations Manager (forced early retirement is what I heard).
Speaking of batching though, does everyone still estimate the candy at the registers? We had a real neat way of doing that. We would do one register pretty accurately and then we would check our audits for department totals on that register and then just add or subtract from those figures for the next bunch of registers.
For instance, if the magazine total for the first register came up $609, then we would just look and see if the next register seemed to have more or less magazines and just key in a total on that department based on that. Of course we had to make it look like we were actually counting to the store personel, so we would hit 2 or 3 numbers on our machines and then the clear button. We would keep doing this until we felt that we spent sufficient time at each register as to not get questioned how we could have counted so fast.
There were actually quite alot of good tricks we had when we counted. More of that later though.
I see. I seemed to remember something odd that your old district had the office actully in RI, but I guess not.
Ever do the CVS in some mall in North Attleboro? I know some store personel there.
The Candy, for the most part, I try get it all in rows to match up with the 24 or 36 piece box so I know how much to add.
Nope, I'm not from a Cali district. I went there during those crazy longs/albertsons runs cause the whole crew was toast due to them. Who in their right mind thought of that crazy combination of abuse? I did hear they changed that recently, so that's good. I hear AMs make 72k over there cause of the ridiculous cost of living in Cali.
To agentskelly, there was another district, it was the Franklin Ma district that use to be headquarted in RI. But that was before my time. That district was moved to Franklin MA and covered northern RI. That office was closed about 13 years ago and they demoted the district manager and merged the district with Boston South. Well the dm that got demoted was re promoted about 3 years later and is still dm of Boston South today.
The office that is headquarted in Seekonk MA is actually called the Providence office because 1)its main territory is RI and 2) it use to be headquarted in RI.
The reason why RGIS no longer has an office in RI is because of the employment laws in RI. RI state law dictates that anyone working in retail on a Sunday in RI or who works out of a company's office that is in RI has to get paid time and a half for any work on a Sunday regardless of what state the actual work is in.
So, by moving the Providence office to Seekonk, RGIS was able to save themselves alot of money, though when they do an inventory in a store in RI on a Sunday now they still have to pay their auditors time and a half.
As for CVS, yes my district did all of them in the Attleboro area.
Speaking of CVS, they were always considered to be the cream of the crop inventories. Everyone wanted to be scheduled to count them. Why? Because the stores are nice and neat, easy to count and usually well prepared for inventories. RGIS loves them as a client also, and they should, CVS is another high paying customer especially when you factor in the pharmacy count.
We actually had "special" crews that did the CVS's. These were made up of our best and most reliable counters and I can honestly say that there was no batching going on in these stores.
Yup, CVS is one of our top 5 customers. They kept them clean is because they always kept everything up to what the planogram says.
We have one TL that runs all the CVS inventories and he picks who's should go on them and well I am on most of them because I am that good.
Agentskelly, you have TL's run CVS in your District? In ours, only the AM's run them. It is basically always the same people who count them also. I am a TL and I run a lot of jobs but not CVS. Although, we are hearing that the new owners want the TL's to run more things like CVS so that the managers can do other things.
Annonymous who posted at 11:14... are you serious? The new owners want TLs to run more stores typically reserved for managers? There's a good little tid bit of info. Personally, that's not a responsibility I'd want to take on! Not that I think a TL couldn't handle it if they had enough experience. But these inventories, at least in my district, tend to be the larger stores, and the managers are there for hours! I think I'd pass up on that "opportunity". In my district, I have seen TLs run larger stores that usually AMs or AAMs run such as Waldenbooks, Forever 21 and Comp USA. These TLs are competent and can handle it, though. I can't speak for CVS as I have never set foot in one for inventory and our day and night teams don't often mix. I think only managers run CVS but TLs are allowed to run the pharmacy section.
core everything:
Ah yes, the Long's/Albertson's runs. I remember them well. Toast is right. Long's in the morning, Albertson's at night, over and over and over again, for two weeks plus. Every three months. Toast, fried, exhausted. But at least some steady work!
Yeah, it works great actually. We also have another TL that runs Family Dollar inventories, which also works great.
I lived in Oregon for 10 years before moving back to NY and I scratch my head that a store like Albertons is financal. I should ask Sprinfield is Shaws is all financial since Alberstons owns them.
to agentskelly,
we are doing Shaws mostly financial. We do have an occasional scan Shaws but they are rare.
i work in the northeast also and we do all shaws financially..we scanned one of 2 of them in the past but not in a while.thank god...scanning a grocery store sucks.aka big y.
there is one thing to batch if u are scanning the right sku's when batching like scanning a medium 5x when there is 5 medium's in a row, but to actually scan all panties in a box as the same sku if they are different is not right.. i dont batch really and when i do it is just scanning all medium's 5x and stuff....my average is still high. there is no need to batch in a financial or sku inventory.it is people like that that give rgis a bad name.
inspector gadget: you're right in that auditors shouldn't batch. And in a good district they wouldn't. But mine was not a good district. It was perpetually understaffed and badly managed. Batching was sometimes overlooked by TL's and managers because it was understood by them that it was necessary to get out of the store on time. No manager ever came right out and said, "Yes, batch", but they knew about it all right and if they thought they could get away with it they would look the other way.
In response to what TL's run. In my distric TL's run everything but the big box stores,Like Penneys or Sears and we rank in the top 20 in the company.
I was one of the most accurate auditors in my district so when I was in the Victoria's Secret B/R with the panties, I asked the manager running the inventory if I could quantity count them. Since they were usually bundled by size, color and SKU, then rubberbanded, this seemed like a feasible way to get it done. I occasionally had to watch for obvious differences, but they were rare in each bundle. As a TL, I had kicked auditors out of inventories because I found that they had been batching. I didn't catch them red-handed, but if there was a discrepancy in an area count or either the store manager or myself looked at a printout, there was the evidence. For example, scanning the first shirt on a wall arm when those behind it were obviously different. Then I would write them up on an incident report, as if that did any good. The only reason people acquire bad habits on this job is because they are encouraged as new hires to do so by veterans. In addition to batching, there is not tagging counted areas, dress code issues, and other "shortcuts" that are more about indifference than efficiency.
Victoria's Secret... *shudder* I did that a few weeks ago and it took 14 hours! The TL that was running it, the AM that was supervising, and the DM that was there because it was his last day were all there for 19 hours since they were in the back room. To my knowledge, there was no batching in the back room due to supervision by the store managers and associates. Luckily for me, I was only there for the sales floor and I did mannequins and the "beauty" department (fragrances, facial stuff, etc...) and that was all facings (scan one, count back). The bad thing was that it was about a third of the store and only me and a gal were doing it. Everyone else was either still in the back room or up to their ears in bras and panties. We were supposed to have 31 auditors, we had at our high point, 23. The problem was as the night grew longer, we had to let some go home since they have other jobs or had other inventories in the morning. When we finished, we had about 11 auditors left, including TLs, the AM and DM who were both counting.
PseudoShadow: Wow, 14 hours in a VS. Now, you guys did get overtime, right? An for some reason the phrase "up to their ears in bras and panties" made me laugh out loud. But you guys had 31 auditors scheduled for a VS? That must have been a huge store. And no batching in the back room? That really sounds awful.
Overtime for the store itself? No. OT for the week because of combined hours? Yes.
The VS's here are in malls and they usually take up two or three store slots making them quite a bit bigger than the other mall clothing stores we do. I do believe that we were striving to get out of there in four hours (not including back room time which was a separate time clock) but with us being understaffed that was not a possibility.
I am glad I got you to laugh with my comment. :)
I just got my first review telling me my EAPH was only 55%, and they COULD lower my pay to like 6.75 or something. Yeah, and I COULD count even slower and stop offering to stay and pull tags.
How do you know if their numbers are right? Did they include all of the stores you have done in this period? Look , the only reason for this EAPH crap is so they can hand out raises to who they want when they want! Get to batching.......everybody else is and their gettin' your pay raise to do it!
Ortiz is still a DM on the East Coast.
As far as VS goes, batching is a must. Especially in the backroom. If you took out the jampacked bras out of the little brown shelfy things, and scanned each one, good luck! The bra straps and overkill of tags get so tangled that it takes Houdini to sort through them. Doesn't help either that the pink VS tag that has the barcode is about the size of 4 dimes.
I also find the VS staff in the backrooms to not give a shit about RGIS auditors or their store's inventory. After a couple of SKU checks for which Buffy or Princess must depart from their loud annoying conversation, they always end up telling you to just scan another item. So no more SKU checks ever again by me in a VS backroom.
Another thing that slays me is when these dumb VS store employees precount everything in a half-assed manner. They go around comparing their terrible count with your scanned and verified count. "This one is wrong!" they chirp. No, you can't count. After 5 contested areas in a row, you'd think that they would double check themselves to save embarassment. However, most of these airheads just don't get it.
To top it off, the VS stores that we've done lately (about 10 of them) have what they call MOOS items...that is merchandise out of stock that are to be packed up and shipped out as they are no lomger to stay in their rotation of saleable goods. So a VS employee counts 192 pieces, the RGIS auditor comes across 31 MOOS items that are thrown into a pile, leaving 161 good and scanned pieces in the area. Here comes Buffy..."161? I counted 192!" STOP PRECOUNTING WHEN THERE ARE GOING TO BE ITEMS REMOVED FROM THE AREA!
Nobody seems to grasp this one. If you must count once, count it after the area hasbeen scanned. Not only will it be possible for the counts to match, but it will require less total pieces to recount!
Of course, VS were the first stores for which we had to use the new blind count feature, likely a feature requested by VS who made the poor decision to precount areas that always would have items removed during the auditing process. We auditors seemed to understand the root of the problem, but the VS Store managers and/or the RGIS TLs,AMs, or DM are stupid or too lazy to try to understand the dilema. I hope I don't have to count a stuffed drawer of tiny panties on the VS sales floor again for a while. One VS store took us about 14 hours even with about 60 RGIS employees on site. Dumbasses!
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