Can you remember ever putting your life in danger while working for RGIS? I mean, did you ever risk life or limb or lungs climbing up on unsteady ladders, standing on broken milk crates, or perhaps inhaling toxic fumes, all in order to scan a bar code or count every last bottle of cough syrup?
There were many times I can recall almost causing some bodily injury to myself while on the job as an auditor. Take standing on milk crates for instance. Even though this was expressly forbidden by RGIS (according to the Auditor's Handbook) we all knew the real deal. In my district our managers never provided us with enough step ladders to use so if we wanted to count all the products on the top shelf in, say, a grocery store, we had to grab a plastic milk crate from the store's back room to stand on. Of course, milk crates were not meant to be stood on and were most decidely unsafe. You had to be extremely careful when you climbed onto a milk crate, making sure you placed your feet not in the dead center of the crate but sort of to the sides, nearer the edge, where the crate was a little bit sturdier. If you stood in the center your feet might break right through the flimsy plastic webbing. And if you weren't careful climbing up onto the milk crate it could go sliding out from under you and you might go crashing to the floor. Ouch.
We always had to use milk crates when we were counting in Food 4 Less, and I can recall numerous times stepping up onto a milk crate and having said crate shoot out from under me because the floors were so highly waxed that they were dangerously slippery. Oh, and let's not allow those waxed floors to go without comment. We always started a Food 4 Less inventory at 4:00 am, when the 24-hour grocery store was almost devoid of customers. My district had three Food 4 Less stores to do, and I hated doing the Santa Rosa one because they always waxed the floors during the inventory. I mean, the minute we set out on the sales floor to count some Food 4 Less pinhead employee would fire up the waxer and start polishing the floors. For them it was like a signal or something. "Oh, I see burgundy polos out on the floor. Time to start waxing!" It was horrible. The waxer was a hideous machine, sounding like ten lawn mowers and belching more smoke than a coal factory. The Food 4 Less idiot who operated the waxer would come down an aisle I was counting in, getting so close that I swear the waxer brushed the heels of my shoes more than once. Getting run over by a floor waxer was not my idea of fun so I would complain to Team Leader Mondo, which was a complete waste of time as that blob of lard was so afraid of authority and confrontations that he wouldn't say a word to store management. So every time we did a Food 4 Less inventory in Santa Rosa we had to dodge the floor waxer.
Even when we had ladders to stand on in a store, we still had no guarantees of safety. In some stores like CSK (auto parts) the ladders were too short for the back room shelves, and we had to stand on the very top rung of the ladder to reach the top shelf. Yes, the top rung, the one that has the sticker on it that says "Warning! Do not stand on. Unsafe!" But I must, as my Area Manager told me to make sure I count every last gasket and spark plug!
Also a danger in a CSK inventory were the bottles of various auto cleansers and oils and other liquids that you had to pick up and scan. There were always a few leaky bottles, and often green or blue or brown fluids would drip onto my hands or clothing. It could make a person kind of nervous, especially when the bottle had a skull and crossbones on the label and read "Warning! Highly toxic!" So whenever this happened I would rush into the bathroom to wash off the green or blue or brown goo. Of course, the bathrooms in these CSK stores were always incredibly filthy, with thick layers of black grit covering every surface, including the bar of green industrial soap in the sink. Oftentimes there would be no paper towels, so you had to dry your hands on your pants. And do I need to say that one never wanted to use the toilet in a CSK? Their bathrooms were more toxic than any leaky bottles out on the sales floor.
Another place with suspicious fluids to count was a strange little place called Vencare RX. I was never quite sure what this place was. Was it a store? A laboratory? Who knows. It was an odd, dinky little place, kind of like a business office with a few shelves and a couple of mini refrigerators that held bottles and vials of mysterious fluids and powders to count. I never knew what the hell were in those bottles and tubes that I was handling. I would ask Mondo, who usually ran the Vencare RX inventories, and he would say, "I dunno." Okay, thanks, that helps. I could have been holding a vial of anthrax and not have known it. Not likely of course, but it's interesting to think about.
Back to the ladders. The extremely tall ones we used in the back rooms of the Target stores always made me nervous. They reached nearly to the ceiling and when you stood on the top step you never wanted to look down, lest you grow dizzy and tumble off. We used the same kind of ladders on the sales floors of Best Buy, to reach the top stock. To save time a Best Buy employee would push a RGIS auditor around the sales floors (the ladders were on wheels), so the RGIS person wouldn't have to climb down, move the ladder, and climb back up again. This was a nice thing to do by the Best Buy employees, but it too made me nervous as I could easily picture the Best Buy guy who was pushing the ladder stumbling over something and causing me to go flying over the short safety railing on the ladder and landing smack on the floor. Auditor clean-up in aisle 5!
Working as an RGIS auditor almost got me electrocuted once. We were doing an inventory for Spencern, a Halloween supply store. This was a few days after Halloween, and the early November day was cold and rainy. The store was temporarily set up in an old building that used to be a Good Guys store. It was a decrepit old building that had a leaky roof. When I went to count some rubber masks along one wall I could see water coming through the ceiling and dripping dangerously close to some extension cords still plugged into a wall socket. I very carefully steered clear of this area. I liked my job (most of the time) but not enough to fry for it. I never did see who ended up counting the area but they must have made it through okay, as I didn't notice anyone walking around burnt to a crisp.
The most outrageous incident I experienced regarding safety in the workplace occurred in a Home Depot inventory. I was assigned to count a large bin that contained incredibly long plastic pipes. There were dozens and dozens of these pipes standing on end, and they were crammed so tightly into the bin that I couldn't move them around to see how many of them there were. I told one of the many RGIS managers there that day about this problem (we had several districts helping us out in this large store) and her solution was to have me stand on the tines of a forklift and ride up to the ceiling of the store, so that I could look down on the tops of the pipes and count them that way. I told the RGIS Area Manager that there was no way on earth I was going to do that. I mean, I wasn't going to risk breaking my neck by doing this extremely unsafe act all so that I could count some plastic pipes. The AM actually got annoyed with me because I refused to try and commit suicide by forklift and said to me, "Well, someone has to do it." I told her, "It's not going to be me," and walked away. I found out later that she ordered some poor unknowing newbie to stand on the forklift and ride it up to the ceiling. Fortunately the guy didn't fall and go splat on the cement floor. This time. Gee, I wonder what OSHA would say if they knew about this?
26 comments:
Greetings...my first post here. I worked for lots of years with RGIS, everywhere from auditor to area manager, so I have plenty of stories. However, having departed fairly recently, I'll remain anonymous for now. Suffice to say I am in a completely different region of the country.
As to the milk crates, when I started with RGIS, that was standard practice in most grocery stores. Then one day we were told that the practice was completely banned. Why? Apparently someone from OSHA came into a store while an inventory was taking place (not in our district, maybe not even our division). The result was a $1200 fine PER OCCURRENCE. That means if they saw 15 auditors standing on crates, the fines would come to $18,000.
In recent years, though, I've noticed a return to the practice, probably because most of the managers who had been around long enough to remember this are no longer with the company. (That's a whole other story there, for another time -- how to get rid of 2/3 of an operating group's management.) The grocery store employees seem to have gone back to the practice, too.
One time I was at a store when we still did the milk crates, and because the store had just closed they were mopping the floors. The guy working the side behind me had his crate slide out from under him, and although I had my back to him at the time, I can promise you the sound of a guy's head on a solid floor is not something you want to hear. He wasn't too badly hurt, fortunately.
As a team leader and manager, I also had to tell auditors on a few occasions not to stand on the top of their stepladders -- not the top step, but the actual handle, which on many ladders is rounded. I even had to threaten a couple of them with their jobs if they didn't get off.
I also did the lift a few times, but I wasn't really that bothered by it. Height just never really got to me, and I was always careful to hang on to something.
Only time I remember hurting myself, other than slicing my fingers on new tags, was at a Linens N Things. I was doing top stocks with a tall ladder (12 feet? Maybe 16?), and I was moving it while it was folded up. I let it lean a little too far while I was talking to my area manager, and it started to tip. In hindsight, I probably should have just let it go, but I was thinking of it possibly falling on a customer, so I tried pulling back. Unfortunately, the ladder was heavy at least twice my height, and if you remember learning about levers, well...there was no way I was going to win that tug-of-war. The ladder went down and pulled me right on top of it. Nothing serious, but my elbow was sore for a few days.
The one I couldn't get was scheduling pregnant women to work in pharmacies. The half/full counts are one thing, but when you have to open the bottles to do tenths or pill counts, that's just nuts. Even more amazing was that usually the women would do it without even asking to be excused.
Sorry about the length of this, but I'll probably be able to counter most of your stories with similar ones.
Last summer there was a “special” 2-day project for 5 auditors. One AM, two team leaders, and two auditors. We were to go and count a warehouse that contained nothing but 2-ton rolls of paper.
Let me describe how this place was setup. Basically, there were about 15 rooms, labeled A-O, each containing a few hundred rolls of paper. Each room had a large aisle down the middle for the lifts to drive in. On either side of this aisle there were rolls of paper that were neatly lined/stacked up in rows/columns that went back to the wall. The problem was that there was only about a half foot to one and a half feet of space between aisles. Since each roll had a different number we had to squeeze through these tight gaps, finding all sorts of spiders, snakes, and other small animals back there (most were dead, fortunately) just to find the numbers and punch them in. Each roll of paper was about 4 to 5 feet tall, and the stacks could go up to about 6 high before hitting the ceiling. Each “aisle” of paper was 5 rolls deep, so we had to squeeze pretty far back. Each “gondola” of paper was a separate area, and the tickets were on the ground-level roll at the front. Very few areas had over 20 rolls.
The day before the inventory the AM that was going with us told us to bring binoculars and flashlights. We couldn’t use any lasers there because there was no way to read any barcodes on rolls that were higher than ground level, so had we brought lasers it wouldn’t really save much time. Each roll of paper had two small stickers on the outside that had the item number. This alone was a problem because the paper rolls were stacked so close together that usually at least one of the stickers was unreachable, so we had to constantly walk between aisles of paper just to see every side of each roll. For rolls of paper stacked on top of 2 or more other rolls, we needed binoculars to read the numbers, and in some cases we had to hold a flashlight in the other hand since there were many dark nooks inside the paper aisles. My APH that day ended up being in the 50’s, and surprisingly that was higher than any other counter there, mainly because I had the best eyesight.
As if the snakes/animals and the layout of the place wasn’t bad enough, keep in mind this was summer, in a large warehouse. There were no windows, and there certainly wasn’t any air conditioning. While walking from one room to another I noticed a thermometer on the wall. 120 degrees. This was at noon. I am actually surprised one of the team leaders made it through that day without passing out, of course in those temperatures anyone would be in danger.
In addition to the above, the employees at the warehouse continued to stock/remove rolls of paper throughout the day. As if that wasn’t already stupid enough, there were many times that I would spot one of the lifts carrying around a roll of paper with one of our area tickets on it. So much for range checks. It was as if the managers of the warehouse told the employees “You might see some guys in maroon or grey polo shirts. Just ignore them.” and nothing else.
While I have also had some terrifying experiences with ladders and the like, I figured that this particular inventory had the most risk associated with it, between the 120 degree temperatures, dodging the machines stocking/removing rolls as you count them, and the variety of animals encountered. Needless to say, a few days after we finished I discovered that they weren’t happy with the job we did so our district lost the account. Boo hoo.
I remember counting a Linens N' Things when I was a newer auditor. I was assigned to count the top stocks that day and the ladder I had to use wobbled this way and that. The top stocks in this store go very high and some of the areas you couldnt position the ladder right next to the area but out a bit because of stuff in the area below. Anyway. I get to this area with these very heavy vase type things on the top. Hmmm, no sku so I called for a sku check. The employee comes over glances up at me and says, "Yeah it's on the bottom." So here I am on a wobbly ladder, overreaching because I couldnt position ladder very close, trying to lift this huge heavy vase. I thought, "screw this", and went to am in charge and said I hurt my foot earlier that day and had trouble climbing the ladder. A lie, but I was in fear for my life.
As for milkcrates, we are not allowed to use those in our district. But like any RGIS rule, who listens to that. Managers will say, "Just be careful".
Theres one shorter auditor that will stack one milk crate on the other and stand on the stack of 2.
The only time managers seem to worry about safety issues is shortly after an accident in our district.
For example, one of our heavy auditors was counting a perimeter in a store. The only stepstool the store could provide, since the manager didn't bring any, was a folding chair. Working on the wall this auditor ended up breaking this chair and falling through it. He sprained his ankle and we had to listen to this phoney store safety crap for the next few weeks in stores. It was phoney crap because the managers didn't really care about our safety at all, they just wanted the inventory done and not get in trouble for having auditors hurt themselves.
As a team leader I would usually have to take over for an auditor uncomfortable doing something dangerous. I mean, someone has to do it.
A store we do has us climb the store shelves to get to the tops for example. I can't have an old lady, we have a lot of those as auditors, trying to climb like a monkey to get to a pair of slacks pile.
I would jokingly say, "You're not allowed to die until the inventory is over" in a lot of dangerous situations. haha
We nothing but stools. If we find a crack in the stool, we chuck it. We had an incident a while back where we put in that policy.
Vencare RX is the outsourced offsite pharmacy division of Kindred Health Care. Its simular to Omnicare's own pharmacy division.
I've been reading your post for a while now. Sometimes I am amused and sometimes really embarrassed by this company I work for! I work for a very good district and have been around for a long time. It has not always been good though and have seen a lot of the things you and others have been talking about. I have asked myself many times in the past why I still work here but it always came down to enjoying the counting and flexibility of the job. I have always been paid really well too, that helped. Anyway glad I stuck it out because we have two good managers now. I have a thousand stories I could tell as well but will leave the creative writing to you with a few notes from me thrown in here and there.
I always enjoy reading others comments as well. Especially those that worked at Headquarters which is now called FSC (field support center). I swear the fix all from the control center is 'did you turn it off?'
In my district you have to add traveling to the list of safety hazards! We've been stuck in ice storms, avalanches, endless deer, mud slides. Not to mention BAD DRIVERS.
We have worked with your district as well and I remember some of the people you are talking about especially Joe and Mandy. The bay area is a never ending sea of chaos.
I liked having to use the rolling racks in the backs of mall stores as ladders. Made me feel like a monkey!
the refugee: Welcome! I hope you'll continue to read my blog and to post your comments.
About the poor guy whose head bounced off the floor...I guess it depends on whose head it was. Some of the people in my district I wouldn't mind hearing (and seeing) their heads connecting with a nice hard floor.
Does RGIS still do Linens & Things? My district stopped doing them. I thought it was because RGIS lost the account but maybe it was just my district. Which would make much more sense.
BPM: OMG, that paper roll inventory sounds horrendous! Spiders, snakes and other small animals, gross! And having to use binoculars, that's hilarious. That company should have been better prepared for RGIS to go in there. Like they should have done precounts for you guys on the hard-to-reach stock.
The high temperature situation sounds awful too. I thought doing an inventory in an Orchard Supply Hardware in Fairfield in August when it's 105 F inside the store was bad, but you've got me easily beat. On the opposite end: once I did an inventory for a place called G & G Foods in Santa Rosa. They made sauces, salsas and dips. We had to wear hair caps and go into their walk-in freezers to count large tubs of dips and sauces. The temperature gauge outside the walk-ins read 8 degrees. Now, as we did this inventory in the summer you'd think we would be grateful for the cold temps. Sure, for about 5 minutes. Then various exposed body parts would begin to turn blue and of course your fingers would freeze up and you couldn't key in anything. So we could only stay in those freezers for 10 minutes or so at a time. Then we had to step outside and thaw out. I was never so happy for 100+ degree weather before.
When I went back into the freezer to count again I remarked to one of the customer's employees that it certainly was cold in those freezers. "Freezers?" the guy said. "These are the coolers. Wait until you go into the freezers. They're like -10 degrees." Waaah!!!
Catty: I too remember some shorties using two or more milk crates to stand on. One person used three: the first one to step up to the other two (stacked on top of each other). It seemed to work for her but it really looked unsafe.
You sound like you were a really good TL. None of the TL's in my district would help out any auditor like you did. And lol! about the guy breaking the chair by standing on it. Once in my district Fat Blob TL Mondo bent an aluminum ladder in two because the poor ladder couldn't support his 500+ lb. body. I also liked the "You're not allowed to die until the inventory's over" comment. Sometimes I think that some managers with RGIS really had this policy in mind. Seriously!
68bug: Welcome! I hope you'll continue to read and leave your comments. And ice storms and avalanches! My God, where is your district? It has to be in CA, right, if you worked with my lame district? And you're 100% right about the Bay Area districts being in constant chaos. Wonder why that is? Maybe the fog clogs the brain.
As for head bouncing off the floor...some of the people I worked with would have been completely unaffected by this. But you probably know about that if you've ever worked anywhere.
No more Linens 'N Things. I guy I worked with left and ended up at WIS, and a few weeks later he was doing LNT. And he said he got stuck doing top stocks, just like he did with us. He thinks "top stock" must be tattooed on his forehead.
BTW, regarding the two milk crates stacked on each other...as I understand it, OSHA considers that to be TWO violations -- $2400.
Ladders, oh boy. I once did a grocery store where I needed a ladder (a "real" ladder, not a stepladder) to see the stuff stacked above the dairy cooler. So the pointed me to the only ladder in the store -- an 8' ladder on which the first step was broken and felt like it would give way as soon as I stepped on it, and the third step had detached from the frame at one corner. I ended up climbing two steps at a time. I said that David Blaine wouldn't try climbing that ladder.
When I started with RGIS, most auditors who had been around more than a couple of months would buy their own stepladders and bring them to the store. Those were always the people who lasted, were productive, and carried more than their share of the load. Nowadays, though, almost nobody will do that.
Having been an AM, I've been on both sides of nearly every issue. No, the company can't require you to bring a stepladder. But if it's 3 am, there are lots of topstocks, and you have 15 auditors and 3 ladders, guess which people will be complaining the most? I'll bet it's not the people with ladders.
If the inventory is being run by a team leader (as in no company van), well, if I had a portable, printer, case of paper, 5 bags of machines and lasers, tag bag, luggage cart and my own ladder, I could fit two, maybe three more ladders in my car. So don't expect me to bring for everyone, especially knowing that a couple will surely disappear.
Refugee: I remember talk of the OSHA fines when I started.
Now all that remember it are the auditors that have been around a long time. I'm not sure about your guy's other districts, but some of our auditors have been around way longer than any of our managers.
So we have long returned to the practice of standing on milk crates and chairs when step stools are unavailable.
But that doesn't stop an older auditor from saying, "Hey! You can't stand on that, what if OSHA comes in!?"
No one is scared by that anymore here.
The stepstools that we do have, many are bent up or have the no-slide rubber things broken off.
I've been chewed out for "monkeying" up shelves or standing on the handle of the two-steps, or climbing down backroom ladders improperly (not facing towards the steps and I walked down).
I understand the reason for the safety lecture, though, for liability reasons. but I also know what I can and can't do without hurting myself.
And there seems to be plenty of people that work for the company that are just too stupid/uncoordinated to manage such complex machines such as stepladders, who manage to hurt themselves even with proper ladders.
We use to use the double stacked milk crates too. Then one day one of the auditors fell and sprained her wrist. That amounted to a workman comp's case and our district finally spent some money and purchased some stools.
I can remember working at home depots and other lumber yards in weather with wind chills below 0. Our district was pretty good about asking for volunteers in that type of weather for any counting that had to be done outside. I can even remember a few times where they offered to pay a differential just for that inventory for anyone who would go count outside and the auditors that did go out were allowed to come in and warm up any time they wanted.
There was this one inventory though that was a special project and there were only 5 of us who were chosen to do it. It was for some biotech lab. You had to wear a special coat and latex gloves. We all sat at a long table and one of the technicians or whatever they were would hand each of us a small box containing vials of blood. We had to list all of these vials on special sheets. Well these vials of blood weren't from healthy people. They contained blood samples from people with every type of disease imaginable. This lab was a storage house that would sell these vials to diffent medical research facilities. Was there any danger? Actually no, because believe it or not for once RGIS stood up for its employees and made it in the contract that we would not be counting any vials that had contagious diseases in them.
Then again, maybe RGIS was just more concerned about the possibility of a lawsuit. ummmmmmmmm, sounds like the latter.
Misfit: we were not doing the Linen N Things anymore in my District either and I am in the Northeast. The company must have lost the account for a while. We just started doing them again this year.
My District has several long term workers compensation cases where people have gotten seriously injured so they are very careful about not using milk crates. Before these cases though, we were told to use them all the time.
We had an incidence several years back with someone falling off a milk crate. Misfit, I will refer to the area manager as FB but you will know from jkat's posts who he is.
We were doing a 2 store run of supermarkets. He had step stools with him but told us to use milk crates because 'he didn't feel like going out to the van to get the stools'. It was already against company policy to use milk crates at that time. Well, once the first store was done, he would send us ahead to start the second store while he printed his reports, etc. We asked if we could take the stools and he said NO, just use milk crates. One of the girls was using a milk crate and it slipped out from under her.
She fell and seriously broke her right wrist. When FB got to the store, we told him what happened and that she had to leave with another auditor to be taken to the hospital. His concern was not so much about her but about himself.
He was going around telling everyone to please cover for him with the company if anyone asked questions. He told us to say that he had stools but they had not arrived at the store yet and she chose to use a milk crate. Not exactly true since we had counted the whole first store using crates because he was too lazy to get the stools from the van. The girl who broke her wrist required several surgeries after to fix the break.
She was never able to do the job again and she had been a major counter. She had won the Top Gun competition and been to Hawaii.
I don't know what he got her to say to cover for him, but nothing ever happened to him over it.
but, if anyone had ever asked the other auditors in the store, I don't think anyone would have covered for him. He was very disliked by most.
That particular chain of supermarkets would never allow anyone to stand on milk crates after that. It is now their policy so even if the AM's would suggest it, they would not allow it. I assume they probably had to pay also for the girl's injury since it happened in their store.
I've seen people standing on the top step of ladders also.
We do a shoe store that has a very small backroom. We can't open our step ladders but have to lean them and climb them like a ladder while they are closed. They are leaning on rolling racks or garcys. We've told our office how dangerous that backroom is and all they say is 'be careful'.
The company issued a safety statement that is supposed to be read at every inventory when the managers give their instructions.
It is very long and involves the safe use of ladders, etc. We have only one female manager who actually reads that statement before every store she runs.
Our safety isn't their main concern in life....counting their stores and getting out quickly so they can make their bonuses is.
jkat: We did a couple of inventories for hardware stores that had outside yards to count, too. In December no less. Even in CA a December can get awfully cold. I remember a Sunday evening counting stacks of lumber outside. It was cold and windy and the yard was huge; it seemed as though there were miles and miles of wood, brick and cement stepping stones to count. We had to walk around and around the yard until I thought my feet would fall off. Then our jerk-off DM Kevin would be driving around the store's yard in a mini golf cart laughing at us. What an ass!
And that blood-vial inventory sounds too scary for words. I wouldn't do that for anything! I don't think I would trust the customer or RGIS to only let the auditors count the ones that contain contagious diseases. I'm way too much of a germaphobe to do that.
anonymous at 7:24 am: Lol! You guys are really great with all of your FB stories. He sounds like such a creep! But that sounds so typical about him not wanting to go out and bring some stepstools inside the store. Why didn't he just give the keys to someone else and have them bring in the stepstools? Was he afraid that auditor would take off in the company van?
I didn't know those rolling racks were called garcys. I hated those things. It was so easy for someone with an imagination to picture themselves getting smashed in between a couple of those things. Boy, did they make me nervous.
How long have they been reading the safety memo out loud (I mean, when they do)? I can't ever remember anyone doing that at any inventory I did. And your last sentence is so true...that should be RGIS' real motto. Certainly not "Accuracy Is Our Primary Concern."
Gee, we do a safety speech here in D354...it seems to be working because no one has like been injured on the job :P
I was actually talking with an old timer auditor a few days ago about the milk crate era and well he brung up the the idea that the problem was that well, not all milk crates are the same and if they just stook with one type of milk crate, the nice sturdy ones that primary held the little milk boxes for school lunches, they would of been fine.
We've had a few A12 audit machines actually lock up in the cold during the one time we had a lumber yard inventory in October.
Misfit, they've been reading that safety statement for about 3 months now. Or our female manager has, anyways. It goes on and on about how to climb ladders correctly, how to be always aware if someone is beneath you so that you don't drop things on their heads, etc.
FB could have let us have his keys but he just liked to be mean till he felt his butt was on the line and then looked for us to cover.
JKat: is that lab inventory the same one as the sperm bank inventory? lol I remember that one. I remember one lab inventory with Pete dropping some vial on his white lab coat and the lab people made him go immediately to the emergency room and get some kind of vaccine just in case he had been exposed to whatever was in the vial. Not contagious diseases? Why were they so concerned when he dropped that vial? I am not sure if you are talking about the same lab inventory.
Misfit, we could tell you so many stories about FB. Ask JKat about being stuck in traffic with him for 4 hours and discussing earthquakes for that whole time because she didn't know what to talk about with him. lol
JJ: Some of those people aren't uncoordinated. There are people who make a living by collecting worker's comp. A few years ago, when I was an AM, we had a guy who worked for us less than an hour, said he hurt his back, and filed a claim. And from what I hear, he went through the paperwork pretty quickly, as if he were familiar with it.
Jkat: I wouldn't have done the biolab thing, no way no how. But I'm sure the managers would have been more concerned about safety than usual -- on-the-job injuries are not contagious, but everyone in the office, including them, might be exposed to whatever was in the lab. But I can say that is one of the most unusual things I've heard of RGIS counting.
Anonymous: No, no, no...ACCURACY is our primary concern. (I'll wait while the laughter dies down.) OK, if you remember when BJ's was a two-day inventory, I ran a couple of those as an AM. And the first day, when we were working on lifts when the store was open, I told the auditors that today accuracy is NOT their major concern, safety is, and if anyone wanted to tell my ops that I said that, they were welcome to do so. And then I went down the list of hazards I could think of, including being run over by crazed lift drivers. As an AM, I did sometimes piss off some of the auditors, but nobody ever accused me of not looking out for the safety of my auditors, even if it meant cutting into productivity.
And one thing I learned as an AM is never cover for anyone, and don't avoid going over your manager's head, because I promise they won't appreciate it. That's most of the reason I ended up not being a manager.
As for garcy racks...I've long held a fantasy about meeting the guy who invented them. In a dark alley. Armed with a baseball bat.
Fortunately, as a current auditor myself, my district's AMs make an effort to ensure proper safety, even taking broken stepladders out of service when necessary. Maybe it is something that comes from the OMs, I cannot be sure, but we tend to get serious about safety. Of course we have gotten more serious about attendance lately but that is another story.
AgentSkelly: You're right about those milk crates. Some of them could even hold a Mondo, while others looked as though they would collapse under a gnat.
Refugee: You sound like you were a great AM. I for the life of me cannot imagine any of my Managers ever telling us that they valued our safety over "accuracy". I think we would have all fainted if one of them had said that.
Jkat: More Fat Bastard stories please! Did you really discuss earthquakes with him for four hours? Was he one of those know-it-alls who of course had ALL the info on earthquakes? And speaking of them, we just had one a couple of days ago. Just a little one, 4.4 or something. Rattled the glasses in the cabinets, but not much else.
Razzcal here with an old story of a ladder incident that occured during a Kmart run.
I was helpping count the area on the perimeter of the store, using those horrid tall ladders that pretty much touched the top of the ceiling... you know where Large department signs dangle on small hooks... This is where the fun begins.
Well, on this special day as District 414 was helpping out Vallejo District's Kmarts, I was counting next to Erin as we both took turns using this super tall ladder, dragging it to the next high rise area. As Erin took the ladder and slowly pushing it to the next area, there was this Large department sign "Gardening" hanging over the entrance to the outside garden section. What we didn't know until it was too late, was that the sign was on two hooks that was not completely closed. Signs those large, thick, and heavy are required to keep closed hooks just in case these signs were to swing off. That's exactly what happend... the top hand railing on the ladder slightly bumped the corner of the large Garden sign in which was just enough effort to detach one corner of the sign off its hook and swing like a pendulum. It swung so fast that the sign cut a super gash in Erin's head. She ended up waiting for the ambulance to take her to the nearest hospital, all the mean while blood gushing like a waterfall. My district was instructed to continue to count regardless of one of our friend was in serious injury. We later were able to pick her up after the inventory.... along with staples running down the middle of her noggin... i want to say she had 12 staples, but that was over 7 years ago.
Milk crates in our district were once strictly off limits. When I first started, everyone used milk crates. Then they started enforcing the OSHA thing, probably about the same time you mentioned.
Lately, though, we use what we can. A chair, milk crate, whatever... The other night, counting a Ross store (very dirty store, BTW) I used a shopping cart. I guess you can't call me the brightest bulb in the box. :) The manager showed up with only 3 step ladders for a Ross. We had 20 some-odd people there!
The thing is, our team leaders and managers don't carry around step ladders anymore. I showed up to this little grocery store the other night where the AM brought exactly zero step ladders. Brilliant. The store had a couple and then the rest of us used milk crates or chairs. I guess the whole OSHA thing has gone out the window, and they really don't care anymore.
When I was a TL, I always brought step ladders to the stores I ran. My own, mind you! Not the disctricts. After going in to the office more than once only to find no step ladders available, I just bought my own.
In my district, there are people who carry around their own step ladders. I used to bring one with me everywhere I went. Now I will, only occasionally, and only certainstores like Targe or Office Max. The management or TLs will most likely not bring step ladders, and if they do, there will not be enough to go around, forcing everyone to share with more than just a few other people. I don't like sharing, so I bring my own.
Nowadays, unless you are old or have some medical condition or you're incredibly short, bringing your own step ladder guarentees that you'll be placed on the wall to count the perimeter, sometimes alone. When I started hearing "you have a step ladder, so you do the wall" more and more, I ditched the stepper. Screw that!
I sometimes bring one and leave it in the car. If I need it, I'll go get it. Otherwise, forget it. I don't want to be solo scanning everything on the wall. I feel bad for the tall guys out there who always get stuck with the wall.
I am one of those who attempted a double stacked milk crate once. Just once. That stack slid right out from under me and I hit the floor hard. No more of that.
I've never worked anywhere too hot, though it gets pretty close to misearable in the mall at night after they've turned off the AC. I've never worked anywhere where the air quality was questionable. I did get stuck in the barely air conditioned basement stock room of a candle store once. Now theres a way to suffocate someone. The multitude of perfumes from the candles and the heat was more than enough to make me want to vomit.
The store personel let us in to the stock room and left. So much for SKU checks. We had no idea how to get out of the basement once we were done, though. Of course no one had a cell phone signal down in the bowels of the mall to call someone. We just wandered through the maze, following the big red "exit" signs until we found a way out. It was an incredible waste of time.
As an auditor, I did several warehouse inventories in which I had to count pallets of merchandise on steel shelving more than 20 ft. above the ground. In order to count it, I would have to ride in a cage that was attached to a forklift. It was OK, except that there were only two weak chains to keep you secure inside the cage. Also, if the forklift driver, who almost always could barely understand English, started driving while raising or lowering the tines, there would be a sharp jolt. And if the forklift couldn't raise you high enough to see the top of a pallet, you had to climb on the side of the cage and more than half your body would be dangling over the edge, so you'd hang on for dear life trying to count the tie(full layer of boxes).
This wasn't the worst I'd seen. In another warehouse, I was asked to count high-shelf merchandise, but this time I would need to stand on a pallet attached to the forklift and have a harness fastened so that if any jolting motions caused me to fall off the pallet, I would not come crashing down to the cement floor as quickly. Putting on the damn harness was enough of a challenge, but I was able to get out of it. What I wonder is why wouldn't our managers running the inventory insist that the forklift drivers bring these pallets down for us? A good manager would think employee safety more important than the profit to be made in the inventory.
We were doing a West Marine one night, and they had overstock on top of the shelves. One guy was counting overstock while some others were counting regular stock in the next aisle. He bumped a few things, made a domino effect, and sent a propeller flying off the top of the shelf and crashing down on the person underneath. He ended up needing ambulance transportation to the hospital for stitches and time off to recover from a concussion.
Then there was the time when we did Linens 'n Things and they were doing the same thing to us on the ladders... pushing us around. The lights up in the high ceiling generated a ton of heat, and one of auditors doing the stock stored behind the displays way up there ended up going home because he almost fainted off the ladder from heat exhaustion.
Now, the thing with Home Depot... we always had a Home Depot associate with us. If you were smart, and had a fairly dumb Home Depot associate, they'd do all the counting for you instead of just doublechecking your own counting. It made things go a lot faster and it was less work for you. I got a guy to do that for me in the home and garden section once with the giant bags of birdseed. I didn't lift a single bag. It was so awesome.
I laugh everytime I hear the safety line of c***.You must work safely,when on the job.But god forbid anyone cancels an inventory during a 40" blizzard,where you can't see beyond the hood of your car.Welcome to the NE Division!!!
omfg, that's horrible!!!! I'm in D169 and we have a sears we do every year and last year before i started my friend T. had one of the SHELVES fall on her head and she had to be taken to the hospital because it knocked her flat out. Well this year i finally got to do my first sears, and lo and behold.... that shelf NEVER WAS FIXED!!!! go figure, yeah?
Good 'ol RGIS
I know it's been a couple of years since anyone commented on this post but I just had to search safety and see other RGIS experiences. I have been begging my area managers for a safety meeting! I for one do not want to die doing inventory, however i feel like a few of my co-workers feel like it would be a fitting end. I am absolutely terrified of heights and silly me goes and gets a job doing inventory. I guess its nice to know RGIS is consistant!
Hi Anon @12/03/11. I'm sorry to hear that RGIS is still having their problems with auditor safety. Not surprising though. I mean, it's RGIS, right? :-)
Good for you on bringing the safety meeting idea to your managers. I wish I had thought to do that, or someone else in my dist. I hope you'll post back here some time and let everyone know how that went, if they took you up on your suggestions for a meeting, etc. And in the meantime, stay off those forklifts! ;-)
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