THE SANTA ROSA ROAD WARRIORS
DISTRICT 414
To the best RGIS Inventory Specialists I have ever worked with (this week. What a phony, smarmy little suckup). During the past few weeks, you have all shown me why I became an RGIS Manager (because Santa Rosa was hard up and desperate for managers). You all display the attitude and desire necessary for a team to be the best it can be (Okay, now this is just outright lying here. How did Kevin write this without his pants catching on fire?) As the teamwork improves (it didn't), you must all continue to strive to be the best (dream on). The new auditors that have recently joined us seem to possess the same attributes that many of you offer (you mean they suffer from apathy, cynicism and distrust too?), make sure you embrace these individuals (okay, sure, I'll just run right over and give a newbie a great big hug and sloppy kiss).
You must all lead by example by strictly adhering to the dress code and all other policies (oh, I guess that means Erin can't wear her bedroom slippers to inventories anymore). More team members does not mean less work (unless of course the district hires some young chicks that Area Manager Joe wants to bang and so therefore said girls get screwed and get more work and the rest of us get screwed over and get less work). A larger team will ensure we can continue to minimize the slow time (not with the retards that this district hires). We are improving in Albertson's (translation: We didn't fuck up the inventory in this store too badly this time) and get ready because now we are taking on Home Depot (poor Home Depot). We have been selected to be the core team for all Northern California Home Depot's (and again, poor Home Depot). I will be looking for the most professional, accurate and efficient (I guess that means you won't be looking in our district). These are the same characteristics I look at when writing the schedule (What are you talking about? You don't even write the schedule, idiot. AM Joe does). I look forward to working toward the future with all of you (that is, until you wig out and have to enter rehab, right Kevin?).
Now in order for us to enter the future (oh, good, we're entering the future, because I thought we were going to step into Mr. Peabody's Wayback Machine and travel to ancient Greece and inventory the Parthenon), we must establish some rules that will not affect most of you (then why send us this retarded memo?). You have all received an Attendance Policy Acknowledgement form. This is going to eliminate the problem we have all experienced (oh, somehow I doubt that, since most people ignored the Attendance Policy form and didn't even bother to sign and return it), when a four-hour job turns into eight (and Kevin loses his bonus for fucking up yet another Long's Drugs run). That may be OK for some people when we are slow, you get the extra hours (and this will make up for the times when AM Joe screws us over and gives our stores to another one of the girls he's chasing after). But what about when we have Sears or Long's the next morning (and only five people show up for a 25 person inventory). These are the times when the entire team feels the pain (er, not the entire team. Just the ones who actually work. The F.O.J.'s {Friends of Joe} will I'm sure feel no pain as they probably won't even show up at Sears or Long's the next morning. And if they do show up, I'm sure their 2 dozen self-called smoke breaks will help to ease their "pain").
This also impacts our ability to supply the quality service RGIS Inventory Specialists is known for (quality service? Are you kidding me? This has got to be a joke). This attendance policy will be enforced (don't make me laugh. Nothing was ever "enforced" in this district). Do not test the water (gross Mondo may have sat in it first). This will improve our ability to function as a team (oh man, what was Kevin on when he wrote this? When did Santa Rosa ever function as a team? Never with Kevin and Joe as managers). Let's improve the quality of life for everyone involved (okay, how about we start with getting rid of you, Kevin?).
We must have the Attendance Policy, the back page of the Handbook and your schedules confirmed by Wednesday July 12 (or else we will nag you and nag you until you turn them in or we forget all about it, whichever happens first). Be sure to call the office if any of this will be a problem (Ring! Ring!). Lack of response will result in termination (a flat out lie. More than half the crew refused to sign the Attendance Policy and still remained with the district).
Thank You,
Kevin *****
District Manager
Santa Rosa
July 7, 2000
14 comments:
heh, heh, heh.
Kevin sounds like quite the cheerleader. Actually, most of the letters that I received from my DM were quite similar, except for the spelling. My Dm couldn't spell and didn't use punctuation marks which is the way he talks (just rambles on and on).
It was right before I left RGIS that an attendance policy came from Headquarters. I didn't pay much attention to it because I knew I wasn't staying much longer but I do remember it being rather strict (seeing especially that its not like anyone gets PAID sick days at RGIS), (oh except for management).
Anyway I do remember thinking that maybe they should just address why lack of attendance and no-shows were issues.
One reason in my district for no shows was that they would want us to schedule the best auditors for a 9pm store and then these same people for a 6am store the next morning. Only problem being is that the 9pm store which was only suppose to run for 3 hours ran for 5 hours because they understaffed it to begin with hoping to make more money.
That was a common occurance in my district. The DM was always understaffing stores. His thought which he relayed to me was that if a store is understaffed the auditors will count faster and that will make the district more money and his bonus bigger.
But that wasn't the only reason for no-show issues. One thing that I had witnessed over my many years with the company happened in large stores. Each AM had several teams that they were responsible for. When it came to large stores each team would be scheduled for a certain number of auditors to be there. Alot of the AM's I worked with couldn't be bothered pestering their TL's into getting their numbers for these stores especially if they weren't the AM running it. So they would lie. They would tell our DM "oh yeah, John has his 8 people and Susie has her 6", and so on. Then come the day of the inventory and they wouldn't answer their beeper when the AM running the store tried to call them to say "John only has 5 people here and Susie has only 4".
When questioned a day or 2 later by our DM they would lie and say that there must have been some miscomunication.
I am not making this up. This went on all the time.
Misfit, I too wonder after reading some of your blogs if somehow my district and yours are intertwined in some crazy twilight zone. I really believe that more of this goes on in other districts as well.
jkat: I know what you mean about how a district would be so much better off, if they would only address WHY there were so many no-shows. And in my district, why the F.O.J.'s were allowed to get away with it. But that never could have happened in my district because tipsy Kevin was so dependent on Joe to do the scheduling, and so was afraid to confront him on his favortism, fearing that Joe might quit.
Oh, and what you wrote about your DM deliberately understaffing stores sounds soo familiar! One of our former AMs, a real loser named Josh, used to do that on a frequent basis. He would then count part of the store himself, thinking that he was so fast that it was much better to have HIM counting in the store, instead of an auditor who could really use the hours. He got caught doing this (thanks to me! but more on that later) and moved on to another district.
That really stinks, what your AM's did regarding staffing stores that they weren't running. I mean, to blatantly lie like that! Were they ever caught by the DM in one of those lies? I guess not, huh? I mean, it would be kind of hard to prove.
Jkat, sad to say (for RGIS anyway) that our two districts are probably not the only ones like this. I bet there are many others out there going through the same issues. Seems to be a common thread through quite a few districts.
We could write pages and pages of reasons why attendance is poor and never come close to hitting them all. But at the core, you have to remember that no matter how well a district is managed, it's always promoted as part-time work. That means you don't get the caliber of people you would get for a full-time job, and also that many of the responsible people you hire will have another job (probably full-time) that will always come first.
One thing that you may have noticed is that the people on the night teams tend to be more reliable than the daytime only people. I'm generalizing, of course, but the night auditors usually hold down 9-to-five jobs and have a sense of commitment.
I worked in a number of districts and never saw one where the scheduling was split up among the AMs, even when specific teams were otherwise assigned to each.
During most of my tenure as an AM, I had the unpleasant responsibility of handling staffing, so I was always the one getting phone calls at 6 am because an inventory was short on staff. At one point my DM wanted to split up the teams and have each one handle staffing for his teams, and while I would have been REALLY happy to give up part of that responsibility, I convinced him that this would be a problem, especially when Area Manager A needed to get people from Area Manager B's teams.
And I ALWAYS pestered my TLs to schedule the requested number of auditors, assuming they had the people. Some of them didn't care for me doing this, but when another AM took over staffing, all I heard from the team leaders was, "You know, the staffing was a lot better when you did it."
As for scheduling low, yes, the crew IS more productive when you have fewer people, but remember that there is a certain amount of downtime per auditor -- getting equipment, transmitting, putting equipment away, etc. So the more people you have, the more downtime. The trick, though, is to avoid (a) running the people into the ground and (b) staffing so low that the lack of people overcomes the increased productivity so you run into overtime issues. (I never did the master schedule, so I'm NOT just saying this to defend myself!)
Fort Collins, CO. here again :)
Ah, the joys ofunderstaffing.
I've had:
-DMs & AMs leave people they knew (or should have known) quit or refused work on the schedule for jobs I ran.
-Incompetent DMs understaff stores because they were dumb enough to *believe* the estimated time of completion in the procedures and not understand that they were being presented with a best case scenario, and anyone whos ever run a store knows that you rarely get the best case(if ever....)
-Devious managers deliberately understaff to increase productivity and save money, as jkat and others have mentioned.
(I once had a DM who took nearly all of my experienced auditors out of a Hot Topic to do a store *he* was running and replace them with a smaller number of newbies. Only a deep respect for the law prevented me from murdering him)
And you know, ultimately understaffing, whether by design or accident, has a domino effect. Have a night store run long due to understaffing, and some of those people won't show up the next morning, and then some of those people might not show up that evening because the day store ran long, and so on and so on until there's an actual break in the schedule. (I could mention what I think are the huge deficiencies in the store scheduling by National Accounts, but that's a rant for another day....)
Oh, thank you for mentioning Hot Topic. I did one of those, and it was the first time we had ever serviced that customer in our district. The AM in charge of staffing (I'll call him Joe) saw the procedures and saw it was all auto-scan, so he gave me all newbies, about half of whom were in their first week with the company.
If you're not familiar with Hot Topic, they sell lots of stuff geared to goth and heavy metal crowd, so there's plenty of things like body jewelry. And it's laid out in a very unorthodox style.
We started the salesfloor at 9 pm, and by 10:30, I could see we were in DEEP trouble, so I called Joe for help. His "help" was to tell me to call the two grocery stores that were going, and see if I could get anyone to come.
ONE person came, and I had one rookie who also was doing well, but the rest of the crew were useless. The three of us spent most of the night recounting areas that were so badly counted I couldn't even figure out what they had done. I ended up walking out of the store at 6:30 am. Fortunately, the store I was supposed to run at 7 am was in the same mall.
Then I got to go home for a few hours before going to another inventory in the afternoon, which I was supposed to run with an assist by Joe. Another AM said I should call off and let the first Joe run it. I didn't really want to do that, but I did, and Joe started giving me crap about how "You wanted to be an AAM," blah blah blah.
So I went. Joe said, "Oh, I was just giving you crap, you can go." But I stayed anyway, finished the early start, and then when we had a bunch of no-shows for the salesfloor count, I still stayed. But during the course of the inventory, my DM called several times, and it seemed whenever he called, Joe was on a smoke break, so I ended up taking the calls. During the salesfloor count, DM called again while Joe was smoking, and when I picked up the phone I heard "WHY ARE YOU STILL THERE?" The DM told me to get the hell out as soon as I finished my area, and I heard that Joe caught an earful.
We've just had one of those 'domino' effect weeks in my District. The stores were all running long, both night & day, and by the end of the week, the stores were really short because people were just too tired to show up. We had a JC Penney that started at 9 p.m. and got done at 6 a.m. Most of the people my DM sent to that store were night teams. And, most of those people have full time jobs so they basically went directly to their day jobs from JC Penneys. So, they were getting cancellations all day for the stores going that night.
Understaffing: don't know about your Districts, but our DM tends to overstaff AM's stores and really understaff TL's stores. My team tends to be a little faster than some so you can bet that if a store requires 7 people, he will only schedule us for 5. And because we are always understaffed, we are always under pressure to get out in the right time frame.
Another problem in our District is that one of our AM's tends to count in all of his stores whether he needs to or not. Guess he is trying to make himself look better by getting his stores done faster.
He counts and so his stores go too short. So, for instance, if he is running a store with 4 people and he counts, the store will go less than 3 hrs. In our state, they must pay us for 3 hrs. The DM sees that the store went short, doesn't realize the AM counted, and the next time it comes around, he schedules a TL to run it for a total of 3 people. His logic: the store lasted less than 3 hours with 4 so you don't need 4. Of course, you are now trying to count a store just 3 people when in actuality, there were 5 people counting last time. This AM causes the TL's this problem all of the time.
We had a major problem with understaffing with an offsite we did in January. Our DM called and asked my team to go count this offsite for a store that would be going the next day. He said he personally visited the offsite, that there were about 40 boxes of clothing, the place had heat,etc. and we could get it done with 4 people in 3 hrs. So, off we go, just 4 people to this offsite. It is the Northeast, and it was 15 degrees out that day and they were predicting freezing rain. Well, when we got to this offsite and the store people opened it up, there were slightly more than 40 boxes. In fact, as I started numbering them, I soon realized that we had 182 boxes. The place was not heated and....there were absolutely no bathroom facilities anywhere in sight. We were all woman. The store people sat under quilted blankets trying to keep warm. I called my DM immediately as he always says: Call me right away if you are in trouble and I can get you 10 people in a hurry.
I told him we had 182 boxes, no heat, no bathrooms, and we were freezing. His response: Do the best you can. I'll buy you all a cup of coffee when I see you next time. Hello??? Coffee?? We needed help. He never sent us anyone. We were in that cold for over 8 hrs. Our hands and feet were totally frozen. And, of course, because we were cold, we had to use the bathroom continuously. The nearest bathroom was at a Dunkin Donuts down the street which required us to get into our cars and drive there. While there, we of course kept buying coffee to warm up and so the vicious cycle: count, coffee, bathroom. Did I mention that we all came down with horrible colds? That is understaffing at its worst. If DM had visited that offsite, how did he miss the other 140 boxes?
Has anyone heard about the new wage cap on hourly employees? I heard earlier in the year it was around 200% of district starting wage, but now it has gone down to 100%. I think it is incredible the amount of cuts going on. Now to stunt the reward for the people who deliver the products! What happens if you are already above the cap? Where is the motivation? Hey, you can't get another raise but we want you to work harder...makes sense.
~The things you talk about are happening all over the country. I'm in NM, and the stories are exactly the same.
The Refugee: Your manager's method of "helping" you out in understaffed inventories sounds exactly like what when on in my district. When he told you to call some other stores and see if you could get the people running those inventories to send you a few auditors, boy did that sound familiar! That's the way they handled it in Dist. 414. Of course, you can imagine that those other TL's or managers just LEAPED at the chance to send some of their precious counters to someone else's inventory.
anon. at 8:48 pm: We had an AM who did the same thing too, in my district. He would deliberately understaff his stores AND count in them. He thought he was such hot stuff that he could do better than any lowly auditor. Never mind that he was depriving some people of hours. His stores had to look good to Ops and HQ. That was the most important thing, right?
Your DM sounds horrible! (But then, don't they all?) What he did to you guys regarding that freezing inventory was terrible. Do you think he deliberately lied about the number of boxes, or was he just a retard who couldn't count? That whole thing sounded like a nightmare. Did he ever apologize afterwards? And what about his "cup of coffee" reward? What a jerk he was!
anon. at 11:23 pm: Oh, please tell me this is a joke? A wage cap? They can't be serious! I mean, the auditors are already getting paid shit wages, and doing shit work, and RGIS wants to cap their wages? If that's actually happening, every auditor should just quit en masse. Or stage some huge strike, something to point out how ridiculous a wage cap would be. How dare they?! I can't imagine anyone staying with RGIS if this actually takes effect. Can a company abuse their employees any more than RGIS? Don't think so.
Misfit, I don't think my DM ever visited that offsite and just gave us a number off the top of his head to get us to do it. No, he never apologized and we are still waiting for that cup of coffee.
Anonymous from NM: We haven't heard about the wage cap here in the Northeast but....they have not given out any raises at all so far this year. We did hear that beginning July 1st, you would be reviewed every 50 stores. What exactly do you mean by 100 percent and 200 percent of the starting wage? Our starting wage here is 9.00 an hour. what would our cap be? 18.00? Can you explain it a little. Thanks
We had a wage cap implemented last year, but I never did learn if it was company-wide, a division thing, or just our operations manager. But a lot of the old-timers were already above the cap, so they could never get another raise. Now think about all those basketball players pulling down $10 million a year whining about how they can feed their families with a salary cap, while they make 5-6 times PER GAME what a "full-time" RGIS auditor does in a year, with no bonuses or endorsement deals.
Hey, that's an idea...I'm sure sure some company could use an RGIS auditor to do endorsements. Dickies? Shoes for Crews? Vivarin?
Anonymous: How about a JC Penney that started at 7 pm on Sunday, and the last group of auditors and the AM signed out at 12:45 pm the next day? I actually walked out of my Sunday night store already into OT. But here's a real shocker for you: by 8 am, they were telling us that if we finished by 10, everyone who stayed would get paid for an extra three hours. In the end, the bitter-enders (tags, range checks, and redoing a few areas that just vanished from the collectors) received an extra FIVE hours pay.
>>Can a company abuse their employees any more than RGIS? Don't think so. <<
Um...yeah. Wal-Mart seems to get busted for worse at least once a month. For example: making employees clock out when they reach 40 hours and then return to work; locking the cleaning crew in the store overnight (illegals, no less!), sending people home in the middle of their shift because their stock price went down.
As for the offsite, exactly when did the DM say he did the visit? We all know that stores will sometimes load up a location (offsite or not) and not let anyone at RGIS know.
I once did a second store visit at a clothing store at a mall because there was concern about the number of people scheduled. When I got there, I saw case and cases and cases and cases and cases and cases of boxes in the stockroom. They told me that half the boxes would be transferred out before the inventory, but I still moved up the backroom start time, because there wasn't enough space to really add more people.
Then the night of the inventory, I get a phone call from the team leader, because they are dying. The S/F is done but they're stuck in the back. I sent over people from where I was, and when I was done, I went over to see what was going on. There were literally hundreds of cases stacked out on the salesfloor, with plenty more to be done in the back, not to mention the loose stuff on the @#$%^ing rolling racks. It turned out that not only did they not transfer any of the cases out, they got about 100 more cases shipped in!
That doesn't excuse your DM for not sending help, but it sure could be why he understated the count. Remember, having inventories run long doesn't help the managers. They have a boss, too, and if the district keeps hitting overtime, the ops will raise his own brand of hell.
Refugee: I can tell you for sure that my DM didn't visit that offsite. Heat?? No idea about the lack of bathroom facilities??
This store always had an offsite.
This past January, they had simply moved to a different offsite with no heat & bathrooms. When my DM called about doing the offsite, I questioned the 40 boxes because I had done that store's offsite twice a year for the past 3 years.
Every time we did it, the number of boxes in the offsite increased.
These are not newly shipped in items. We have counted the same merchandise out of those boxes for the past several years. The clothing has become wrinkled and dirty from our putting it on floors. When I did it last summer, the offsite had 140 boxes.
My DM said that the store had reduced their offsite inventory. If he had visited, he would have seen that it increased and did not decrease. Again, this wasn't newly shipped merchandise. It was all the same stuff we have counted in the past with some additional boxes thrown in.
As far as stores getting deliveries after the PIV, that happens all the time here too. The stores do not let us know that they have received a shipment since the visit and we are often in a mess once we get there. That is the store's fault.
But, this January episode was not the store's fault. My office recently did the summer cycle of that inventory. My AM went to visit the offsite. It had now grown to 2 storage units full of boxes. The only difference with the summer cycle was that it was hot that day and people didn't freeze for 8 hours. Because it was our slower months, they put 15 people in to do what we had done 4 people in January. But my AM had the same problem we did with a lot of lost time with people needing to get into their cars to find bathrooms. They did have one perk we didn't have in January though.
This offsite has a small pond in its yard. Once the inventory was over, several auditors jumped in to cool off with all their clothing on. It was frozen and people were ice skating on it when we did the inventory. The store people were also helping with the moving of boxes, etc. this summer.
In January, the 2 store people at the offsite with us actually went home to put warmer clothes on, brought blankets and a video game, and sat huddled under those blankets playing games and did nothing to help us at all. And, when it got too cold, they went out to their cars and sat there with the heaters running.
http://madauditor.blogspot.com/2006/06/smelly-one.html
Another one!
EAHP is here RGIS wide. I got a warning letter that I am counting (as a TL) 92% of my Estimated Average Per Hour and that within 10 stores if I do not reach 100% they will take away $0.58 per hour.
Funny thing this 50 store thing is that I only worked 4 stores, 3 of which I ran and the third I did sheets for 3 hours and then on the portable doing corrections for 5.
Just another excuse to take money away.
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