It looks like the agony at Sears has been going on for too long. I'm a long time and I caught myself not remembering when was the last time that things looked at least ok. I imagine that the younger folks don't even know the meaning of the term better times.
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3 was a lot for our store, it is about half the size of most Sears.
They'll only give hrs to appliances if people aren't in draw once everyone is in draw and can't make more than minimum wage they cut hrs....they won't fire you for being in draw even if it's in the thousands.....why would you want sales people thousands of dollars in the hole away from making commission on the sales floor, they're obviously not going to care and just hang out for minimum wage and just tell everyone to take a hike that isn't buying a protection plan if they're okay with taking minimum wage and having a lazy job where you don't have to do anything but make sure you only sell to Sears card holders who buy protection plans and you get praised
The good old days?....1973-74 when my mother worked at the Woodfield store, Schaumburg, IL when the mall first opened. Everything was new, retail was exciting then. Sears was the place to be and the place to find just about anything a person could need.
@igi I was the one who posted @10Tzwc0l-gvb. My store staffed just one appliance person a lot of the time. Once in a while we'd have two on hand, and that was usually before 2-4 pm, then we'd drop down to one for the rest of the day. Rarely ever had three or more unless it was a "big event".
Tools/fitness/L&G almost never had more than one person. In fact, some days there would be nobody for a couple hours and one of us in appliances would have to cover both departments. Was getting tired of being griped at by a customer about not knowing the difference between this tool or that tool, or not being able to answer a question about a mower or treadmill, but I could not blame them for their frustration. I just explained that our payroll was tight and appliances had to cover those departments from time to time, and a lot of the customers were sympathetic after I told them the situation and said that it was ridiculous that Sears would expect to run entire department stores on virtually nothing.
I worked in Sears IT for years. We had a lot of fun over the years even when the company wasn’t doing well. We had projects and the work was good. All of that changed when Eddie came along but especially since 2016 when it became clear that the business was just Eddie’s piggy bank. It got real bad in early 2018 when Hoffman became a ghost town and you could literally go hours without seeing or hearing anyone walk by. We used to joke around that god forbid one of us got really sick on at work because it would be days before anyone found us.
@ccl 3 appliance people? Wow. That's nothing. Why did they even open the doors? We were still being staffed with 5 to 6 all day when they closed our store.
$2000 a day? For the whole store? Ouch. Our store usually has $2000 in just appliances within 2 hours of opening. Heck we still have 2 appliance people almost all day at all times. Back in the day it was sometimes 3.
The real good times ended after the merger/buyout. After that layoff came more often and affected those it never used to. It didn't help anyone except for Eddie.
I worked there from 2014 to 2018. Even though Sears was having troubles then, 2014 was quite the contrast compared to last year. I originally worked in electronics. Did really well for a college student. The conmissions and spiffs were awesome. Had fun most of the time and actually looked forward to going to work for the first year or so. Then things started going downhill. Electronics went away and we were moved to appliances. Didn't seem to make as much money selling there compared to electronics. I made more money selling just an average, midrange TV with a TV stand or some other accessory, delivery and a PA than I did selling a high end washer and dryer set, delivery and PA.
Aside from a drop in pay, our store gradually became slower, and slower, abd slower...it wasn't unheard of for our entire store to do less than $2000 in sales for the entire day. The original store manager retired and his replacement only cared about credit, PAs, SYW and know your member. Turnover accelerated. Then corporate decided to have everyone in the store do everything to avoid having to pay for extra labor, so I was putting freight away, doing adsets outside of my department, doing RAD/RAN in softlines, finding web orders and ringing at the CAC on top of selling appliances. Morale was very low. Every other customer would ask if we were closing.
Things became even more ridiculous – we had one person per department most days. The cleaning crew had to use a broom and swept the carpets in the morning because the vacuum broke and Sears refused to buy a new one. AP was shown the door and shoplifters regularly walked out with carts full of merchandise. It became well understood that we were there to push PAs and credit and that sales were secondary. My sales were cancelled regularly because delivery couldn't get their act together or Sears never had the item in stock at their warehouse. Managers started walking around with clipboards every single hour to check the dozens of metrics, even when it was dead and there were clearly no sales. We started having a "credit table" over by the door in a futile attempt to capture more credit apps (it didn't work). Payroll was cut back so bad that we took turns watching the MPU SNC for customer pickups on truck days, since the back room associates had just enough time to unload the truck and do nothing else. We were also covering breaks or filling in for HI and softlines too, even though appliances is draw pay, because it was either that or nobody would be in that area of the store at all. Black Fridays gradually turned to c-ap – my first year there was a good sized crowd until midnight, while my last Black Friday, we had just a couple people walk in and that was after a good five minutes after unlocking the doors at 6 PM.
Last straw for me was when seemingly 90 percent of our floor was unorderable and I couldn't sell anything except for low-end merchandise in stock at our store, which wasn't much. Coincidentally, I was close to graduation and was leaving for a job in my field anyway.
Softer Side of Sears era was positive, with new locations popping up.
Mid to Late 90s KMart with Supercenters, expansions of locations, and the hope that KMart would fully go toe-to-toe with Wal-Mart and Target with their Supercenter arms race expansion.
Its a day to day struggle to even imagine good times. The bad outweigh the good. Going in every day is hard not knowing when the ball will drop. We say we should leave but do we? Nope.