we are not on the death list yet. But, I can't recognize my store anymore. Our Kmart family is gone. It feels like a foreign country when I go in. the lights mostly are out until opening and we have to try to see our freight and read numbers in half dark. we don't see our regular customers anymore at all. Everything is done but the burial. sometimes wish it would just be over.
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Won't be long now. Sorry for all of you who are still at this disaster. I am hearing that the first quarter financials are a complete train wreck. At the store I used to work at the people left tell me that they are bringing in new people and getting rid of the people who are making more than minimum wage so that and cutting the hours of the long time employees to three to ten hours per week. They are only bringing in people to stock shelves. There is only one cashier at any one time and no more department leads. Who do they think will run the store? Who do they think will train the new people? Just a matter of time until it is all over and bankruptcy is here. This company is following the Circuit City playbook. Once the vendors demand payment it is over.
Anyone who has worked at Sears before the Kmart merger,can remember when you were proud to work there,not like today,no one to do any of the jobs they want you to do with little or no help on the sales floor,nearly all positions that are non commission are gone,so the commission sales associates have to also do all the non selling duties that were once done by the MCA teams. Plus sell and meet all the "stupid" metrics they want at corporate. I dread going to work some days,I need 3 more years before I can retire,I wonder everyday if Sears will still be here or in what form it will be in.
It seems it is the same for all of us. Reminds me of the movie 'One flew over the cuckoos nest'. And getting to where I don't care anymore either has been the hardest part. I do still care and try hard. I just have to remind myself it is pointless. It is the hardest thing for hope to die. The loss of hope is terminal. It is good for a person to work hard with their hands and their brain and it is said that hard work is it's own reward. just not at SHC these final days.
It definitely seems that it is the same story in all Sears store, the register process is awful, so slow so time consuming, it takes forever to do the most simple transactions, the SICs and printers are so old it is just about impossible to get them to work to print bin tickets, sales signs are never right,we never have the ones we need but have tons of signs we just throw away that are not needed,the stores have no one working in them,but you are still Expected to get credit,Pas, SYW, KYMs,emails,recaps,mobile alerts,hero's at home donations plus sell on commission and try and make some money while also being a cashier ringing clothing,housewares ,taking on line returns because there are no softline cashiers any more.
Sometimes it is such a joke. I have been with Sears for over 30 years and have no idea what we are doing anymore.
I dread the GUI-based (graphical user interface) POS software. The text menu-based POS software worked really well, all things considered. The "pretty and shiny" touch interface frequently locks up and is terribly slow. It's not intuitive either. Even my older and computer-illiterate associates liked the old version better. The sad thing is that the underlying code hasn't changed much, or so I'm told, they just decided to throw a bloated GUI on top of it. These registers are from the Pentium III era with only 512MB of RAM (half of a GB), they can't handle a GUI running on top of a modern Linux distribution. Sears should either revert to the text-based software or should roll out new POS hardware. The current situation just isn't working out in the field, like most of their other ideas.
Don't get me started on iPads/SNCs. ShopSears is the bane of my life. I can't tell my CSAs to use the register because of the Digital Journey metrics. Sales associates just have to put up with them. Sales have been lost due to the excrutiatingly long process it takes to complete transactions on these. The associate has to start over and the customer gets frustrated. Rumor is that it appears to SHLD investors as an online sale, for what it's worth.
I will say that the PCs in our store's back office are pretty decent, with 8GB of RAM and Core i3 processors. They're probably on par with corporate's average workstation. I don't know about other stores though. I'm thinking Sears was more or less forced to upgrade due to the retirement of Windows XP a couple years back.
I wonder what kind of computers they give the people at corporate. I bet they give them the latest and greatest, though its in the stores were the technology actually has an impact.
In our store the registers are so old that only about half work, and they are SUPER slow and freeze all the time. The touch screen system might look nice, but the old blue interface was so much faster and the machines were able to handle it. And on top of the slow systems we have a million b2b questions to ask, and since last month we have had the Heros at home which we mostly skip over. All the technology initiatives are great, but the registers can't handle them. The signing system too needs repairs, I'm a softlines ASM, and my store's signs are usually off or the printer is broken. Filing help desk tickets is rarely helpful... Sigh.
Same in our store. No hours given to work the store, high turnover. Only time we have more than 10 people in the whole store is on truck day to unload the truck. We have more socks, and winter coats than we know what to do with and we got a pallet of more winter clothes last week (In April!!!)
The problem is the higher ups in Hoffman making decisions that are not based in reality, just some wild hair they got and decided to run with it. All these crazy ideas trickle down to the different managers and finally to store level.
And the stores don't have the man hours, the personnel, the proper equipment, or the software to run the store much less to implement a new idea. Just sad how bad it is and how low employee moral is in the store. No one cares anymore.
Kinda hard to "Serve, Delight and Engage our members" when they can't shop their way because the store can't help them.
I still think Sears is trying to run the stores with no one working in them,so the few associates we have must do all job assignments. In Home Improvement we seldom have more than 3 people on at one time,usually only 2, with no cashiers, no MCAs to do signing or price changes,you only find out if the price has changed when you ring up an item at the register and it comes up a different price then the bin ticket. On truck day,stock takes at least three days to be put away because there are so few associates scheduled that it is impossible to get it put away,be the hardware cashier plus be a commission sales person. Also in our store the appliance department is usually carrying the store and the only reason I can see we are still open.
S
We have TONS of soft goods sitting in clearance, a problem since late February. It's taking up floor space for things that have much higher margin.
You're right about the overzealous buying on certain merchandise. This is something I just don't understand about Sears, and they're buying stuff that's doomed to sit until it is clearanced near or below cost. Even still, it still won't move, and it's eventually taken out of the store. I talked about this in another post, it is a HUGE problem in softlines. We received several boxes of these thin scarf-like things with NO room to place them, enough purses to break a camel's back and get this--slippers. Customers have been breaking down our doors for warm fuzzy slippers, skipping the shorts, t-shirts and bathing suits. Sales are through the roof!
Meanwhile in my land (hardlines) I'm starved of many different products. I don't want to toot my own horn but hardlines--particularly appliances--carries the store. I'm sure that's the case for 99% of other Sears stores.
The soft goods on clearance is mostly $3.99 and below but the softlines MCAs/lead have no time to mark down about 1000+ pieces of merchandise--individually--to its proper price point. Thus, a winter sweater shows that it is $15.97 clearance on its markdown sticker when it really is $3.99. Nice surprise at the register for the customer, I guess, but then again most customers are walking away from all of this clearance because it hasn't been marked down to its real price.
Setting the floor and freight/RADRAN take up the already few hours that softlines gets, leaving no time to properly complete PCNs (markdowns). The couple of MCAs we have get less than 10 hours a week. Half of the time they are on the registers as we lack hours for scheduling cashiers sufficiently. While the softlines lead is fulltime, she is doing the job of ten different people.
Our store still has TONS of winter merchandise. Corporate WAY overbought, and it makes our stores look messy and junky. We have so much clearance stuff that the members are reluctant to buy anything thats not on clearance, which will of course mean that all of this seasons stuff will have to go on clearance. Its a mess.
As someone with over 35 years one word "heartbroken"! Once a wonderful place to work!!
It seems from this site that what is happening in my Sears store,is happening in Sears stores across the country,no connection with the reality of working on the sales floor with upper management. We just finished doing inventory this week,it will be interesting to see what the shrinkages will be with all the shoplifting going on without any AP in our store. Metrics are all that matter, sometimes you just want to give up and say end it now Seats and put us out of our misery.
I have to say that I have a love-hate relationship with Sears Holdings. I love my particular store: my employees, the store GM and our frequent customers that we see often. We are like a family, despite the uphill battle that the company is in. I work alongside some veteran employees, some that have been with the company for 20-30 years or more. Obviously, they're loyal and have pride in their work and the company, but I sometimes wonder if they're disheartened of the changes that have taken place over the past 10 years or so.
That said, I do not like the direction the company is headed. There is a disconnect between corporate and store-level management--they know best and won't take suggestions from those of us working in the trenches. 90% of them have never worked in customer service let alone managed a store in any capacity. Nevertheless, there's this vibe that "they know it all" from district all the way up to the board of directors. So many store-level associates and managers have great advice that could improve customer service save time and/or money and strengthen the company and I have yet to see upper-level management take the advice.
There's too much control and micromanagement coming from the top plus a lot of red tape. There is very little autonomy for store-level management, and there's often a Catch-22 for such simple tasks or goals, making everyone's job difficult. A lot of initiatives and actions from higher-up just doesn't make sense or isn't logical. Let's not forget that the company is too focused on certain metrics, taking the focus away from sales. Some of my employees are more concerned about getting a PA or a credit app over making a good sale because of this indoctrination.
Sears/Kmart just seems like it's in the Pick-n-pull of companies: ESL is stripping the company of valuable parts. Just like a junked car, eventually there isn't much valuable left so the car goes to the crusher for recycling, and then it's history. We're almost to that point. Kenmore, Craftsman and DieHard (KCD) seems to be the last valuable "part". When that goes, which may be soon, we're done. I think all of the real estate that had any worth had been sold off by now so there isn't any more of that.
It is why I am not going to be with the company much longer. I am eyeing an opportunity in store management at Target--the pay is better and the company actually has a future. Hopefully, my experience as a hardlines ASM (and before that, HA sales lead) could be put to good use.
Sad but true. Kmart unfortunatly is beyond repair and not worth salvaging. They should just get it overwith. Sears isn't much better, but at least the company owns 300 of the stores. Kmarts look like third world establishments. Don't know why anyone would shop their with Target and even Walmart stores in way better shape.