From @RoAoOC9 --
"At my current store there are 4 ASM positions. Being told that they will be eliminating 2 of those. HI and BC will combine and OPs will be gone.
Backroom will also be eliminated in my store.
These changes are insane."
How is that so? I'm not questioning whether this is true or false, because it sounds very probable. it may not happen in every store but it has probably happened or will happen at several, at least. I'm questioning how they think this is going to work. Are sales associates going to come to work in steel-toed boots and a strain belt, ready to do physical labor in addition to selling a washer and dryer set or ringing out clothes at the CAC? Who wants to be helped by a sweaty, grimy sales associate?
Let's not forget the glaring safety problem this will be. Do they have their checkbook ready for all the lawsuits and the workers comp? Having regular floor associates work the stockroom may work for stores like a drugstore where there isn't anything heavy involved and the volume is smaller. When there's extremely heavy merchandise like exercise equipment, appliances, lawn and garden equipment (tractors in crates, anyone?) etc. to load off the truck, load into a customer vehicle or move around in the stockroom, people are going to get hurt if they don't know what they are doing or are not able to do it. And that five-minute guarantee? Ha! It won't work.
There are many floor associates in my store that are elderly retirees or are otherwise physically handicapped, are they going to make them do this? Or are they going to find clever ways to let them go because they aren't young and "useful" to have around for the purposes of Simple Store, where associates will literally have to do everything and not get paid accordingly?
It's bad enough the softlines and home improvement associates have to put all of their own freight away, since MCA's no longer exist on either part of the store. How well has that worked out? The freight never gets stocked on time and there isn't very much time freed up to help customers. Of course, there are no hours to keep enough people out on the floor to service those customers and work the freight. We've even had negative feedbacks come in about this. Have hours gone up? No.
What about web orders? We (as in the backroom team) can barely get these picked, scanned and packaged as it is now with the lack of hours for the backroom, and even though hours are very low, we are "uncapped" for web orders, meaning there is no limit on what comes through. So backroom can get 30 web orders popping through at the start of the day and those all have to be pulled off the floor, labeled with the pick ticket, sorted, packaged, weighed and labeled again with the shipping label. that takes time if you are doing it right and you are not just throwing random #### in random boxes and calling it a day. Usually it is just one person on staff in the back unless it is a day we have a truck unload, so on a typical day with 20-30 web orders by the start of the day, it won't get done until at least noon, and that's without interruptions. How are floor associates going to process web orders from start to finish, on time?
There are so many other things I'm missing... PMT, RTV, stock location, pick-ups, floor model assembly, ratchet rebuilds, general maintenance if it isn't too complicated...
To whomever @RoAoOC9 is, yeah I agree with you. This is really insane!