I work at two shops at the moment. Two clothes shops. One knackers my back and keeps me sneezing all day due to the extreme levels of dust, the other, I genuinely enjoy. I will call these shops Shop A and Shop B.
Shop A made it clear to me during my interview, watching the training DVD’s, and from working and talking to the staff, that helping customers is always your number one priority. You might have other tasks, but if a customer approaches you for whatever reason, you’ll stop what you are doing and assist them in any way you can. Approach browsing customers to ask if they’re OK. Smile. Complement on their choice of clothing. Make polite conversation. It’s all very common sense to me. I don’t know a lot about clothes, but I know how good it makes me feel buying nice clothes and being on the receiving end of just a smile or a complement.
Shop B is truly the opposite. The manager insisted that she found smiling, helpful employees absolutely essential to the customers experience, however from day one this has clearly never been the priority. Staff work on strict deadlines for every single task – unpacking delivery, moving items to stock rooms, scanning away, etc. Every time I come back from one of these tasks I have been reminded that it’s extremely important I do this quickly. Not that I do it well, but quickly. Not that I tidy up the clusterfuck stock rooms as I go, not to pick up clothes off the floor, and also to hand customers over to another member of staff, just so I can work quickly. I may be new, but I’m not surprised to find that after a check up on this store, management came under fire for the messy, jam-packed stockrooms. What irks me is that the mess isn’t really the fault of any particular staff. They have been instilled with an ‘every man for himself’ attitude about their tasks, because they’re under pressure to do them so quickly. There’s a frantic vibe that means for a new member of staff such as myself, many current staff are very reluctant to help me. I’d brought down a rail of children’s clothes which I was told for the shop floor. After wondering around with almost every garment and being unable to find a single one, I told a member of staff that I didn’t think this stock was out yet. She told me to “keep looking, it’s there”. I kept looking. It wasn’t there. It was only when I found the floor manager that she said, yes, that is new stock, not for the shelves. To be fair to the first member of staff, she was probably very busy with some other task that had to be done quickly, that doesn’t involve getting distracted by customers or new members of staff.
Towards the end of my latest shift at Shop B, I was asked to sweep the women’s stock room. (Please note I am certain this is only because the state of their stockrooms had got them into trouble – it is not routine to clean up as you go). I filled a bag with clumps of dust, and a rail with clothes I picked up off the floor, and made a pile of old cards, security tags, pins and clothes dividers that were just left/dropped everywhere. Because time spent cleaning doesn’t move new stock somewhere, OMG IT WILL KILL US.
What irks me is that unless management can change the JUST DO IT FAST system, it’s going to continue to fester and grow into a muck house no matter what. There’s no incentive for staff to put stock away in the stock rooms correctly, to add new dividers for new lines of clothes, to put stock on the shop floor in the right place, to correct mistakes as they come across them, to move clothes along to different rails when you run out of space. You’ve got to just “shove it in somewhere”. While scanning some excess tights to put away in the children’s accessories stock rooms, I saw the same pair of tights had been thrown in about 5 different boxes. So I picked all the ones up I could see and scanned them into one box together. But working like this is not good, because by the time I come back to a senior member of staff, they will tell me to do it faster. The only way I can do it faster is to do it shitter.
I get a far superior staff discount at Shop A. They understand how important it is to dress to impress, and how much difference it can make for customers to see staff wearing the new range of clothes – thus, specific items in new ranges of clothes are discounted for staff even further. The discount at Shop B is so tiny that I won’t be bothering to purchase anything. All the clothes I wear to work at Shop B are from Shop A. You know what else I’ve got to add to that? The customers at Shop A are more pleasant than the ones at Shop B, because they’re never fobbed off to someone else, or surrounded by a tornado of hurrying staff that have no time to help or smile.
Shop B would work much more efficiently if it had no customers getting in the way of their priorities.
While I was cleaning one of the stockrooms (presumably for the first time in a long time), the manager from Shop B asked me what Shop A‘s stockroom was like. I said there was only one stockroom, with only a few extra items of clothing in it – and it’s clean. I said Shop A have almost all their stock on the shop floor. I didn’t tell her that I think work ethic needs to change if she wants to run a tidier store – I’m a new, minimum wage grunt, and I don’t think it’s my place to say until I’m invited to comment.
There’s one more thing that soured my opinion of Shop B before I started work. One of the training DVD’s talks extensively about theft. Not theft by customers, but internal theft by staff. It creeped me out. It made me feel like they expect every new employee will have a go at stealing form them. It brags about how great they are at catching staff out who have stolen clothes or money, and how they have sued the living daylights out of anyone involved, and completely destroyed their lives. They sound proud of it.
So instead of telling my manager, I decided to write it on my blog instead, on the off-chance it’ll get read by someone who knows what I’m talking about, and I won’t get fired or sued.
Discussion
No comments yet.