When Jesus came in, the department had been taken apart. There were shelves on the floor, brackets everywhere, stock in cages… the look on his face was one I will never forget. And I don’t blame him. Where in Management for Dummies does it tell you how to deal with staff that are too keen? Well, nowhere, because it would be as useful as a whole chapter dedicated to the procedures involved when a crazed elephant rampages through your store. A highly unlikely improbability.
I ploughed through, resolutely, ripping the stock off the shelf and meticulously placing it back on, where it was supposed to go, using the correct merchandising principles. It was a cleansing process, one that took about a week to finish. I think I redefined the colloquialism “busting your gut” in that week, but my effort definitely paid off. I was relatively oblivious to this, as I wasn’t expecting accolades for what I had done. At Old Target, you could literally work your skin to the bone and your brain to frying point and they’d still fire you. Here, it seemed, all you had to do was turn up for work on a regular(ish) basis and you’d be inundated with praise.
That was something I could probably learn to handle, as odd as it was in the very beginning. I remember during my first week an older lady (checkouts, obviously) approached me.
“You’re Katherine from Perth, aren’t you?”
Notoriety, too. Sweet. I think, however, the finest moment of this burgeoning knowledge of how awesome they thought I was, was the Thursday that I showed up to work two hours late, with no explanation, the second week in a row. First time, they’ll usually understand, give you the benefit of the doubt, that kind of thing. But the second time, your arse is definitely in for a reaming.
I was given an excellence card that very day.
As with everything, it wasn’t to last long. For the upper echelons of New Target, the novelty that was a decent staff member was wearing off gradually, as I was coming to realise.
Once I had scraped browngoods together from a horribly parody of a department into a respectable sales area, I turned my attention to interactive.
Interactive, to a Soundbar staff member, is like the cherished, feature part of a front garden. It’s our major selling point, and the most volatile of all the areas. One could never know how a game was going to sell. But sell they did, most of them anyway, and they remain one of the highest shrinkage points in the store.
Ah, Shrinkage! The capital in that word is entirely deliberate. For a retail drone, Shrinkage is one of those concepts that keeps coming back to haunt you. It means, simply, theft. Theft, and having to mark items down due to damage and such. But mainly theft. Every year, after stocktake, the signs would start to go up on the backs of toilet doors and wed be inundated with suspicion. Especially if you work in Soundbar. Once, I happened to find the minutes from a regional Asset Protection meeting, and there was not a single department more focussed on than mine, to the point of making sure that the staff were of the right “age bracket”. I smiled at that, seeing as most, if not all, the Soundbar staff I knew were definitely in the wrong age bracket.
I ploughed through, resolutely, ripping the stock off the shelf and meticulously placing it back on, where it was supposed to go, using the correct merchandising principles. It was a cleansing process, one that took about a week to finish. I think I redefined the colloquialism “busting your gut” in that week, but my effort definitely paid off. I was relatively oblivious to this, as I wasn’t expecting accolades for what I had done. At Old Target, you could literally work your skin to the bone and your brain to frying point and they’d still fire you. Here, it seemed, all you had to do was turn up for work on a regular(ish) basis and you’d be inundated with praise.
That was something I could probably learn to handle, as odd as it was in the very beginning. I remember during my first week an older lady (checkouts, obviously) approached me.
“You’re Katherine from Perth, aren’t you?”
Notoriety, too. Sweet. I think, however, the finest moment of this burgeoning knowledge of how awesome they thought I was, was the Thursday that I showed up to work two hours late, with no explanation, the second week in a row. First time, they’ll usually understand, give you the benefit of the doubt, that kind of thing. But the second time, your arse is definitely in for a reaming.
I was given an excellence card that very day.
As with everything, it wasn’t to last long. For the upper echelons of New Target, the novelty that was a decent staff member was wearing off gradually, as I was coming to realise.
Once I had scraped browngoods together from a horribly parody of a department into a respectable sales area, I turned my attention to interactive.
Interactive, to a Soundbar staff member, is like the cherished, feature part of a front garden. It’s our major selling point, and the most volatile of all the areas. One could never know how a game was going to sell. But sell they did, most of them anyway, and they remain one of the highest shrinkage points in the store.
Ah, Shrinkage! The capital in that word is entirely deliberate. For a retail drone, Shrinkage is one of those concepts that keeps coming back to haunt you. It means, simply, theft. Theft, and having to mark items down due to damage and such. But mainly theft. Every year, after stocktake, the signs would start to go up on the backs of toilet doors and wed be inundated with suspicion. Especially if you work in Soundbar. Once, I happened to find the minutes from a regional Asset Protection meeting, and there was not a single department more focussed on than mine, to the point of making sure that the staff were of the right “age bracket”. I smiled at that, seeing as most, if not all, the Soundbar staff I knew were definitely in the wrong age bracket.
Point being, Interactive at New Target was a high shrinkage area. And again, it is due only to the incompetence of the previous staff/management. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but when you go into the DVD bit of a Target store, some of the DVDs are in hard plastic cases (called safers) to prevent people stealing them. Back before interactive was such a problem, this used to occur with the games, too. Since then, however, a ‘library system’ was developed, in which staff take each game out of its case and file it away alphabetically in the drawers, putting the empty box out on display for customers to peruse. Game shrinkage = 0.
Not at New Target, oh no. I think I nearly cried when I saw the entire department ‘safered’ (the term for stock which is in the hard plastic cases) and watched the mounds of work that I’d have ahead of me to fix it up. I didn’t, however, count on being opposed.
It happened during one of the Power Walks. Janine, the store manager, has this little routine whereby she powers around the store sparks flying out of her eyes, criticism seeming to emit from all orifices. If you got the ‘stop… hands on hips… right foot forward… squint…’ while she walked through your department you knew you were for it. Anyway, one afternoon she and Kellie, the Merchandise Manager, happened to be doing the rounds of my slowly improving department, and I brought it up.
They looked at first shocked and then suspicious. I could almost hear their thoughts… What did she say? She is opting for a huge amount of work for herself, so that we have less shrinkage? Are we hearing right? I can understand, the whole concept is unorthadox. However, if I was faced with the same situation I’d cover my shock and immediately approve the activity, giving all the support I could in the hope of encouraging further independent thought like this.
I definitely wouldn’t frown, and exchange a glance, and ask where on earth you got such an idea… and I certainly wouldn’t belittle the staff member by whipping out my portaphone and calling the sister-store to find out what they were doing.
I was fuming the next day, as they still hadn’t got back to me, so again I decided to jump the gun and just start doing what I knew needed to be done. I felt a twinge of unease. This was the second time an almost identical situation had happened, and I suddenly had a new understanding of what it must have been like for the previous staff member, who, untrained and much less pushy than I, must have felt like he was drowning in a bog.
But, I knew there was two roads I could take at this point. I could acknowledge that they were idiots, shrug, and work by the creed that they should do their own jobs and I’d do mine, keep my nose down and make it easy for myself.
Or, I could narrow my eyes, square my shoulders and allow a small tendril of indignation to snake up through my mind, giving me the required strength to fight. Fight with every ounce of false confidence, hard-won knowledge and political tactics that I had, and whip this department into shape.
Most people, not the idiots that I was, would have chosen the first option. Easier, oh, so much easier. But I simply could not do that. It has never been in my nature to go with a preordained flow. I had to make the flow, and if I couldn’t do that, I’d struggle and fight it with all my strength.
A couple of days after I decided to bull ahead with my gaming idea, I was half way through de-safering the games. Kellie happened to be walking around, and she came up to the counter.
“Katherine,” she said. “We’ve decided that you should go about transferring the games into a library system.”
A dry smile came into my eyes as she walked away, and I turned my back and continued what I was doing.
“I’m so glad,” I muttered sardonically.
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