Im a department manager who is generally considered excellent at his job. We had our management team switched mostly out and now I'm losing 30-50 hours a week to the front end. Im still getting by but cleaning and customer happiness is suffering greatly. We go hours without eggs and milk at night. Is this common? Is there anything I can do about it? I'm debating looking for a job with another company because I'm worried about the long term prospects of a grocery store chain that doesn't care if it has groceries to sell.
It's a pretty common problem, based on what I've seen and what others have said here.
It should be obvious to corporate/management that pulling people from other departments to cashier is a failed idea that was bad to begin with. The most common complaint on our OSAT is out of stocks. Customers aren't able to buy what they came in for and thus are leaving without making that/those purchase(s). Why is this happening? The front end is understaffed, and rather than staff it accordingly (we have plenty of checkers... but a lot get less than twenty hours), the idea is to "save" money by scheduling fewer people and just pull from other departments to check customers out faster... because God forbid these customers have to wait an extra five minutes or so, and that's apparently more important than keeping the shelves full. So... the result? Yeah, the customers were checked out faster, but some of those customers? They'll be heading down the street to the competition because you - as in, Kroger - kept calling those that were stocking to check/bag/get carts and now, the customers have to spend some of their money elsewhere. So instead of just scheduling properly, pennies were pinched... and guess what, dollars were lost (and perhaps, customers, because eventually, customers are going to get sick of having to go elsewhere to do the rest of their shopping).
TELL THEM YOU DON'T GET FRONT END HOURS QUIT TAKING MY PEOPLE! Be an ******* about it or they will walk all over you. When they call your people, tell them dont go. Then when they ask you why you told them that, say we have shet to do.