Everyone is abandoning the front end at my store right now. Like everyone is transferring to another department. I am actually sad to see them go. I am new so I don't really understand what is happening. Is this normal?
Same thing going on at my store right now. A ton of Checkers, CC's, and Service Desk people are either quitting or transferring and some are even getting fired.
I am personally in the middle of a 30 day LOA in order to get my mental affairs in order and not have to deal with my store's BS. I'm probably going to take another 30 days after this one.
From my observations, my store's front end sucks because most of the workers are lazy including the head clerks. Before I left, I noticed frequently that checkers would leave their registers just to talk therefore funneling more people to my lane and head clerks wouldn't tell them anything.
Our service manager told head clerks not to get in a check-stand but when it is busy and you have 2-4 head clerks just standing up front talking when we could use baggers or checkers, you know you have a problem.
I'm sure that it is true for most other departments as well but most of your co-workers merely show up and do the bare minimum to get paid and if they are sociable enough, management will let them get away with it.
Front end is the department that gets the brunt of all the other department's problems. If an item is mispriced, customer yells at us for it. If a product is damaged, customer yells at us for it. If something is out of stock, customer yells at us for it. Everything that customers gripe at us about is usually not our fault and usually we can do very little to fix it so it is very frustrating. I can easily see why anyone sane people would want out
This is the time of year where sales start to pick up and the departments get more hours to spend. so what they tend to do is syphon off the OK/Good employees from the front end, as that is where all the employees start, and pull them to the back. This is when the transfer requests start getting accepted as well, from the paper posted in January.
This leaves the front end with only a small number of
1) People who, for whatever reason, want to stay
2) were not accepted for a transfer
3) are plain BAD or
4) were hired recently
It's a very hard time to be a FE Clerk. People will start quitting around August when sales start to slow down and hours get cut.
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