I'm new here. Just trying to get a concensus. Not sure how many dept heads are on here. The holidays are coming up fast and I feel like the demands from corporate are completly unreasonable. I work really hard. I'm doing 6 days and and at least 9 to 10 hours a day. Now it's becoming closer to 12 hours a day. The grocery trucks we get require more stocking time hours than I have scheduled. My store takes 7 to 9 hours just to condition. I had a 46 hour double truck the other night with 40 hours scheduled. That is stocking time only. Doesn't include conditioning, breaking down and spotting two trucks. Peyton and 01. Pluse I have to let vendors and employees in all night. Constantly answering the door bell. Then throw in the residual scans and sometimes lows and holes and ordering plus control v. One nght a week I have to do a frozen order. Plus the scans. People in my position in the division I work in are stepping down left and right. It's not sustainable. Mgmt are really stressed out due to the recent firings. I completly understand where they are coming from. I'm going to stick it out through the holidays but after that I'm going to look elwhere for employment. I just don't see things getting better. We have only been able to hire one person in my dept in 4 months. They lasted two weeks.
It won't get much better. You'll be stuck at minimum for several years. Work your @$$ off for nothing and have to deal with the b.s. that a grocery store throws at you. While it is a union security job you'll be treated like garbage half your career with little rights against people. Grocery jobs are not highly respected by society. I know a lot of people who can't work grocery because of food allergies. This company is incompetent compared to other companies I've worked for. Coworkers get away with bull sh*it and never get properly punished for it. If they punish they punish all wrong.
Say for example: my coworker at my current store realizes he can't be an @$$ hole to people any more and must reform his ways if he wants to keep his job. He's occasionally an @$$ hole to staff members as well. Well new management came and finally ended it. He finally got written up for it. He thinks he's totally innocent but after working with him for a year he's very abrasive towards customers, very discriminatory towards select individuals (some more than others) and I can see clearly now why he was written up.
It's getting worse and it's not going to ever get any better....
Ethics in this company are completely gone....we used to have the core values. When do we see any Honesty or Integrity anymore?
Some *shady* stuff has gone down lately.
I've been too afraid to pull the trigger on looking for another job but I know there's better options out there. I'm finally getting the courage to start looking and when i get a new job it's going to blindside them so hard because I don't think they have any idea. I'm almost afraid of what my department will look like when I'm gone.
ELMS is based on items sold, not always the amount of items coming from the warehouses. With schedules being made weeks ahead, there isn't a way to edit ELMS/Schedule to what is actually ordered. With Holiday selling trucks always get bigger due to increased ordering, but ELMS is using the last 10 week order average with scheduling.
ELMS is based on items sold, not always the amount of items coming from the warehouses. With schedules being made weeks ahead, there isn't a way to edit ELMS/Schedule to what is actually ordered. With Holiday selling trucks always get bigger due to increased ordering, but ELMS is using the last 10 week order average with scheduling.
This is a lie. When I worked as a department head I was told 4 different ways to increase elms, get my guys hours and get another guy.
I kept detailed spreadsheets and asked for "goals".
I achieved all of them and my elms dropped by 25% the next quarter. Elms has absolutely no basis and if you ask me it's set to decrease incrementally till they find that point just above breaking.
ELMS is based on items sold, not always the amount of items coming from the warehouses. With schedules being made weeks ahead, there isn't a way to edit ELMS/Schedule to what is actually ordered. With Holiday selling trucks always get bigger due to increased ordering, but ELMS is using the last 10 week order average with scheduling.
This is a lie. When I worked as a department head I was told 4 different ways to increase elms, get my guys hours and get another guy.
I kept detailed spreadsheets and asked for "goals".
I achieved all of them and my elms dropped by 25% the next quarter. Elms has absolutely no basis and if you ask me it's set to decrease incrementally till they find that point just above breaking.
I remember overhearing the floral manager having a "discussion" with an assistant store manager. The floral manager said she needed more hours the next week for Valentine's Day. The asst. manager said, "When you get the sales, you'll get the hours." The floral manager kept arguing that she needed the hours now in order to get the sales. "What good will the extra hours be after the holiday is over?" she kept asking.
It's the same way in the bakery department during Thanksgiving. It's a holiday week and half the staff has to have three days off. They also cut hours on top of that We all end up working overtime and our sales are usually the biggest for the year. The following week we get all these hours we can't use. Where's the logic in that?
Regardless I just don't have the staffing. Elms is one thing but I just don't have enough people to do the job. Sales could advance ten fold and we would have the same amount of people. It's a hiring issue.
Today i just got told i need to work my 1-9 every week. How, i'm not sure. I've been stuck on the bake shift for forever, i finally got someone else trained on it but still have to work at 4am on her days off. I have one person who can do midshifts, but then i have to work her two days off as well..... doesn't leave a whole lot of wiggle room for me but you know, why would i ever need a normal schedule?
This whole week i've just felt so burnt out and done. I don't feel like i've worked as hard this week as I have in the past, and i didn't stay on any overtime either.....
I want to have a better attitude because i want my department to succeed. I love seeing us do much better than we had in the past before i was there... but it's getting harder and harder to do because i feel like i'm on my own here half the time.
3 of my people including myself have been working 6 days for a month now. Our store does 1 mil a week, our front end have a total of 5 courtesy clerks, everyday customers complain thereare no carts in the store cause no one is available to get them
I'm almost afraid of what my department will look like when I'm gone.
Is it wrong of me to feel so strongly this way, too? My freezer was a mess when I transferred over, with markdowns and damaged/expired product being backed up literally months, and the palletized back-stock about the same. And now everything's caught up, it's all very organized, BOHs are in excellent shape, and I'm great at keeping it all that way. It feels a bit arrogant when the thought crosses my mind that "this department would go to **** without me"... but I feel that I know it's true. I hate working for this company so much, but do honestly take pride in the fact that I'm able to do these things so well. It's just too bad that 'these things' aren't what the company values or appreciates you excelling at, and they keep tacking on policies that work against what should matter. Freezer used to be such an easy department, too, it's frustrating.
After I quit full time, I came back for a few weekend shifts part time. I walk into the produce cooler to take stock, and I see stuff stacked the way I had left it two weeks prior all rotting in the boxes. After in done my 4 hour "shift", I tell them I've changed my mind and won't be coming back part time anymore. I'm not doing two weeks worth of work every Saturday from 6 to noon.
I just feel better when I know going into work that I'm going to have a chance of making my goals for the night. It's just hard when the stocking hours of the truck outnumber the hours you have because that is just the amount of people you have to do the job. 40 hours scheduled to a 46 hour truck. 46 hours is stocking time only. Add 10 hours for conditioning, 1 hour for pulling grocery truck. 1.5 hours for spotting truck. 1 hour breaking down Peyton and DPI. Another hour spotting Peyton. Turning off alarm. Answering door bell. Add everyone's breaks. Fast Alerts. Residual scans. Making a bail. Luckily we don't have to pull a perishable truck.
I'm new here. Just trying to get a concensus. Not sure how many dept heads are on here. The holidays are coming up fast and I feel like the demands from corporate are completly unreasonable. I work really hard. I'm doing 6 days and and at least 9 to 10 hours a day. Now it's becoming closer to 12 hours a day. The grocery trucks we get require more stocking time hours than I have scheduled. My store takes 7 to 9 hours just to condition. I had a 46 hour double truck the other night with 40 hours scheduled. That is stocking time only. Doesn't include conditioning, breaking down and spotting two trucks. Peyton and 01. Pluse I have to let vendors and employees in all night. Constantly answering the door bell. Then throw in the residual scans and sometimes lows and holes and ordering plus control v. One nght a week I have to do a frozen order. Plus the scans. People in my position in the division I work in are stepping down left and right. It's not sustainable. Mgmt are really stressed out due to the recent firings. I completly understand where they are coming from. I'm going to stick it out through the holidays but after that I'm going to look elwhere for employment. I just don't see things getting better. We have only been able to hire one person in my dept in 4 months. They lasted two weeks.
Exactly. You can't hire anyone because Kroger has an atrocious reputation for how it treats it's ppl, (long hours, nothing is good enough, expectations not reachable, (over-all very poor work environment - low pay, over time cuts, lack of appreciation, very long hours because not enough ppl ..) then management gets blamed for poor store conditions due to not having enough hands.. They wan't more out of ppl then is possible - expectations are not doable because not enough hands. ppl either leave or get fired because they can't do the work of 3 ppl. Turn over rate is seriously terrible. The brains at the top are responsible for this and it didn't happen over night - they earned this reputation that no one wants to work for:. Low pay, reduced overtime - yet want more out of workers who have to do the job of 3 ppl because - you can't hire but 1 person in 4 months - (See the cycle?)
I completely agree. I can't coach enough lol. How am I supposed to coach people when we don't have enough help. It does come from the top and they need to be held accountable just like they preach to us. It goes both ways. Give me the tools to do the job. If I get the tools and fail it's on me. I use the Dept Planner against them. This is the standards this company holds. Here is the math. You give me a 40 plus hour stocking time truck with 32 hours of help scheduled it's going to be a tough night. It actually takes 10 hours to condition the grocery dept. in my store. That doesn't include bread, dairy or frozen. Just dry grocery.
I completely agree. I can't coach enough lol. How am I supposed to coach people when we don't have enough help. It does come from the top and they need to be held accountable just like they preach to us. It goes both ways. Give me the tools to do the job. If I get the tools and fail it's on me. I use the Dept Planner against them. This is the standards this company holds. Here is the math. You give me a 40 plus hour stocking time truck with 32 hours of help scheduled it's going to be a tough night. It actually takes 10 hours to condition the grocery dept. in my store. That doesn't include bread, dairy or frozen. Just dry grocery.
Most people don't understand how to tell where the time goes. Some store managers think we come in at night and just run stock. And, goof off.
Yes, I have some very slow people on night crew (that are un coachable to speed up and management won't fire them because they need more coaching) but I can account for every minute of the shift for each person. Some people are incapable of moving fast and never will. There just isn't enough time to get everything done and finish what day crew didn't get done.
