So I just got hired to do frozen foods manager and I thought I was going to have help other than me(silly me) its up to me to throw and sort all the cases, do the ordering, and mange the grocery part of the freezer. Does anyone have any tips? specifically I have a question for how long can my cases of frozen can be out on the sales floor before going bad? I wanna break down my pallets and throw them to the shelf but I dont wanna leave them out too long. Please any tips or advice is appreciated!!
Were you a Kroger employee before or did you get hired off the street?
There is a chart somewhere in the store showing allowed times at certain temps.
General rule for refrigerated items is that after 2 hours at room temp, it must be thrown away.
Frozen is different. 32 degrees is frozen. Most freezers are supposed to be around 0 degrees. Most food does not re freeze well. Once the temp hits 32 degrees, you probably need to scan it out and throw it away.
Search online for temp guidelines or ask a store manager.
There is nothing wrong with bringing a pallet out of the freezer, breaking it down and then putting everything back in the freezer. Take one cart at a time onto the floor and run it.
If you run stock directly off pallets, there should be a freezer blanket somewhere in your store for you to wrap around the pallets.
So I just got hired to do frozen foods manager and I thought I was going to have help other than me(silly me) its up to me to throw and sort all the cases, do the ordering, and mange the grocery part of the freezer. Does anyone have any tips? specifically I have a question for how long can my cases of frozen can be out on the sales floor before going bad? I wanna break down my pallets and throw them to the shelf but I dont wanna leave them out too long. Please any tips or advice is appreciated!!
I was a frozen lead for 5 years so maybe I can give you some useful advice. First off, Kroger uses a staffing system called ELMS which decides how many hours each department and subdepartment should need to complete the total task. The ASMs and store managers are required to follow this. High ups are on them constantly to follow this computer scheduling system. The problem with ELMS is it is a computer program that figures in a perfect world scenario. We all know that if it can go wrong it probably will. Elms does not figure in the time a customer approaches you and you take them halfway across the store to show them where something is at. ELMS does not figure in if you have a pallet turn over and you have to restack it to get the product out of the freezer. ELMS does not figure in if the grocery manager pulls you out of the department to throw a dry grocery aisle before working in your own department. ELMS also does not figure in if your coworker shows up 10 minutes late every night and likes to take 20 minute breaks and management decides to do nothing about it. I talked to a lot of frozen leads at different stores when I was doing this and they all said the same thing. Frozen is shorted hours necessary to get the job done the right way. Doesn't matter how fast you process, stock or condition, you are always going to be behind. If you try cutting your loads to catch up. some ASM or even the store manager will tell you not to do that, let it come in anyway. Your freezer can be stacked to the ceiling and you have to use a power jack to close the door and they still will not give you any help to get caught up. When I last worked there at the very end of 2019, they had me doing a lows and holes scan, a code date scan, a residual scan, and another scan that I can't remember the name for it. These scans have to be done every day, 7 days a week, so the 2 days a week you are off work, somebody has to do them for you. These scans take a lot of time and you have to be accurate with them for YOUR own good. Then you got to print out paperwork in some upstairs office, which is where ours was at, hope like hell the copy machine was working right or you had paper, then take that paperwork back down and hang it on some random wall where they wanted all this information posted. This had to be done daily. I would spend 15 minutes on some nights at the start of my shift looking around the store in all the hiding places just to find a freaking RF handheld because people would hide them and our store didn't have many to begin with. You absolutely cannot do this job if you do not have access to your own RF handheld for at least 3 hours of your shift. The RF will log you out if it is inactive for like 5 or 10 minutes, never more, so you are constantly logging back into the RF to scan your residual. This time is not figured into the ELMS hours, so more getting behind. Also, the high ups are real focused on you running your backstock daily in addition to throwing your load. This is impossible and it doesn't matter if you work in a small or big store. You simply do not have enough time to do it. I hid all my backstock U-boats deep in the back of the freezer and if asked just lied and said that I ran it and they never knew the difference. Then on the 1 night a week I worked and didn't get a load or had to do display changes, I would use that night to completely run all of my backstock and reorganize everything in the freezer, make sure all the numbers and signage was right, etc. I was so understaffed that I would pull the entire load out on the floor and break it down, leave about 3 U-boats of new load out on the floor and then push the rest back into the freezer. When I got that worked, I would pull a couple of more out. I would save all the conditioning till last. Save yourself about 1 hour to condition your entire department if you work in a big store. I worked in a high-end store so the conditioning had to be very tight every day. With the exception of ice cream related product, everything you stock can remain out on the salesfloor for several hours regardless of what anybody else tries to tell you. I never had anything returned by a customer saying that it tasted funny or made them sick and I would leave U-boats of frozen out on the salesfloor sometimes for 5 or 6 hours. I didn't do this out of meanness. I did it simply because every minute I spent going back and forth to the freezer is another minute I lost to get more stock put out. Of course, you cannot do this with ice cream. You got about 1 hour on it. We had a freezer entirely too small for storage, especially during the holidays. High ups don't care. They remodeled our entire store but left the freezer exactly the same. Our business went up at least 25% after the remodel, still the same size freezer. Nestle got cheap and decided to let Kroger stock their vendor items, so we got a buttload of new ice cream we now had to stock as well as Digiorno pizza which Kroger constantly puts on sale. There wasn't enough time to do what you had to do to begin with and then they added that and ELMS hours did NOT increase to compensate. I got a crap load of overtime, "stole" pretty much all of it, meaning I just worked it without asking my grocery manager or an ASM if I could do it. Depending on how much they depend upon you and how good you are, you may be able to get away with this. I never asked for it because once you ask and they say "no" then you can't do it or they can say you are being insubordinate. You will need to work overtime to stay on top of your job. There is no way around this. Get in good with your store manager and he/she will sometimes override a stingy ASM or grocery manager that says no overtime. Following the chain of command simply does not work in this company because everybody is out for themselves. This is the kind of stuff that you are going to end up having to deal with.
To make your nights go smother, I would recommend to process your pallets to U-boats. The old way we used to do it was to toss everything on the floor in stacks leaving enough room on the floor to open the doors. I got away from this because it keeps the floor guy pissed off and if for some reason you can't complete your load, you end up having to pick everything back up and rolling it back into the freezer anyway. If your store doesn't have enough free U-boats you may have to throw it on the floor anyway and screw the floor guy and what he thinks. Processing to pallets is a waste of time, you are double handling the product. Also, pulling the pallet around up and down aisles and stocking off of it is moronic because your freight will not be palletized by aisle and you will spend your whole night pulling heavy pallets from aisle to aisle. As the lead, I recommend you take the hardest aisle and put your coworker on the easier aisle. You will get more out of him/her if they think you are not trying to screw them. Nobody likes to stock ice cream so either you and your coworker can gang stock this aisle to try and get it done fast and over with or you yourself can just do it. My predecessor liked gang stocking the entire department so he could keep an eye on his coworker and bark orders at him all night. Personally, I liked working by myself so I would break off into aisles. You will know if your coworker is disappearing a lot. You are not going to get the best night worker to work with you if the grocery manager has anything to say about it. In my experience, the grocery manager always kept his best stockers in the dry grocery department and always put some weak link over there in frozen for the frozen guy to deal with. You really can't do anything about this unfortunately. Find a really good RF handheld and hide it on top of one of your freezers. Only do this if you guys are not signing out and in your handhelds. You don't have time to look for an RF every shift and it gets frustrating if you don't have one on hand when you need it. Always edit/view your order 100% of the time at a computer, adjusting as needed based on what you know you have. If you are adding to your order when scanning the department be careful not to add 11 cases instead of 1 case. Sometimes the keys stick on the RF handhelds. This is what edit/viewing your order does is you can fix any mistakes you may have made. Allow yourself at least 15 minutes to edit view your order being aware of your cutoff time. I got wrote up one time because a customer took an out of date item up to customer care and complained about it. It is impossible to do mark downs on load nights so what I started doing was if it was code dated I would pull it from the shelf, put it in a box and hide it in the freezer until I got an off load night to mark stuff down or to scan it out. Make sure you do not adjust your on hands on these items or it will get your numbers off. Good luck finding a mark down scanner in your store. My favorite thing about the job was changing out displays on Tuesday nights. Fortunately, that was an off load night in my store, so I had all night to focus on this. When I first started doing the job we had the freedom to build the displays according to our experience of what sold the best in our stores leaving only a couple of doors for their required displays. I had a mark down door and a couple of doors that I put old ad stuff on that didnt sell through and asked the file clerk to leave it on sale for another week. It was a great way to stay on top of your backstock. Unfortunately, corporate decided we were all too stupid to be thinking this much and came up with a pre-planned display sheet. I had 12 doors in my store but no bunker. District management required that 9 of those 12 doors be utilized with pre-planned display product which they started distributing to us. We used to have the freedom to order our display items in. At some point, they decided they wanted to take all the decision making out of the store level. This lead to way more backstock and nowhere to display it.
The worse thing about the job at the end was everybody was stressed out to the complete upper limits and it created a very toxic work environment. You either become an alcoholic or a pothead to cope or you have one hell of a tolerance for mental abuse, walked around frowning all the time, head down, arms moving fast. I chose to move on but the very best of luck to you. I wish you success.
So I just got hired to do frozen foods manager and I thought I was going to have help other than me(silly me) its up to me to throw and sort all the cases, do the ordering, and mange the grocery part of the freezer. Does anyone have any tips? specifically I have a question for how long can my cases of frozen can be out on the sales floor before going bad? I wanna break down my pallets and throw them to the shelf but I dont wanna leave them out too long. Please any tips or advice is appreciated!!
I was a frozen lead for 5 years so maybe I can give you some useful advice. First off, Kroger uses a staffing system called ELMS which decides how many hours each department and subdepartment should need to complete the total task. The ASMs and store managers are required to follow this. High ups are on them constantly to follow this computer scheduling system. The problem with ELMS is it is a computer program that figures in a perfect world scenario. We all know that if it can go wrong it probably will. Elms does not figure in the time a customer approaches you and you take them halfway across the store to show them where something is at. ELMS does not figure in if you have a pallet turn over and you have to restack it to get the product out of the freezer. ELMS does not figure in if the grocery manager pulls you out of the department to throw a dry grocery aisle before working in your own department. ELMS also does not figure in if your coworker shows up 10 minutes late every night and likes to take 20 minute breaks and management decides to do nothing about it. I talked to a lot of frozen leads at different stores when I was doing this and they all said the same thing. Frozen is shorted hours necessary to get the job done the right way. Doesn't matter how fast you process, stock or condition, you are always going to be behind. If you try cutting your loads to catch up. some ASM or even the store manager will tell you not to do that, let it come in anyway. Your freezer can be stacked to the ceiling and you have to use a power jack to close the door and they still will not give you any help to get caught up. When I last worked there at the very end of 2019, they had me doing a lows and holes scan, a code date scan, a residual scan, and another scan that I can't remember the name for it. These scans have to be done every day, 7 days a week, so the 2 days a week you are off work, somebody has to do them for you. These scans take a lot of time and you have to be accurate with them for YOUR own good. Then you got to print out paperwork in some upstairs office, which is where ours was at, hope like hell the copy machine was working right or you had paper, then take that paperwork back down and hang it on some random wall where they wanted all this information posted. This had to be done daily. I would spend 15 minutes on some nights at the start of my shift looking around the store in all the hiding places just to find a freaking RF handheld because people would hide them and our store didn't have many to begin with. You absolutely cannot do this job if you do not have access to your own RF handheld for at least 3 hours of your shift. The RF will log you out if it is inactive for like 5 or 10 minutes, never more, so you are constantly logging back into the RF to scan your residual. This time is not figured into the ELMS hours, so more getting behind. Also, the high ups are real focused on you running your backstock daily in addition to throwing your load. This is impossible and it doesn't matter if you work in a small or big store. You simply do not have enough time to do it. I hid all my backstock U-boats deep in the back of the freezer and if asked just lied and said that I ran it and they never knew the difference. Then on the 1 night a week I worked and didn't get a load or had to do display changes, I would use that night to completely run all of my backstock and reorganize everything in the freezer, make sure all the numbers and signage was right, etc. I was so understaffed that I would pull the entire load out on the floor and break it down, leave about 3 U-boats of new load out on the floor and then push the rest back into the freezer. When I got that worked, I would pull a couple of more out. I would save all the conditioning till last. Save yourself about 1 hour to condition your entire department if you work in a big store. I worked in a high-end store so the conditioning had to be very tight every day. With the exception of ice cream related product, everything you stock can remain out on the salesfloor for several hours regardless of what anybody else tries to tell you. I never had anything returned by a customer saying that it tasted funny or made them sick and I would leave U-boats of frozen out on the salesfloor sometimes for 5 or 6 hours. I didn't do this out of meanness. I did it simply because every minute I spent going back and forth to the freezer is another minute I lost to get more stock put out. Of course, you cannot do this with ice cream. You got about 1 hour on it. We had a freezer entirely too small for storage, especially during the holidays. High ups don't care. They remodeled our entire store but left the freezer exactly the same. Our business went up at least 25% after the remodel, still the same size freezer. Nestle got cheap and decided to let Kroger stock their vendor items, so we got a buttload of new ice cream we now had to stock as well as Digiorno pizza which Kroger constantly puts on sale. There wasn't enough time to do what you had to do to begin with and then they added that and ELMS hours did NOT increase to compensate. I got a crap load of overtime, "stole" pretty much all of it, meaning I just worked it without asking my grocery manager or an ASM if I could do it. Depending on how much they depend upon you and how good you are, you may be able to get away with this. I never asked for it because once you ask and they say "no" then you can't do it or they can say you are being insubordinate. You will need to work overtime to stay on top of your job. There is no way around this. Get in good with your store manager and he/she will sometimes override a stingy ASM or grocery manager that says no overtime. Following the chain of command simply does not work in this company because everybody is out for themselves. This is the kind of stuff that you are going to end up having to deal with.
To make your nights go smother, I would recommend to process your pallets to U-boats. The old way we used to do it was to toss everything on the floor in stacks leaving enough room on the floor to open the doors. I got away from this because it keeps the floor guy pissed off and if for some reason you can't complete your load, you end up having to pick everything back up and rolling it back into the freezer anyway. If your store doesn't have enough free U-boats you may have to throw it on the floor anyway and screw the floor guy and what he thinks. Processing to pallets is a waste of time, you are double handling the product. Also, pulling the pallet around up and down aisles and stocking off of it is moronic because your freight will not be palletized by aisle and you will spend your whole night pulling heavy pallets from aisle to aisle. As the lead, I recommend you take the hardest aisle and put your coworker on the easier aisle. You will get more out of him/her if they think you are not trying to screw them. Nobody likes to stock ice cream so either you and your coworker can gang stock this aisle to try and get it done fast and over with or you yourself can just do it. My predecessor liked gang stocking the entire department so he could keep an eye on his coworker and bark orders at him all night. Personally, I liked working by myself so I would break off into aisles. You will know if your coworker is disappearing a lot. You are not going to get the best night worker to work with you if the grocery manager has anything to say about it. In my experience, the grocery manager always kept his best stockers in the dry grocery department and always put some weak link over there in frozen for the frozen guy to deal with. You really can't do anything about this unfortunately. Find a really good RF handheld and hide it on top of one of your freezers. Only do this if you guys are not signing out and in your handhelds. You don't have time to look for an RF every shift and it gets frustrating if you don't have one on hand when you need it. Always edit/view your order 100% of the time at a computer, adjusting as needed based on what you know you have. If you are adding to your order when scanning the department be careful not to add 11 cases instead of 1 case. Sometimes the keys stick on the RF handhelds. This is what edit/viewing your order does is you can fix any mistakes you may have made. Allow yourself at least 15 minutes to edit view your order being aware of your cutoff time. I got wrote up one time because a customer took an out of date item up to customer care and complained about it. It is impossible to do mark downs on load nights so what I started doing was if it was code dated I would pull it from the shelf, put it in a box and hide it in the freezer until I got an off load night to mark stuff down or to scan it out. Make sure you do not adjust your on hands on these items or it will get your numbers off. Good luck finding a mark down scanner in your store. My favorite thing about the job was changing out displays on Tuesday nights. Fortunately, that was an off load night in my store, so I had all night to focus on this. When I first started doing the job we had the freedom to build the displays according to our experience of what sold the best in our stores leaving only a couple of doors for their required displays. I had a mark down door and a couple of doors that I put old ad stuff on that didnt sell through and asked the file clerk to leave it on sale for another week. It was a great way to stay on top of your backstock. Unfortunately, corporate decided we were all too stupid to be thinking this much and came up with a pre-planned display sheet. I had 12 doors in my store but no bunker. District management required that 9 of those 12 doors be utilized with pre-planned display product which they started distributing to us. We used to have the freedom to order our display items in. At some point, they decided they wanted to take all the decision making out of the store level. This lead to way more backstock and nowhere to display it.
The worse thing about the job at the end was everybody was stressed out to the complete upper limits and it created a very toxic work environment. You either become an alcoholic or a pothead to cope or you have one hell of a tolerance for mental abuse, walked around frowning all the time, head down, arms moving fast. I chose to move on but the very best of luck to you. I wish you success.
It seems like I read this several weeks ago, so maybe this is a repeat from the same employee (copy and paste) instead of re-writing the post again. In any case, I truly sympathize with all the problems you have endured with Kroger.
My take on this is that we can boil down most of the sources of these problems to these two main points:
1) Kroger Corporate is corrupt. The top head honchos of this company are corrupt. Much of the constantly changing rules and guidelines are instituted because of extreme greed for money, combined with abject ignorance on how a thriving, productive store should operate. Constantly increasing workload while AT THE SAME TIME reducing hours given to departments, and/or reducing the number of employees that can be utilized. A dead fish rots from the head down. The corruption of this company stems from the top.
2) ELMS is pure worthless GARBAGE!!!!! I hate it when any manager even tries to pretend that ELMS is good business practice. ELMS didn't "think up" the allotted / projected times on it's own. ELMS was PROGRAMMED BY HUMAN BEINGS who DO NOT KNOW WHAT THE HELL THEY WERE DOING!! They don't have a clue how much time it actually takes to do any job at Kroger. The whole program is total phony hogwash and should be abolished.
So I just got hired to do frozen foods manager and I thought I was going to have help other than me(silly me) its up to me to throw and sort all the cases, do the ordering, and mange the grocery part of the freezer. Does anyone have any tips? specifically I have a question for how long can my cases of frozen can be out on the sales floor before going bad? I wanna break down my pallets and throw them to the shelf but I dont wanna leave them out too long. Please any tips or advice is appreciated!!
I was a frozen lead for 5 years so maybe I can give you some useful advice. First off, Kroger uses a staffing system called ELMS which decides how many hours each department and subdepartment should need to complete the total task. The ASMs and store managers are required to follow this. High ups are on them constantly to follow this computer scheduling system. The problem with ELMS is it is a computer program that figures in a perfect world scenario. We all know that if it can go wrong it probably will. Elms does not figure in the time a customer approaches you and you take them halfway across the store to show them where something is at. ELMS does not figure in if you have a pallet turn over and you have to restack it to get the product out of the freezer. ELMS does not figure in if the grocery manager pulls you out of the department to throw a dry grocery aisle before working in your own department. ELMS also does not figure in if your coworker shows up 10 minutes late every night and likes to take 20 minute breaks and management decides to do nothing about it. I talked to a lot of frozen leads at different stores when I was doing this and they all said the same thing. Frozen is shorted hours necessary to get the job done the right way. Doesn't matter how fast you process, stock or condition, you are always going to be behind. If you try cutting your loads to catch up. some ASM or even the store manager will tell you not to do that, let it come in anyway. Your freezer can be stacked to the ceiling and you have to use a power jack to close the door and they still will not give you any help to get caught up. When I last worked there at the very end of 2019, they had me doing a lows and holes scan, a code date scan, a residual scan, and another scan that I can't remember the name for it. These scans have to be done every day, 7 days a week, so the 2 days a week you are off work, somebody has to do them for you. These scans take a lot of time and you have to be accurate with them for YOUR own good. Then you got to print out paperwork in some upstairs office, which is where ours was at, hope like hell the copy machine was working right or you had paper, then take that paperwork back down and hang it on some random wall where they wanted all this information posted. This had to be done daily. I would spend 15 minutes on some nights at the start of my shift looking around the store in all the hiding places just to find a freaking RF handheld because people would hide them and our store didn't have many to begin with. You absolutely cannot do this job if you do not have access to your own RF handheld for at least 3 hours of your shift. The RF will log you out if it is inactive for like 5 or 10 minutes, never more, so you are constantly logging back into the RF to scan your residual. This time is not figured into the ELMS hours, so more getting behind. Also, the high ups are real focused on you running your backstock daily in addition to throwing your load. This is impossible and it doesn't matter if you work in a small or big store. You simply do not have enough time to do it. I hid all my backstock U-boats deep in the back of the freezer and if asked just lied and said that I ran it and they never knew the difference. Then on the 1 night a week I worked and didn't get a load or had to do display changes, I would use that night to completely run all of my backstock and reorganize everything in the freezer, make sure all the numbers and signage was right, etc. I was so understaffed that I would pull the entire load out on the floor and break it down, leave about 3 U-boats of new load out on the floor and then push the rest back into the freezer. When I got that worked, I would pull a couple of more out. I would save all the conditioning till last. Save yourself about 1 hour to condition your entire department if you work in a big store. I worked in a high-end store so the conditioning had to be very tight every day. With the exception of ice cream related product, everything you stock can remain out on the salesfloor for several hours regardless of what anybody else tries to tell you. I never had anything returned by a customer saying that it tasted funny or made them sick and I would leave U-boats of frozen out on the salesfloor sometimes for 5 or 6 hours. I didn't do this out of meanness. I did it simply because every minute I spent going back and forth to the freezer is another minute I lost to get more stock put out. Of course, you cannot do this with ice cream. You got about 1 hour on it. We had a freezer entirely too small for storage, especially during the holidays. High ups don't care. They remodeled our entire store but left the freezer exactly the same. Our business went up at least 25% after the remodel, still the same size freezer. Nestle got cheap and decided to let Kroger stock their vendor items, so we got a buttload of new ice cream we now had to stock as well as Digiorno pizza which Kroger constantly puts on sale. There wasn't enough time to do what you had to do to begin with and then they added that and ELMS hours did NOT increase to compensate. I got a crap load of overtime, "stole" pretty much all of it, meaning I just worked it without asking my grocery manager or an ASM if I could do it. Depending on how much they depend upon you and how good you are, you may be able to get away with this. I never asked for it because once you ask and they say "no" then you can't do it or they can say you are being insubordinate. You will need to work overtime to stay on top of your job. There is no way around this. Get in good with your store manager and he/she will sometimes override a stingy ASM or grocery manager that says no overtime. Following the chain of command simply does not work in this company because everybody is out for themselves. This is the kind of stuff that you are going to end up having to deal with.
To make your nights go smother, I would recommend to process your pallets to U-boats. The old way we used to do it was to toss everything on the floor in stacks leaving enough room on the floor to open the doors. I got away from this because it keeps the floor guy pissed off and if for some reason you can't complete your load, you end up having to pick everything back up and rolling it back into the freezer anyway. If your store doesn't have enough free U-boats you may have to throw it on the floor anyway and screw the floor guy and what he thinks. Processing to pallets is a waste of time, you are double handling the product. Also, pulling the pallet around up and down aisles and stocking off of it is moronic because your freight will not be palletized by aisle and you will spend your whole night pulling heavy pallets from aisle to aisle. As the lead, I recommend you take the hardest aisle and put your coworker on the easier aisle. You will get more out of him/her if they think you are not trying to screw them. Nobody likes to stock ice cream so either you and your coworker can gang stock this aisle to try and get it done fast and over with or you yourself can just do it. My predecessor liked gang stocking the entire department so he could keep an eye on his coworker and bark orders at him all night. Personally, I liked working by myself so I would break off into aisles. You will know if your coworker is disappearing a lot. You are not going to get the best night worker to work with you if the grocery manager has anything to say about it. In my experience, the grocery manager always kept his best stockers in the dry grocery department and always put some weak link over there in frozen for the frozen guy to deal with. You really can't do anything about this unfortunately. Find a really good RF handheld and hide it on top of one of your freezers. Only do this if you guys are not signing out and in your handhelds. You don't have time to look for an RF every shift and it gets frustrating if you don't have one on hand when you need it. Always edit/view your order 100% of the time at a computer, adjusting as needed based on what you know you have. If you are adding to your order when scanning the department be careful not to add 11 cases instead of 1 case. Sometimes the keys stick on the RF handhelds. This is what edit/viewing your order does is you can fix any mistakes you may have made. Allow yourself at least 15 minutes to edit view your order being aware of your cutoff time. I got wrote up one time because a customer took an out of date item up to customer care and complained about it. It is impossible to do mark downs on load nights so what I started doing was if it was code dated I would pull it from the shelf, put it in a box and hide it in the freezer until I got an off load night to mark stuff down or to scan it out. Make sure you do not adjust your on hands on these items or it will get your numbers off. Good luck finding a mark down scanner in your store. My favorite thing about the job was changing out displays on Tuesday nights. Fortunately, that was an off load night in my store, so I had all night to focus on this. When I first started doing the job we had the freedom to build the displays according to our experience of what sold the best in our stores leaving only a couple of doors for their required displays. I had a mark down door and a couple of doors that I put old ad stuff on that didnt sell through and asked the file clerk to leave it on sale for another week. It was a great way to stay on top of your backstock. Unfortunately, corporate decided we were all too stupid to be thinking this much and came up with a pre-planned display sheet. I had 12 doors in my store but no bunker. District management required that 9 of those 12 doors be utilized with pre-planned display product which they started distributing to us. We used to have the freedom to order our display items in. At some point, they decided they wanted to take all the decision making out of the store level. This lead to way more backstock and nowhere to display it.
The worse thing about the job at the end was everybody was stressed out to the complete upper limits and it created a very toxic work environment. You either become an alcoholic or a pothead to cope or you have one hell of a tolerance for mental abuse, walked around frowning all the time, head down, arms moving fast. I chose to move on but the very best of luck to you. I wish you success.
It seems like I read this several weeks ago, so maybe this is a repeat from the same employee (copy and paste) instead of re-writing the post again. In any case, I truly sympathize with all the problems you have endured with Kroger.
My take on this is that we can boil down most of the sources of these problems to these two main points:
1) Kroger Corporate is corrupt. The top head honchos of this company are corrupt. Much of the constantly changing rules and guidelines are instituted because of extreme greed for money, combined with abject ignorance on how a thriving, productive store should operate. Constantly increasing workload while AT THE SAME TIME reducing hours given to departments, and/or reducing the number of employees that can be utilized. A dead fish rots from the head down. The corruption of this company stems from the top.
2) ELMS is pure worthless GARBAGE!!!!! I hate it when any manager even tries to pretend that ELMS is good business practice. ELMS didn't "think up" the allotted / projected times on it's own. ELMS was PROGRAMMED BY HUMAN BEINGS who DO NOT KNOW WHAT THE HELL THEY WERE DOING!! They don't have a clue how much time it actually takes to do any job at Kroger. The whole program is total phony hogwash and should be abolished.
This is the same guy that wrote this book above. Thanks for your comments. I chose to move on meaning I no longer work for the company. I completely agree with what you say about corporate greed and ELMS being worthless. I only typed all that because I would like to see somebody else not have to go through what I went through and maybe that can help them navigate it a little better. The job wouldn't be bad if they gave you enough help to get the job done. The high ups have their attention on a lot of different things (many things that are not even Kroger related) as I am sure most corporate offices do. They really need to give the stores more attention with their own eyes to see that none of this stuff works at the store level. That 2 time a year 5 minute store walk is completely worthless and a waste of company money. Rodney and the gang need to actually go inside a store in each division and work alongside staff for a few weeks to see how crazy things really are. Of course the mid-management will make sure things run smoothly so he never gets an accurate view of what it is like but it sure wouldn't hurt if they did this. There are too many things to list as to why Kroger is not a good company to work for but the main thing that set me off besides the impossible expectations was the store music. The same 40 songs, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Is it too much to ask for them to change the channel every 6 months? IMO, it would be much better if they did away with the music and all the Covid encouragement nonsense. All they are doing is driving their employees off, but maybe this is the plan. What I tell anybody that ask me is you can't make a career out of Kroger because they just don't want any more full timers and at some point you are going to get fed up with the crap and leave so why waste your time. Not to diss on anybody that is making Kroger a career but retail in general, at least the way it is run today, is not meant to be a career job for anybody. It use to not be this bad as I worked for Kroger back in the 90s and things were a lot different back then. But for those who enjoy it or don't feel like they have an out, I wish you the best.
