on a daily basis

on a normal day take tuesday for example, me and boss lady enter shop 22 (and commence the deep breathing excersises that prevent us from axe murdering random people.) and begin the day.
assuming the previos day went ok it starts like this open tills, print off emails, find out how many pallets are due on delivery (but take this information with a pinch of salt as it has been written by a bloke with less brains than an amoeba!) proceed up stairs and start the paperwork which is basically what we took the previois day and other numbers divided between each other over and over on a rianforests worth of paper...
and we go down stairs and thats when the real fun begins!
now to give you a clue about the timetable we have to work with,
9am           10am           11am          12pm           1pm         2pm        3pm          4pm         5pm           6pm
open            tea                    [lunch]         [lunch]      [lunch]              tea [     tidy shop     ] close           run
                  breaks                                                                       breaks                                        screaming
                                                                                                                                                    from the
                                                                                                                                                    building!

delivery is nornmally due at 11 so before that we have to...                                                            

• damages - any thing returned worn, anything unwearable and broken crockery has to be listed on to a sheet and put through till. 
• best sellers - a list is sent down every day of things that need best seller POS on, this changes daily but certain items which head office feel arent selling well need to be moved to a more prominent position which in doing so cocks up the "visual merchandising" 
• clear the back alley where the delivery goes, this alley is just over 1.5 meters wide and 8ft in height and the pallets are over 6ft tall sometimes so what doesn't fit down the alley has to be carried up the fire exit up the side of the shop and onto the upstairs sales floor, where it will sit for sometime as we haven't got enough staff to get up there and sort it out!!!

• finally clear what is left of the previous delivery...

 so delivery arrives and it has to be got in off the pallets and stacked down the alley quiete literally to the rafters!
then it has be checked off agaisnt  the invoice we are told not to do this but then you are trusting that the idiots at the warehouse have picked it properly etc yeah right like we going to do that!!
so its all checked off and lo and behold the invoice says two boxes of jog pants and we have recieved three!!!
so discrepancies have to be put through till and the delivery then has to be hung on the relevant hangers etc
and put out of course according to the visual merchandising guidelines (see other post)
at three we all down tools and begin tidying ready for next day
while doing this we are constantly fielding phone calls from customers, other shops, head office and AM
at 4.50 out comes the hoover we arent supposed to hoover when the shop is open but we are f the view that we have homes to go to and lives to lead so the hoovering is done while shop is open
while hoovering we look for chewing gum, i watch those shows about street cleaners getting stressy about chewing gum on the streets while they pressure wash it away, well we have a white lino floor (go on laugh, we did!) and chewing gum is a bastard  to remove without a pressure washer!!!

and finally at half five the doors close some customers we literally have to kick out of the door! oh what i would do for a cattle prod!!!

last year on boxing day no less i had a family of... "individuals who dont celebrate xmas" if you know what i mean who wheni was trying to lock up at 5 asked "what you not open til 7? i tell ya it was all i could do to restrain myself from throttling him!!! in the event i said "no sir im afraid we are restricted by the Sunday trading laws and we have homes to go to...bye" and i kicked him out the door!!!

area managers

our old area manager was lovely, she had a wicked sense of humour for a start! she would come in give boss a list of things to do and then roll her sleeves up and help us do some of it, she left the company a couple of years ago, and i didnt blame her, her days off werent really her own as she was on call 24/7, so next we had another she wasnt too bad she would muck in as much but she was ok recently all the area changed and the new one is well you can injsert your own adjective here ________. she breezes in doesnt say hello, doesnt even make eyecontact with any of us lowly workers, give boss lady a list a mile long and expects it to be done in 24 hours even if that means moving the entire shop around!!! the last time she wanted the shop "flipped" it was ladies at front, then boys and girls at back. post flipping it was ladies on one side girls on other and boys at back, it meant the entire shop, every single item had to be moved, AM rang the next day and asked if it was done yet! i picked up the phone and when i said no, well there were things said lets put it that way.

shoplifters

we get some seriously crafty customers in shop 22, they are constantly coming up with new schemes.
but then again head office doesn't help matters, we are currently running on Minimum staff which is two people in the morning and three in the afternoon to help clear up for next day, and the shop-lifters know this they know which shops are vulnerable and where. i recently picked up a dressing gown to take to the till to price check it and found 15 hangers hidden within... shoplifters!!!! our CCTV broke two years ago and i know of at least three occasions when criminals have got away with it because the cameras weren't working!!!
we are a two floor store, when i stated at shop 22 if you were upstairs i.e. on the till, hanging stock, helping customers getting through the delivery etc, it was drummed into me,
"you DO NOT leave this shop floor unattended at any time, if you need bathroom call and ask for someone to take over for a minute"
now we are lucky if someone is up there once a week! and head office wonder why our stock take result is bad, well a clue might be that most of the stolen stuff is from upstairs!

customers!

we shouldnt but in our shop we adhere to the philosophy, "all customers are idiots"
this applies to most customers with a few exceptions
we have a policy of when someone tries on a skirt for example and breaks the zip because they have been a little over ambitious about their size, we have to reduce it by 25%, for two weeks then 50% for another two then 75% and if it still hasn't gone it is hidden fora while in the dark recesses of the stock room and bought back out again and we go through the process again. this is head offices policy not ours if we had our way it would go in the bin but because head office (which i am convinced is run by men!) wants to make a quid for it but they dont realise that to replace a zip its costs anything up to £10! utterly pointless!!!
And then we get the hagglers who try to barter with us over the price and not necessarily on damaged items it can be any thing! or of course the customers who take an item into the changing room, try it on and proceed to either get make up on it or (because they smell like they have bathed in thier perfume) get thier own personal odour on it, take the item off hangit back up and go get another "clean" one" infuriating!!!

"visual merchandising" ha!!!

The Boss lady of shop 22 has recently come back from a visual mercandising workshop called "vision 4" this comes after visions 1,2 + 3! these work shops are where the people from head office tell us where they moved to goal posts to!!
We are issued with visual merchandising guidelines for the working of the shop, and all items of clothing are meant to have on the label which "story" they are in... and then we refer to the guidelines to see where to put them but in most cases at the moment either the "story" isn't in the guidelines or the item isn't so we are supposed to guess!!! but if we get it wrong we are berated with an imaginary horsewhip for not using the psychic powers they think we are endowed with when we finish our training!!!!