I work at a grocery store (Smith's Marketplace) in Utah and we just recently got the program installed in our store. They are gradually adding it to more and more stores. Yes it is supposed to help save money by not hiring more workers, and we do need to cross train as many people in the store as possible. But I think it's working. We have to make sure that we get each and every costumer out of the check-stand within two-three minutes. 

It's just a way of making things more convenient for the public. :] That's how I see it.

Not sure where to start! I will start with that trust me I am not a huge fan of QVision, since it all falls on me when our score is not above the 85%. I am a CSM.

You all need to know what your talking about before you speak!

Do to union contracts only certain departments are allowed to be crossed train. I am not at all in approval of any of them being crossed train. They have their own responsibilities to worry about.

Another thing I've read was that someone mentioned its all about getting the customer out in 2-3 mins, sweety, that was the old way! Its more like 30 seconds or less! If you read the reports thats what it is all based on!

And last if you have good checkers with CCG scores above 95 you would not have to worry about calling the backend up and not have to worry about hiring extra people. This is one thing that I do approve, if a checker cannot maintain a 95 or better, bye bye! I do not care how long you have been with the company, alot of them go slow on purpose to throw off your numbers on Que-Vision!

You guys obviously dont know anything about the quevision of how hours are attained....no hours will be lost, when checklanes are opened...we the FE GAINS hours for the next week, so quit complaining and just go up there....the only way quevision wont work is if yall dont cooperate.

Here, Here! Exactly other depts. are hurting! In my store they expect me to send help back to the depts that helped up front or for me a csm running the front end to help them out near the end of the night!?

Hours? what are those? our store takes hours out of the front end and gives them to the lazy a_ _ night crew! these guys purposely work at whatever pace they want get tons and tons of OT and nothing ever said! I get out late because Im short handed up front and I get my a_ _ chewed out and written up?

Q-Vision- A BIG JOKE!

Just to let you know they are going forward with advertising the Q-Vision! One of my co-workers has been chosen to interview to be one of the spokespersons for a Q-Vision ad they are doing!@

^ I don't know, I'm just a lowly deli clerk, so I have little understanding of this from a managment-type perspective, and I'm sure you're right that it can be done properly (maybe at certain stores--customer volume isn't the same in every area...so that's a little assumptive), but the poor implementation of this at my store has personally caused me to have to stay longer just to get basic closing tasks done... Kroger doesn't want me staying until 11 when I'm supposed to get off at 10? Then they need to fix whatever the problem is. Maybe that means managers looking at more effective ways to schedule the shifts for people on the front end, or something, but it has to change. It's gotten better as of late. Slightly better.

One more complaint: they ran everybody in my store through cashier training four months ago, and they're expecting that everybody's retained all of that training information, which is, of course, a little naive. Half the people they're calling up there need assistance on how to work on the front end, so it's negating them being called up in the first place. This will change in time as more people get used to going up front and start getting some experience on that end of the store. It's just a little comical that they're not thinking, 'hey, why don't we call the person who actually has experience as a cashier instead of that dude from produce who doesn't know the first thing about a cash register?'

I have to agree with you on all of this......our store has been cutting hours and it's keeps getting worse every week. We have to use others from different departments and then they get behind. It's not fair to them to have to be pulled up front all day long. Our FES does a great job but it's not fair for her or our Office people to get blamed whenever this doesn't work. As I see it stop cutting hours and schedule front end help...One of the things Management doesn't get is if you only schedule a person 2 days a week then when you need help they expect these people to just drop everything and come running. Sorry it doesn't work that way....I'm not looking forward to this winter because when it snows in our town everyone comes into the store and buys enough for a week. Most of the time by 8:00 we have a u scan person and a lane person and a carry out if we're lucky! We have that even on the weekends. The office person ends up on lane and she gets out late. If they have the help things would run so much smoother! Q vision does not work with a skelton crew!!!!

As long as Wal-Mart has lower prices than Kroger, I will continue shopping at Wal-Mart.  If Kroger really wants to win this war over Wal-Mart, lower prices!  Until then, Wal-Mart has my business!!!

Ditto, I hate this system. Managers freaking out because of the Que vision and the 1+1 ideas they  have now.

 I work at SCO alot, and they want us to run 6 robots, plus pull people from express, help them all and run and grab some more people so our percents are up since we have a "quota" of customers we have to do every hour.

Heaven forbid someone may have to wait for a few minutes. We are dumbing down our customers by not letting them pick which line to be in because we may be out of queing.

I wish customers would refuse to move to another line and watch the que vision screens blow up!

 Corporate has no idea what it is really like on the floor.

I personally don't think any of you are giving it a chance to work.  Que Vision is a tool to help the store and front end run more efficiently.  As with any tool/resource, modifications need to occur.  There is NO perfect solution to make everything in the store run perfectly; but we can certainly strive to with the tool/resources developed.  Give it a chance!

Bull****.

The whole purpose of Que-Vision is to avoid hiring more cashiers, and to rob the current cashiers of hours for the purpose of keeping them part-time, and all at the expense of other departments.  Rather than hire or schedule cashiers for the busy times, they get to call the poor cross trained suckers from other departments, but it's ok because the Magic Balls tell them have to.  The Magic Balls legitimize the whole thing and divert blame wonderfully.

We've all given it a chance.

The response time is too slow to be useful.  Every late afternoon, we get "The Rush".  Lines back up to the aisles, and it's ok because Que-Vision says 333.  We call up the cross trained suckers from other departments, the rush dies down, and the cross trained stand around like idiots until the numbers change and they can do the work they are supposed to do.  For a while today, during a 666, all of us were standing at the front waiting for customers.

****, we'd even be better off recording statistics to generate an almanac that says how many lanes need to be open at what times.  Maybe then they could figure out it's ****ing busy in the late afternoon.  Maybe I could just make up some numbers and sell it to them for millions of dollars.  It couldn't be much worse than Que-Vision, and then we could repurpose all those tv's everywhere for showing Spongebob.  It would entertain cranky children and managers alike.  A win win situation.

I work at SCO alot, and they want us to run 6 robots, plus pull people from express, help them all and run and grab some more people so our percents are up since we have a "quota" of customers we have to do every hour.

Yep.  The best part is that I'm supposed to pull them out of line... to go stand in line for SCO.  Just like any other quota, it's set about 5-10% more than we have ever managed.  Or, at least when the office clown doesn't give us a printout of a broken spreadsheet.  The best part is when my manager bitches at me to get to get back to SCO when I try to pull customers out.

The thing is, RFID tech is still too expensive.  A barcode is half a drop of ink on a pre-existing label.  It's practically free.

RFID's are what, still 5 or 10 cents each these days?  Chris Hjelm isn't sure it will even work if they get down to a penny each, and states that vendor rollout will still take years and years anyways.

Figure a cashier makes $8 an hour.  Generous, but let's go with it.  That works out to about 13 cents a minute.  We're supposed to scan 35 items per minute.  Generous, but let's go with it.  Divide, that's about .4 cents to scan an item.  A slow cashier doubles it.  There's other costs, but that's still fairly cheap.

In the short term, the real threat is offloading the act of scanning a barcode to either machinery or the customer.  As far as I know, Kroger is still playing with a scanner/OCR tunnel called "Advantage Checkout".  No idea how that's going.

In my opinion, the bigger threat is the customer scanning their own stuff.  Self checkout as currently implemented is a pain for large orders.  Stop & Shop is playing with giving their customers scan guns to ring up their own items as they go.  It seems to be going pretty well.

And then, so what?  Cashiering for Kroger isn't even a real job.  Part time only minimum wage is really only be suitable for kids and burnouts.  It might even be good for us since it's an opportunity to go look for a better job.

Existing cashiers won't stock impulse items.  Whoever does that will keep doing it.  There will still be a need for warm bodies to supervise whatever system is in place since it will undoubtedly be implemented poorly and since customers are idiots.  It's just that we'll be scheduled 12 hour weeks until enough of us bail.

Milkmen and elevator operators probably had it worse.

I'd like some feedback on how this system is doing in high-volume stores- say $650,000 and up in sales without fuel or pharmacy. In our store, it has become a nightmare. Associates from other departments are called up all day, every day to help up front. It looks like there are not enough hours for the front end. In our store, it is almost impossible not to have a line, we are busy most of the time. Last Friday, when I came in at 11:00, there were 2 regular checkers, and one express, on a pre-football game day. Needless to say, we were called up front the entire day. Yesterday, I had 2 floral people (per e-scheduling, another joke) and they spent about 5 hours on the register. Our drug gm clerk spent 3 hours up front, and I don't know how many others. The morale is at an all-time low. We can't get our jobs done, or work a daily plan, because we have to constantly subsidize the front end. Clerks are being called up where there is only one or two working on that department, and being made to stay up front hours at a time, or even worse, every few minutes for a short time, then back again after 5 or 10 minutes. Some members of management are now saying that the budget is not correct, but no one has a clue what to do about it. Any comments out there from the big stores?

totally does not work for the other departments. 3 days in a row spent toal of 15 hours on front end instead of in nutrition where we all know there is usually only one person working. didn't get display compliance done, didn't get dairy worked, no frozen worked at all,and peyton tuck everywhere. was told does not matter what is on the floor que vision comes first.Back stock not shot in several days. Total joke of management skills and MICRO MANAGEMENT from corp.

flower child wrote:

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I'd like some feedback on how this system is doing in high-volume stores- say $650,000 and up in sales without fuel or pharmacy. In our store, it has become a nightmare. Associates from other departments are called up all day, every day to help up front. It looks like there are not enough hours for the front end. In our store, it is almost impossible not to have a line, we are busy most of the time. Last Friday, when I came in at 11:00, there were 2 regular checkers, and one express, on a pre-football game day. Needless to say, we were called up front the entire day. Yesterday, I had 2 floral people (per e-scheduling, another joke) and they spent about 5 hours on the register. Our drug gm clerk spent 3 hours up front, and I don't know how many others. The morale is at an all-time low. We can't get our jobs done, or work a daily plan, because we have to constantly subsidize the front end. Clerks are being called up where there is only one or two working on that department, and being made to stay up front hours at a time, or even worse, every few minutes for a short time, then back again after 5 or 10 minutes. Some members of management are now saying that the budget is not correct, but no one has a clue what to do about it. Any comments out there from the big stores?

-- Edited by flower child on Tuesday 18th of September 2012 04:43:58 AM

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 I use to work at a 750,000+ store (wo/ fuel and RX of course) and it was a nightmare. FES's were always on the register. That's not a hyperbole, pretty much the second we came in, until we clocked out we were on the register 90% of the time. And we were still calling for help a lot. Even SCO was too busy to help lighten the load. Every time our FEC mentioned getting the SCO Attendant to help with lines I laughed. It was pretty common for SCO to be full when the other registers started to backup. The Service Desk usually had 2 people working in the morning, but one of them was always on the register making it difficult for the Bookkeeper to get their work done.

Yes our Riing/Tender wasn't that great, but what do they expect? Half the cashiers are too old to move that fast, or too young to care. Sackers were always on the register leaving no baggers, and the lot often getting full with carts. Go-Backs were often overflowing. In other words I'm so gald I transfered to a mid-volume store. Quevision still sucks their, but it is a little bit better. But not much.

Management as the ability to adjust budget in your store.. If you are constantly beating budget then it needs to be adjusted so you get allotted the correct hours..