As I am only too miserably aware of what an abominous cluster fk MY company and store has been, throughout this thing we call the holidays, I was wondering what some of your stories and experiences are. The biggest bitch I have is how we are no longer able to call distribution and stop or even slow the amount of freight coming in. Wish I could post some pictures of my grocery back room........And then there's all the end-of-the-world zombie apocalypse customers to deal with; they are LEGION.
It would unbelievable hell at my store today and it will keep up until Wednesday too. I ended up working a mid shift and the moment I came in it was to the freezer for turkeys. They had blocked off my pallets with 3 pallets of bakery. It took me an hour to sort my pallets out and put them outside to move everything back in and leave my turkeys out. I ended up filling the bunker above the load limit, because the turkeys were moving fast. I focused on the meat counter and got that filled up real quick and all the chicken and half of the pork was put out. Once we're out of chicken i'm going to fill it up with fresh turkeys. We currently have 4 pallets of fresh turkeys with very limited room.
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My Views and Opinions do not reflect that of the Kroger company. I'm an indivdual expressing my 1st amendment right.
17 stacks of Kroger brand dinner rolls. 1 stack of kroger band hawaiian and whole wheat dinner rolls. 2 stacks of brown and serve rolls. 3 stacks of buttermilk and regular flake rolls. All destro'd.
It's a nightmare.
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Would you like fries with th... I mean, your milk in a bag?
At least Kroger won't be as hellish as last year...or at least, I hope they learned their lesson from last year! Last year they had these bonus points that you got throughout the year and then you could spend them for stuff. Well some people got 300+ (the most I saw was a customer with 700.) Our store was picked clean by these people, all for free. Towards the end of it, people who had waited until the last minute to redeem their points were getting into fights over stuff like paper shredders, because there was nothing left, and customers were lining up at the back dock doors to wait for people to come out with stuff so they could grab it.
I don't work on the floor anymore, thank God. But I went into the back yesterday and it was a cluster fluck. It has never helped that Pepsi has taken over a ton of space back there. They're still under-staffed, everyone looks tired and angry - including the co-managers. Customers are rude, hateful and demanding.
I work overnight grocery stock and if I didnt have bills to pay I would walk out. My issues with company are:
- overtime( I dont want it yet we have so much crap to stock and not enough help so we get punished by working over)
- the store always being a damn mess but its expected since its the holidays but still its aggravating.
- co workers bitching about I gotta be home at this time and im not doing this or that and i just wanna say stfu, suck it up and stock this crap.
- backstock, you can run and scan your carts but its all for nothing because they keep filling up and its pointless. Got too much to do and backstock shouldn't be one of them.
- Not being able to do anything, kroger expects you to give up your life for them and quite frankly im sick of it. Can't sleep, stressed out, tired of picking up peoples slack and sick of call offs. Also, unloading trucks....crap not stacked properly, cleaning up messes, ughhh. So that ends my rant, happy thanksgiving everyone if you can enjoy yours!
What's bad is having all the Christmas stuff come in the week before Thanksgiving and a deli manager who keeps ordering more and more stuff, even though the stuff that we already have is just sitting in the freezer. It's fine if you're putting it out and it's selling, but it's just accumulating.
Yesterday, I had a fairly large bake but I could only bake one channel cart at time because the deli was using one side of the oven to cook turkeys. I had to put away the fresh chicken order. I had to put away the frozen food order. I had to do the breakout for the next day's bake. We also had an order for 25 dozen mixed donuts due out the next day. So I had to prep that. The bread bagger was only scheduled to work 5 hours and because I couldn't get the bread baked fast enough due to those stupid turkeys, someone else had to finish bagging the bread. To top it all off, the deli manager asks why I didn't bake any croissants. I was so tempted to ask, "Well, what have you been doing?"
Really, this holiday for my store seems to be going fairly smoothly without too much issue, outside of space in the freezer and meat cooler. I would have to say this year so far has been one of the easiest years in a while for me, especially in the market. All items outside of Simple Truth turkeys coming in with tags and ring correctly up front, all shipments are being sent with minimum scratches, no TXU coupons for a free ham 9lbs or less and all the hams we get in are 10lbs+. Yeah, this year is actually kind of great compared to most others I have had to deal with. Still though, gobble gobble.
At least Kroger won't be as hellish as last year...or at least, I hope they learned their lesson from last year! Last year they had these bonus points that you got throughout the year and then you could spend them for stuff. Well some people got 300+ (the most I saw was a customer with 700.) Our store was picked clean by these people, all for free. Towards the end of it, people who had waited until the last minute to redeem their points were getting into fights over stuff like paper shredders, because there was nothing left, and customers were lining up at the back dock doors to wait for people to come out with stuff so they could grab it.
Why did they give away stuff for free? Our Kroger didn't.
At least Kroger won't be as hellish as last year...or at least, I hope they learned their lesson from last year! Last year they had these bonus points that you got throughout the year and then you could spend them for stuff. Well some people got 300+ (the most I saw was a customer with 700.) Our store was picked clean by these people, all for free. Towards the end of it, people who had waited until the last minute to redeem their points were getting into fights over stuff like paper shredders, because there was nothing left, and customers were lining up at the back dock doors to wait for people to come out with stuff so they could grab it.
Why did they give away stuff for free? Our Kroger didn't.
it was some sort of points rewards system, and i think it was just for marketplaces. At least thats what some customers told me . . . "you don't have anything left?! I drove in from out of state because you were the closest marketplace!" Yeah well if it meant that much to you you shouldn't have waited until day 4 to drive in. anyway, each point was worth $1, so if you had 100 points you could get 100 dollars of free stuff. (Not food though, just kitchen appliances, furniture, vacuums, ect.) You can see more about it here: http://www.10tv.com/content/stories/2011/12/05/columbus-kroger-deals-anger-shoppers.html
This was Sunday night (5pm) at the local Kroger. Whar replenishment clerks? WHAR?
Seriously, this place was a disaster. Meat case empty, shelves blown. And I'm grinning like a mofo because it's not my problem! I'm so glad I don't have to deal with the holiday crap like this anymore. Truckers are much easier customers.
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My views don't reflect those of anyone, not even me. I may not have even made this statement. It's all lies, all of it!
Ahhh my first holiday NOT at Kroger (well, FredMeyer!)! Im so glad I dont have to hear a freakin' blowtorch going all damn day long to glaze the Flame-Crafted hams, and don't even have to deal with turkey questions! Since im at Whole Foods now, the store I'm at is a very busy one, and it has a completely separate Seafood department. Meat is completely outside my responsibilities. Not that I minded ever, but especially when holidays come around theres plenty of stuff to attend to in Seafood, but you get stuck helping sell hams and turkeys and whatnot. Nice not to have to do it!
My last year at Freddie's was rather nice though, since I worked at a "special" store with excessive staffing, so I didnt have the usual issues of no extra help and 3x the volume. In fact it went super smooth, and was pretty cool to help the store achieve some unheard of results.
As for Whole Foods, we havent had any holiday issues, except that since im not the boss anymore (low man on totem pole!) I have to work tomorrow!!! 5:30am-11am, at least. Not too bad. I do get time and a half at least. One gripe I do have is that we dont sell shrimp rings! We actually thaw out some cooked shrimp and piece a platter together, or toss it in a clamshell with some lemon wedges and a little cup of ****tail sauce. It's good quality stuff but a bit ridiculous when just having it premade wouldn't really affect the quality any.
Also nice that i'm not in charge for once, so I get to just show up and work my shift and go home. Kroger doesn't appreciate their department managers anyway, so always giving 110% and not getting a thing for it starts to wear away at you. Hopefully I can return to that sometime but i'm cool to just relax a bit for a while :)
Whar replenishment clerks? WHAR?
