Recently, our department has gone from bad to worse, whereas most nights we used to have (at least) three people that would work evenings and get off at staggered times like 7,8 and 9 or 8,9 and 10.. lately, it has gone down to only two people to work from 4pm to close. A lot of people have quit or have transfered departments or stores. They even kicked out two people and sent them up front to the registers and NONE of these people have been replaced. On top of that, last week I was scheduled 38 hours, most everyone else got 30+ hours, this week we are all down below 25 hours, yet there are no new hires. Why would they cut our hours when we are already understaffed? After watching all those Fresh and Friendly videos where they stressed how important it is that Produce look amazing, why do they refuse to properly staff it so that their expectations can be realized? Instead they expect 2 of us to work harder (for **** pay) and get berated by the managers for the department looking like ****. Meanwhile, the other departments have way more staff and seemingly the staff each have less individual responsibilities and stress. I mean I see like a lot more people in the deli. What motivation do I have to stay in Produce when I could be having less stress in another department?
One day I came in and saw a note on the dry erase board threatening write ups if all the nightly cleaning (trash, rpcs, etc) wasn't completed. Angry and frustrated, I wrote this response merely to clear my head of the stress building inside. I figured it would help to write out my thoughts even though I never planned to give or read the letter to anyone in management because I know the REAL solution is for me to find another employer. In the meantime, I am still here and things have gotten even worse in the two weeks since I wrote this. I decided to share it here to get some thoughts, empathy, perspective, advice...
In theory, your expectations are reasonable, however, I feel your are unaware of what happens in the evenings when you are not here yourself. In addition to the trash and rpc's, we have to worry about...
- the salad bar (tear down at 7, often doing that and blue line combined can take up over an hour)
-nature's market (wheeling that milk truck out there and restocking takes a bit of time)
-finishing the truck (which may have come late)
-doing dishes (both from closing the salad bar, cut fruit and the half full containers of bean dip left from salad bar from the morning set up)
as well as...
-helping any customers that require assistance
-requests from management to do something we did not previously alott time for...
-having to go blow up balloons in floral (which always happens on the worst possible days).
-conditioning (salad wall is always wrecked)
Frequently when coming in to close, I am confronted by a tower of rpc's taller than my head, trash that clearly has not been taken out all day, blue carts full of garbage and things that do not need to go out on the floor. Often the floor has several carts and boxes left there, something we, as closers, can NEVER do despite needing to clock out and not having the luxury of staying late even if we wanted to.
If towards the end of the early shifts, if everyone could pitch in and perhaps do a garbage or rpc run, empty the blue carts of trash, do the salad bar dishes in that last 30 mins of time before people leave instead of just counting down the minutes in the hallway. If someone could just take the trash out earlier in the day, then it wouldn't take literally 30-45+ minutes to do at night, hence meaning we will have less time to go to nature's market or whatever else needs attention.
Personally, I don't care what other people do, but it's not fair to threaten write ups on the closers. The last people to leave will be the ones written up first, not someone that came in the morning and gets to leave trash on their carts and not so much as consider doing dishes or a trash/rpc run. Basically, they can leave the place however they do and the only thing you will see in the morning is that something isn't done and "why didn't the CLOSERS do it?" You won't see what we walked into, that we were expected to deal with both day and night's trash and dishes. You won't see us blowing up balloons in floral, there is always someone there until 5pm so it's not something that probably even gets factored into our time to accomplish everything. If something doesn't get done, it won't be the person that could have did it at 3pm, but didn't, it will be the last two people to leave that ran out of time.
I feel like I'm being set up to fail.
You need to talk to everyone face to face instead of posting intimidating threats with vague explanations of how they will be distributed.
I'm fine with being written up for when I screw up legitimately, but this sounds like either it's everyone gets punished for something that was really only one or two people's failures or the last people here will bear the brunt of the blame for everything that didn't get done by everyone.
Geez! And I thought I was the only one!!! Thankfully, no salad bar anymore. Glad they did away with it...The more extras you have, the more people you need to hire, or the more hours you have to give the existing skeleton crew...If more people did the math on this stuff, they would see that the numbers just do not add up...There's a difference between reasonable and unreasonable expectations. I have a work ethic, and do MY part...don't get me wrong...but just like Wal-Mart, you see more show, more money spent to make the building look better, but well-staffed it ain't! Why, for instance, do you NEED 30 registers, when half the time I go in there, only 3 are really open??? And people wonder why things are the way they are...
By the way, night crew vs. morning crew has been a battle that's been going on forever, and I doubt it will end any time soon, and you see that everywhere...
of course, I do understand that... it's been like that in many jobs I've worked. But the major difference in this scenario is, night crew is completely understaffed. we have 2 people, they have at least 4 or 5. and if THEY can't get everything done (lazy or just not enough time) with 75% more staff than we have, then how the hell are WE expected to get everything done with just 2 of us?
We have people in the bakery that take 8 hours just to do their bake and don't do anything else to help out, but god forbid you don't clean the floors one night. Nevermind the fact that you had 4 hours to get your work done as well as cleaning up everyone else's mess.
We have people in the bakery that take 8 hours just to do their bake and don't do anything else to help out, but god forbid you don't clean the floors one night. Nevermind the fact that you had 4 hours to get your work done as well as cleaning up everyone else's mess.
That must be an awfully huge bake if it takes them 8 hours to do it. Do they have to bag it too? Because that might explain it. How many trays do you use for the breakout? On light days we have about 15 trays of bread dough to work. On heavy days it's about 20. It usually takes me about 6 1/2 hours to get it all baked. With the time I have left, I have to break down the frozen order, run the useless CAP report, and do the breakout.
The worst part is (yes, there is a worst part) we're in the middle of a remodel and the bakery department doesn't have a freezer. We had a nice big freezer but it's being used as a produce cooler, and it's going to be that way for several weeks until produce gets its own cooler. In the meantime, all our stuff is in the back grocery freezer all the way on the other side of the store, which is over 30 aisles away. Everything has to be loaded on to brown and/or green trucks and wheeled back and forth. Each trip back and forth takes six minutes. I now spend a good part of my day walking from one side of the store to the other.
We have people in the bakery that take 8 hours just to do their bake and don't do anything else to help out, but god forbid you don't clean the floors one night. Nevermind the fact that you had 4 hours to get your work done as well as cleaning up everyone else's mess.
That must be an awfully huge bake if it takes them 8 hours to do it. Do they have to bag it too? Because that might explain it. How many trays do you use for the breakout? On light days we have about 15 trays of bread dough to work. On heavy days it's about 20. It usually takes me about 6 1/2 hours to get it all baked. With the time I have left, I have to break down the frozen order, run the useless CAP report, and do the breakout.
The worst part is (yes, there is a worst part) we're in the middle of a remodel and the bakery department doesn't have a freezer. We had a nice big freezer but it's being used as a produce cooler, and it's going to be that way for several weeks until produce gets its own cooler. In the meantime, all our stuff is in the back grocery freezer all the way on the other side of the store, which is over 30 aisles away. Everything has to be loaded on to brown and/or green trucks and wheeled back and forth. Each trip back and forth takes six minutes. I now spend a good part of my day walking from one side of the store to the other.
They are supposed to bag and label the breads too, yes.
We usually have 2 trolleys worth of the dinner rolls, cinnamon rolls, etc. and 1 trolley for bread and bagels.
Then there's 1 trolley for donuts, and one for pies.
The bakers in my store never do breakout, as breakout is the job of the closer to do (guess who gets to be the breakout queen).
And yes CAP is useless. It tells us to bake WAY too much stuff that just gets marked down.
Really depends how slow and useless your morning crew is...if they dont set you up for just topping things off and customer service..it wont work.
Exactly. The busiest times at the store are the late afternoon and evening -- NOT 10 f*king AM. So I think Kroger should allot some hours for customer service for the closers.
first off, insist at least some people up front can do balloons.
second, they tried to pull this crap up front at my store.
somehow we're supposed to make sure the lot is clear, the go backs are done, the damage cart is done, the trash is done, customers are helped, the desk is closed, plus count and rebuild all the tills in an hour. sorry, i can't be ten places at once. they're trying to add deep cleaning the restrooms too so the morning utility doesn't have to do it.
if you've got people who will stand around and do nothing then why are they still employed? why is it my job to see other people get their stuff done? i've got my own stuff to get done. hold them accountable thank you.
and what i love is those setting the expectations never put themselves in that position.
so they don't know how unreasonable it is. we as closers keep asking ourselves what the hell did they do all morning?
we end up disappearing off the floor so we can count tills early and then get paged to help customers.
Recently, our department has gone from bad to worse, whereas most nights we used to have (at least) three people that would work evenings and get off at staggered times like 7,8 and 9 or 8,9 and 10.. lately, it has gone down to only two people to work from 4pm to close. A lot of people have quit or have transfered departments or stores. They even kicked out two people and sent them up front to the registers and NONE of these people have been replaced. On top of that, last week I was scheduled 38 hours, most everyone else got 30+ hours, this week we are all down below 25 hours, yet there are no new hires. Why would they cut our hours when we are already understaffed? After watching all those Fresh and Friendly videos where they stressed how important it is that Produce look amazing, why do they refuse to properly staff it so that their expectations can be realized? Instead they expect 2 of us to work harder (for **** pay) and get berated by the managers for the department looking like ****. Meanwhile, the other departments have way more staff and seemingly the staff each have less individual responsibilities and stress. I mean I see like a lot more people in the deli. What motivation do I have to stay in Produce when I could be having less stress in another department?
