What's it like being the mgr of the overnight stock crew at Kroger? I'm thinking about jumping ship. Can anyone fill me in on the nightly responsibilities, what it takes to run a good crew, average pay, etc. Thanks.
Depends on your contract for the pay. All of the contracts I've seen have fallen in the range of 18-19$ an hour. You will technically be over all of the grocery subdepartments, dairy, frozen, & nutrition, but shouldn't have to have much influence on those. Depending if your store does enough sales for a lead nutrition, you may be responsible for the ordering & display compliance of that department. Your main day to day tasks will be dry grocery.
You are not exempt from regular duties, as they don't give you enough hours to just "manage". You'll likely need to be break down the load, stock an aisle, or something else in addition to your managerial duties. You are to keep all displays to compliance. Keep the backroom orderly and inventory under control. Inventory control is one of the biggest things that is difficult about running a department, especially one as large as grocery. CAO can only do so much, so you have to make sure you are dealing with all excess stock as you see fit, be it marking it down or finding store choice areas to get through it. Ordering is the key to success. You need to be on top of each and every order taking all the time allotted to make sure a good order goes off. Again, CAO is not perfect and you'll need to add/remove as necessary. You will be getting a ton of shippers/distributions and you'll need to make sure you pull that sheet and keep up with them so you don't order product that is coming in if you don't need extra. Maintaining good minimums on products to ease the amount of work you have to do on the computer/out on the floor is necessary as well.
In terms of the "management" of people. Your crew will probably be anywhere between 4-10+ people depending on the size & volume of your store. A huge key to success is having a solid backup. You need to know that this person can maintain the department on your off days/vacation time, it's far too large to have to fix everything every time you come in. Train them well to do things how you want them done, so they are an extension of you essentially. Make them understand why you make the decisions you make, so they can use that information to make the same decisions given the same information. You are the schedule writer, so make sure you keep up with future situations so you can schedule accordingly. You may have to deal with store problems once the regular management has left, customers, scam attempts, theft, etc. So make sure you know company policy.
Your regular crew will most likely be very diversified in terms of work ethic/ability. You will have to deal with tight hours. It's not easy to get all of the work done with the time allowed, and you need to make sure your people are doing what they need to be doing. It's overnight, so some may have a second job, and come into this one tired. You need to make sure they are working, they simply don't give the hours to allow too many slackers. Just like with anything in life, routine is the key to increased productivity. So if at all possible, have each person assigned areas/tasks, so they can walk right in and know what to do. You will have to deal with random call ins, so make sure you have a backup plan. Hopefully you are staffed with part timers that can cover, if not then you will have to prioritize the nights tasks since you won't have the time to get them all completed. Most of all, make sure the workers are appreciated. It's not easy to do graveyard for the vast majority of people, it turns your life upside down. So be understanding, within reason when situations arise, and be appreciative when they do well. The more they feel appreciated, the more they are likely to want to do for you.
In addition to communicating with your store management, you'll need to be communicating with your district coordinator over your department. Usually weekly conference calls, occasional visits, and meetings in the day time several times a year at various stores in your general vicinity for standards walks etc.
-- Edited by DeltaGrocery on Friday 14th of August 2015 02:36:00 PM
depends on your contract with Kroger? You mean the wage i negotiate with HR? At Target we have a backroom team of about 4 people that handles all the overstock each night, scans it, and organizes it to the back storage area as well as a replenisher team of about 4 team members during the day and evenings to work "pulls." The " flow team" or overnight stock crew consists of 20-25 people with a team leader as well as an "Executive" team leader there to manage the crew each night. Wow, It seems at Kroger that way too much is put on your skeleton crew of a flow team. How do y'all get it done with just 4-10 people? Are the Krogers in your area really tiny? Jesus! All the Krogers in my area are huge and as big as if not bigger than the SuperTargets. lol
depends on your contract with Kroger? You mean the wage i negotiate with HR? At Target we have a backroom team of about 4 people that handles all the overstock each night, scans it, and organizes it to the back storage area as well as a replenisher team of about 4 team members during the day and evenings to work "pulls." The " flow team" or overnight stock crew consists of 20-25 people with a team leader as well as an "Executive" team leader there to manage the crew each night. Wow, It seems at Kroger that way too much is put on your skeleton crew of a flow team. How do y'all get it done with just 4-10 people? Are the Krogers in your area really tiny? Jesus! All the Krogers in my area are huge and as big as if not bigger than the SuperTargets. lol
Kroger is union. He is talking about the union contract. They have a set starting rate, and set raises, vacation, etc.
depends on your contract with Kroger? You mean the wage i negotiate with HR? At Target we have a backroom team of about 4 people that handles all the overstock each night, scans it, and organizes it to the back storage area as well as a replenisher team of about 4 team members during the day and evenings to work "pulls." The " flow team" or overnight stock crew consists of 20-25 people with a team leader as well as an "Executive" team leader there to manage the crew each night. Wow, It seems at Kroger that way too much is put on your skeleton crew of a flow team. How do y'all get it done with just 4-10 people? Are the Krogers in your area really tiny? Jesus! All the Krogers in my area are huge and as big as if not bigger than the SuperTargets. lol
The average Kroger does about 500k in sales volume a week. You probably live in an area with an abnormally high concentration of supersize high volume stores. The largest store in our area which does around 1.4M has about 15 overnight workers. The only departments that are done overnight are dry grocery, frozen, some have nutrition, some have drug GM. Frozen has its' own lead, so the grocery manager shouldn't need to ever really do anything.
And Kroger is unionized, so nothing is negotiated in terms of compensation. The only exception to this is if you enter store management(salaried) which is separate from the hourly workers as they are non-union. There are different tiers of stores depending on volume where department heads receive additional premiums for the store doing more volume. It's not much, usually only a 1$ gap between the smallest volume stores and the largest.
-- Edited by DeltaGrocery on Sunday 16th of August 2015 04:03:17 PM
What's it like being the mgr of the overnight stock crew at Kroger? I'm thinking about jumping ship. Can anyone fill me in on the nightly responsibilities, what it takes to run a good crew, average pay, etc. Thanks.
Jump ship if you want but I would advise you not to work at Kroger. Ever.
