I've been working as a courtesy clerk/ utility for about two months now at my local Kroger's. I know I was one of the many new hires during that time, due to a major competitor in our area shutting down. As such, I got hired in specifically so I could start doing utility asap and bump some of the older utility clerks to other depts.
I got some basic training; "Here's how to clean a bathroom" "This is how to work the pallet jack" "This is how to clean the bottle bin area", ect ect. The bare basics I would need to know to actually do my job. But today I got pulled into the office to, "review standard utility clerk procedures" because someone forgot to lock the bottoms of one of the glass bins and the other glass bin sensor was blocked off and caused the glass bin to overfill to the point of it spilling into the machine itself.
Both of which were separate incidents that happened yesterday while I was on shift, within the first two hours. I had to get creative with a straddle stacker to dump the first bin into a new one (after trying to shovel the bottles in there) and had a two foot stack of glass to clean up on the second one. As the front-end manager and I sat down to go over some of these standards, I realized that some of these practices I had never been taught or heard of. Simple things like never stacking glass bins atop other bins or even about facing the bins in a certain way when stacking them. These were simple but vital aspects to the job (the glass bin one even being a safety issue) that were simply never mentioned, and no one bothered to stop and see if I knew any of these before I was expected to do the job I was "trained" for.
I don't get the sense that management cares about my position, or me as an employee.
Welcome to Krogrr . . . where we don't bother to train because we don't have time because we deliberately understaff so we can compress our labor budget, thereby netting bonus dollars for a small number of management folks.
After I first started I asked to re-watch the video on bagging.
I was told that I had already seen it and that it was enough.
Kroger really doesn't give a damn about training.
They see all of us as expendable regardless of what position we work.
But god help you if you are a courtesy clerk or utility clerk underneath the Front End.
Even a Production Assistant on a film set gets more respect than you will from Kroger.
They always give us untrained people in the deli and starbucks. And they always start them up on a weekend (our busiest days) and they take up a slot of a regular, trained employee. "Oh you don't know how to do anything? Well just watch and learn!"
It's always been a "learn as you go" job for me. Fortunately I'm good at that.
Right now, though, I'm actually being trained for an assistant management position and I'd say it's too much. I've actually been doing back up for months now (they only have classes at certain periods), so I pretty much already know everything I need to. Now they got me sitting in useless classes half the time and "training" at another store the other half. It's all very arbitrary, and the manager at my training store doesn't really know what to do with me. He doesn't have anything to teach me, and they don't really need help...meanwhile my home store is short people and I'm the only back-up for my department. I'm afraid of what I'll come back to, honestly.
