For the past year or so, our management has been getting over the intercom and getting workers from the Meat/Produce/Day-Time Grocery. They're refusing/not letting the leads of front end schedule baggers to cut hours and they're just making it up with other departments. As someone who works in Meat, it's annoying having to be called upfront 2-4 times a day, sometimes for more than an hour. Is this allowed? Anything we can do? Just not go up? I've noticed they never do it when our district manager is there.
The fact that Kroger continues to do this (and much more in recent months at our store) is proof that KROGER CORPORATE does NOT truly care about giving good service to their customers. ALl that is needed is to staff the front end with enough baggers and cashiers so that even with a sudden heavy rush, they will be covered. This happens because the front end supervisor was not given enough hours on the stinking e-schedule (a JOKE!!!) to staff the front end.
Just the other day, a holiday (Presidents Day) it seemed apparent that Kroger had been caught with their pants down, so to speak, and because there was a shortage of baggers and cashiers, constant calls for help from dairy, meat, produce, floral, whoever could, occurred all afternoon and evening long.
NOT GOOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Wake up, Kroger big wigs!! Get your act together and show the public you care about their continued business!
Other departments have their own respective problems to take care of (with way too small amount of time allotted, of course) and should not be called to assist the front end. BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD COMPANY POLICY / BUSINESS MODEL!!!!!!!!
Meat/Seafood and Bakery/Deli should never be called upfront.
If you have a service case, you aren't supposed to leave the area.
Don't forget Produce. Produce is heavily shopped when it's busy and a lot of departments are already understaffed as it is and most evening crews aren't the hardest workers.
But to answer OP's question, they will not call you up if you are a valuable asset of your department. Have your department lead talk to a co-manager and let them know that you are extremely busy and valuable to your department and you have a lot of work to do that cannot be done while you are up front bagging for 30 mins-hour. I know my department head, produce, used to get really pissed off when they called up people from our department and they eventually stopped calling anyone from produce when they learned how understaffed we were.
Also, it's their fault they can't schedule high school kids to come in at 4p and bag. Lazy kids though.
It's not really that I'm not an asset. It'd the fact that the store manager thinks she can rely on me to do what she needs to because I've helped her a few times. They don't understand I have things I need to get done before I can leave AND so I can leave on time. My main question is can something happen to me or us if we just stop going up there to help them.
Meat/Seafood and Bakery/Deli should never be called upfront.
If you have a service case, you aren't supposed to leave the area.
Don't forget Produce. Produce is heavily shopped when it's busy and a lot of departments are already understaffed as it is and most evening crews aren't the hardest workers.
But to answer OP's question, they will not call you up if you are a valuable asset of your department. Have your department lead talk to a co-manager and let them know that you are extremely busy and valuable to your department and you have a lot of work to do that cannot be done while you are up front bagging for 30 mins-hour. I know my department head, produce, used to get really pissed off when they called up people from our department and they eventually stopped calling anyone from produce when they learned how understaffed we were.
Also, it's their fault they can't schedule high school kids to come in at 4p and bag. Lazy kids though.
That's one good thing about being a baker or a cake decorator. You can't go off and leave a rack of bread in the oven or go off and leave somebody's cake unfinished.
I am pretty sure it is against union policy to ask or force people from a different department to go help bag up front. You may want to go ask an experienced Union Steward that question. I remember several years back some guy who worked in the liquor store just blatantly refusing to do anything else besides what was prescribed under his job code. He prevailed. The managers can ask/beg any employee to do whatever they feel like asking in hopes that the employee will just do it. Most will. Most employees do not have the brains nor the balls to refute what is asked of them by management
Just don't help. Or if you do help, leave at the end of your shift without finishing up/taking care of what you need to. If they ask why you left things undone than tell them you kept being called up front and overtime wasn't approved OR you can be nice and ask if you can stay and finish your job and then make it take a long time to get extra time on the clock. They will get tired of that too! It's a 360-win if you handle it right. :)
The customer comes first. Giving the customer a quick and smooth end to their shopping experience is what they will remember about your store.
What if the customer's shopping experience ends before they even reach check-out because they end up leaving the store discouraged/mad because the produce department was neither full nor fresh, grocery shelves have holes in abundance and drug/GM's promotional/seasonal items aren't on the sales floor but rather sitting in the back?
See, what Kroger (and apparently some others) don't get is when you pull people away from one department to help another, the department that's being pulled from suffers. Departments already aren't getting enough hours because of how greedy the corporate bigwigs are, so if you keep pulling people from departments to help another, even less stuff gets done.
Staff the departments properly in the first place and hold people accountable, plus start paying competitive wages and a vast majority of the problems that plague Kroger stores will in fact go away. Kroger needs to realize the marketplace (and the way people shop/the options they have available to them) has been and continues to change dramatically, so Kroger needs to do much, much more than rely on the Faster Check-Out at Kroger slogan to stand apart from the competition nowadays.
The customer comes first. Giving the customer a quick and smooth end to their shopping experience is what they will remember about your store.
obviously you never worked in a service department. when a customer gets no service and walks out leaving their full basket next the the meat case check out don't matter to them. people in the front end don't realize how much service departments bring into the store
