Advice anyone?? (Long rant…sorry)

Noters Beware!! This is a “mean-note” free diary.

I know I don’t write in here like, at ALL anymore, but I’m still here from time to time. I do enjoy reading other’s entries. It just seems that I don’t have much to say…or much GOOD to say, I guess would be more accurate. However, tonight, I guess I don’t really care. I’m having a “poor me” kind of night. It has to do with my job. Background info…I work for a nationwide “small-box” retail chain that has the word “Dollar” in its name. I don’t want to actually say its name on here in case it gets me in trouble somehow, so take your guesses. There are only a few, and I think they all probably pretty much are the same anyway. I am an assistant manager and have been for over 9 years. At the current moment I make just over $9 an hour, which is sad, after putting in that much time at one job. But that’s this company for you. The pay is so far off base with the work you do it’s ridiculous. If you are the opener, you work the first 5-6 hours alone. During those hours, you are stocker, cashier, customer service rep, janitor, receptionist and god only knows what else. In addition to stocking the shelves, you might have orders to do, you might have vendors-such as Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Frito-Lay, etc. to check in (you have to use a scanner gun to scan each kind of item they are bringing in, and make sure their invoices match what they actually bring into the store), you have ads to set (this involves placing signs all over the store on the shelves in front of items that are in the ad. They aren’t always sale items, because our actual ad…the little paper thing you can grab when you walk in the door…has both sale items and regular priced items. They throw a bunch of regular priced items in there to bulk up the ad….but they say it’s to make people aware of items they carry…whatever. Putting these stupid signs up can take several hours. It sounds easy, but, remember you are also doing about a kazillion other things, like running your register, and answering customer’s questions, etc. You can only get the signs up inbetween all the rest of the goings on.) This company just started selling cigarettes in a majority of the stores. So now, in the morning (and also before closing) you have to count how many packs of cigarettes you have on hand in your store. They do this in gas stations, too. That can take you quite a while as well. Oh, and I forgot to mention, with setting your ad, you also have to set endcaps up to feature sale items. The corporate office sends you a planner each month that shows what items are supposed to be on endcaps, etc. ( However, because some stores are less busy, you don’t always get enough to fill your endcaps and sometimes you only get some of the items you need and not all…so it takes a certain amount of creativity to find things that fit the category to fill up space. It’s always a game. Sometimes you have way too much of something, and other times not enough.

Anyway…I don’t want to get sidetracked on all of that. I just want you to understand that for 9 bucks an hour, we do a heck of a lot. That’s not what my issue is tonight. My issue is that my manager…who I am going to call Ann is horrible to work for. She is a wonderful person, outside of work, and I really can’t say I hate her or anything like that. But ever since I have been working under her (which has been about 2 years, I think, because I have bounced around from one store to the next to the next for various reasons-all the same company, just different stores in the area. There are approx. 10 of these “Dollar” stores in my general area. I live on the outskirts of a small city and there are about 6 within the city and several more in the outlying area. )I have had nothing but grief. My particular store operates with only 4 people. My manager (Ann), myself, and another assistant, and one cashier. The other assistant is fairly new to our store. We had a different assistant, who I will call Marie, who recently moved to a different store so she could be closer to home and her kids. (One other thing you REALLY need to know in this story is that Ann and I worked together years ago at the same store I am currently at, except back then, the store was new and so was Ann. She was hired in as a cashier and back then I was still an assistant, so I was over her. I still outrank her time-wise. She’s only been with the company for 7 years. Back then, I got along with her fabulously, which is another thing that is driving me nuts right now.) Anyway, from the time I started at this store with Ann as my manager, it has never gone well. Ann used to be in the Army years ago, and she likes to run her store like a drill sergeant. We do have one of the best stores in the district, but it’s a challenge to maintain that. Ann expects perfection out of me and I can’t always be perfect. For the most part, I am a closer. I work the 2nd shift until close. I usually go in at 1:15 and we are supposed to be out the door at 9:15. Most days I work an hour or two in the afternoon alone, as well, because whoever opened usually leaves around 3 or 4. Our cashier doesn’t come in until 5:30. So basically, I have from 5:30 until around 8:30 to try and get out as much stock as I can…although evenings are busier than mornings and I sometimes have to run to the register to play “back-up cashier” if the line gets too long up front, and if the cashier needs anything, I have to take care of it…like if she needs any change, or if she has a return (which requires a manager’s key in the register), or if she has a customer complaint, or if she can’t answer a customer’s question she’ll yell for me…or if the register’s computer system crashes ( a common occurrence), and now, anytime someone wants to buy cigarettes, she has to call for me because the cabinet is kept locked at all times to avoid theft, and only management can access the key. Long and short of this story is that I can get called up to the front a LOT!! Some days are worse than others.

Twice now since I have been at this store, I have had to have a “Talk” with Ann. In her mind, I don’t do my job to her standards. And to be fair, there are areas that I am weak at. The endcaps that I mentioned above are one. For example, if we are supposed to have a breakfast endcap that has 4 varieties of pop-tarts on the top shelf, Folger’s coffee on the next shelf and then the next 3 shelves down have, let’s say, 4 kinds of Kellogg’s cereals on them…it should be easy to set, right? I mean you have a picture in the planner and all, so what can go wrong. Well…for starters…because my store is a country store, it does less sales than many that are in the city. And your store’s inventory is based on that. So even though the pretty picture in the planner shows an endcap filled with 4 kinds of pop-tarts, you might only get sent extra cases of two different kinds…if even that. So sometimes you

have to go “rob” from the actual “home” (where the pop-tarts are always located, in the breakfast aisle). That works out…IF you have a lot to rob from. But if you only have 3 or 4 boxes in the actual home…you wind up leaving that spot sparse-looking. And to me, that’s bad news, because not all customers will see the pop-tarts on an endcap. It depends on how much time they are in the store for. If they come in just for those, they will more than likely head straight to where they always find them and not even notice the endcap. (By the way, the endcaps aren’t always located near where their actual “home”is…for example, right now, we do have a breakfast endcap…it’s on the first endcap right by our checkout…but the breakfast aisle is all the way to the right side of the store…hence why items might not get noticed by customers, and hence why I don’t like to leave the actual home bare.) Many times, though, you wind up not having enough to rob…so then you have to get creative and find something that fits the theme…breakfast, in this case…and it has to be something you have lots of….and also, because Ann is picky, it has to kind of fit in size-wise and look good. For the most part this means, bigger items go on lower shelves, and the smaller ones go on the higher ones. So if boxes of pop-tarts are what is supposed to be on top, you probably don’t want to throw some other kind of cereal up there. It wouldn’t fly in Ann’s world, because then your endcap would have cereal on the top shelf and also on the bottom 3, with your Folger’s in the middle (if you even get enough of that to fill your shelf it’s lucky). I struggle with making the endcaps look decent. I admit it up front. I also think I have a touch of ADD because I can get distracted fairly easily. If I am in the middle of stocking and have to run up front to catch up the line, there are many times where I have to think for a minute as to what the heck I was doing before I ran up front. It doesn’t usually take me terribly long, but, to be fair, I guess it can add up when you get called to the front 15 times a night. However, I do try my best to get out as much stock as I can. And again, some days are better than others. As an example, this past week, Ann went home sick on Sunday and when I came in the other assistant we have now, (who I will call Tia) was there by herself. Ann told Tia that when I came in, I was to be the main cashier and work on stocking food and that she (Tia) was to go work on a schematic that needed to be set no later than the end of that day. (Setting schematics basically means that you have to reset an area of the store. Each area gets totally redone at least once a year. You pull off old price strips on shelves, and many times you have to rearrange the heights of the shelves because the products change too. Like you might be discontinuing one kind of laundry soap and replacing it with a new item–like the Tide Pods they just came out with–and you might have to adjust the shelves to accommodate the new items. So Tia wound up resetting the entire School/office supply section and it took her most of the rest of the shift to get it done. Technically she didn’t quite get the whole thing done, there was a lot of rearranging and she still had a couple of small things to wrap up the next day. However, it was busy, and I ran the register by myself, and I didn’t get an entire stock cart of food finished. Monday was just as crazy. Tia opened the store, I came in at 1:15. We have to do the banking when there are two of us there, so one can stay and run the store. Tia worked on some stocking for a while after I got there, and then did the banking, and then by the time she got back, it was almost time for her to go home. So she had to close out her drawer and by then it WAS time for her to go home. I had an hour by myself before my cashier got in. When my cashier got in, it was still crazy busy in the store and I kept having to go back her up. I only wound up getting one stock cart (we call them U-boats. U-boats are long carts with upside-down U shaped handles on each end. )worked. It was a chemical U-boat…full of detergents, cleaners, air fresheners, etc. Working any carts can take a while…sometimes you have to price-sticker items (if they are not going in their home which has a label on the shelf showing how much it costs) and some of our items must have an anti-theft label on it. Something the corporate office dreamed up, even though the labels don’t really deter theft very much, in my opinion. They’re just a stupid sticker that anyone can peel off…but we still have to put them on certain items.

Tuesday was different, however. Ann was off both on Monday and Tuesday, so it was Tia opening again, and me closing with my cashier coming in at 5:30. But Tuesday was slower, customer-wise, and my cashier was able to handle it on her own for the most part. So that day I got a U-boat of pet done (that’s all the big heavy bags. Not an easy boat to stock.) Then I did two more chemical U-boats (and quite a bit of that is heavy too. I’m not a wuss, but I don’t lift weights or anything, so having 6 gallons of bleach in a box…it’s heavy to me. Not complaining…just saying. Our air conditioning is controlled by the corp. office (which isn’t here in Michigan, where I am) and the store is usually pretty hot. We can’t control it, but when you get to hoisting the heavy stuff, you’re usually sweating by the time you’re done. Again, not complaining, just saying. After that, I took 3 U-boats full of trash-we break down the cardboard and use larger boxes to put all the broken down pieces in-to the dumpsters out back. Then after that was done, I went to our stock room and loaded up a bunch of repacks (repacks are basically totes–big black plastic tote boxes–that the distribution center uses to ship certain items. They might have clothes in them, plus a lot of our Health And Beauty items…aspirin…makeup…cold meds…lotion, etc…comes in those because they get them at the Distribution center in bulk and they break their shipment into smaller amounts and send them to the stores that way. For example, at the Distribution Center, they might get a case of 50 boxes of Excedrin Aspirin…but none of our stores have enough shelf space for that many so they break it up and send 10 each to 5 different stores.) on U-boats. I had the next two days off, but I wanted whoever was working to be able to just grab a U-boat when they were ready to stock the repacks. We have a certain order we have to stock and repacks are the last thing you do. After I loaded the repacks on U-boats, I had to get the store ready for our Coca-Cola delivery, which would be arriving the following morning. To do this, I just have to bag up our bottle returns (Michigan charges a 10 cent deposit on all bottles and cans of soda which we refund when people return them) in bags of 40, and then the black “shells” that hold the two-liters have to get stacked together. (Shells hold 8 two-liters each and can be stacked on top of one another. When they are empty, we take the shells and put them in the back room. ) I had to make sure that all the Coca-Cola shells were separated from the Dr. Pepper ones because Coke doesn’t want to take ones that aren’t theirs. I stack the shells on one end of a U-boat and the bags of returns on the other. By that time, it was nearly time to cl

ose, but that really wasn’t a bad days work. Or so I thought.

Like I said, I had Wed. and Thurs. off, and I was hoping that Ann would be happy with the store when she opened Wed. morning. I did all that I could possibly do Tuesday night before I closed. But…apparently I did something wrong because when I walked in today, I was informed by Ann that she needed to have a talk with me. And she sounded crabby. This will be the third time she has had a “talk” with me and the first two were to tell me how she thinks I don’t work hard enough, that everything falls on her, stuff like that. And again, many times, things DO fall on her…but I can’t see this as being all my fault. She is salaried and as a manager she is required to work a minimum of 52 hours. The rest of us are hourly and CANNOT go over whatever hours we are scheduled to get…and I don’t mean overtime by that. Each store is given a budget which is then divided up amongst the employees. I usually get 30-32 hours each week. The cashier gets around 18-20. If you are scheduled 30 hours, you can’t go over that or it blows the store’s budget. You don’t get overtime until after 40, but that happens so rarely anyway. The corp. office put out a memo a while back telling us how even going over your time by 3 minutes each day adds up to a lot of money spent in payroll for them. Maybe…but they are pretty tight with their budgets too, and they only give small raises, usually a dime or something like that. I try to not go over, but we are only given 15 minutes to clock out after the store is closed and I have to shut down 2 drawers and count all the money and fill out the deposit slip and bag, and then sign a couple of logs in the log book. Then I have to go enter all of that in the computer up front. Many days, I am pushing it to get out on time. Many days I don’t get out on time, but I do clock out on time. I just clock out and then finish what I have to do…so basically I am working for free at that point. But I don’t want Ann to get yelled at for having her store over payroll so I do it and don’t complain. Ann doesn’t know this, and I can’t tell her because we are absolutely not allowed to work off the clock…but what they don’t know won’t hurt them, I guess. I guess it’s more that I can’t complain rather than I don’t complain.

When Marie was still at our store, she was definitely Ann’s favorite. She could do no wrong. Ann even told a customer once “Yep, Marie’s my girl!” She’s never said that about me. She rarely says anything good about me. And the crazy part is, that she wound up leaving today around 5:30 and she never had that talk with me. She said she still needs to talk to me…but then she left. It’s not fair. I know she’s mad about something…and I know it must be something I did. But she knows that I know she’s mad at me (even though I have NO idea for what this time) and she just leaves. Now I’ll be stressing out over it for the next 12 hours until I go into work tomorrow. And Ann herself is not perfect. She regularly gets the money messed up. She’ll buy some change from the petty cash and swear that she put it back and that petty cash is right where it should be, amount-wise before she leaves for the day. They when I go back and count it before close, it will often be off 10 or 20 bucks…sometimes as much as 80. I always find it…Ann’s not a thief or anything like that, but it’s stressful. I try to get petty counted before we close because like I said, we only have 15 minutes to get out the door, and when petty cash doesn’t balance out, I have to wait until I have counted the day’s cash and hopefully it turns up there. (It always does, but still, I can’t finish the petty cash out until I actually FIND the money…so it’s just one more thing I have to do before I can clock out. And because Ann works quite a few open to closes, she has a bad habit of putting money that should go in petty cash into the bag where she puts the cash she took in from her drawer. It’s because she’s always tired. But she knew that when she took the job, that she would have to work at least 52 hours, maybe more. Probably more.

Since I have started at this store, I have gotten bitched at for not separating the plastic from the cardboard (and I am usually one of the better ones about this. Truthfully, Ann is one of the worst. I have taken the trash out no less than 3 times in the past few months and boxes from areas that I know Ann worked have had plastic stuffed in the bottom under the cardboard. We have two dumpsters and the one with cardboard isn’t supposed to have plastic or any other garbage in it because they recycle the cardboard. Ann took the trash out about 4 months ago and freaked out on me when she came back in because there was plastic in with the cardboard. I don’t know who’s fault it was, but she acted like I did it. But you know what’s funny…when I have emptied the boxes from the areas she has worked and found plastic in them, I have not said a word. I just fix it and move on. Last winter, I got yelled at by Ann because she took the garbage out and she said I overloaded the boxes and when she was trying to lift them in the dumpster, she sort of lost her balance and wound up stepping in a snowbank up to her knees and then her shoes and pants were wet from the knees down. Funny part of that was, just a week before that happened, my cashier and I were taking trash out together before our delivery truck came and we both wound up stepping in a snowbank trying to get the boxes in the dumpster…AND we had to stand out in the cold while our legs were soaking wet to unload the truck, which takes at least an hour, sometimes more. The day it happened to Ann, she got to come inside and do some work on the computer right afterward.

I never rub Ann’s face in her mistakes. It would probably only further get me into trouble for one, but also that’s just not me. I don’t like to make people look like fools and sometimes (most times) it’s just easier to fix the mistake…whoever made it…and move on. If I do bring it up for whatever reason, I do it nicely, usually as a sidenote…”Oh, by the way…I found this out of place…don’t know how it got there, but it goes here.” And that’s that. Something like that.

I am only human…I’m going to make mistakes. I can’t do perfection. And Ann seems to need that. Unfortunately, switching stores right now isn’t an option, and I don’t know what I am in trouble for this time. The last “talk” we had, Ann said that if things kept going this way, she was going to let me go. I can’t afford to get fired. Who can? But it doesn’t seem to matter what I do right at this store. There’s little praise. But if something is wrong, it’s rubbed in your face…or at least my face. Like I said, when Marie worked at our store, she could do no wrong. As an example, we had an endcap whose theme was “Laundry”. It had different kinds of detergent and dryer sheets on it. But Marie had to find a place for a displayer of Rid-X (which is for your septic system, for those that don’t know–and our store doesn’t carry Rid-X on a regular basis…this was just a display box that had maybe 20-25 boxes of Rid-X in it. Marie didn’t know where to put it, so she stuck it on the top shelf of the laundry endcap. Now, if it was ME who had done that, I am sure it would have been made a point that I stuck stuff for a septic

system in with Laundry items. But Marie did it…so it was fine.

I am sorry this rant is so long. But really, I would like to know if anyone has any decent ways to approach what is going to happen tomorrow. I know you don’t really know what she is going to hit me with, because I don’t either. (Oh, and the other thing is…(I have proof of this because I keep the nightly receipts and bring them home), a good chunk of the time–not all but a fairly high percentage, I am the one who does the most on register. Many times I will have caught up to Ann’s totals from the morning shift within 3 to 4 hours. There have been lots of times when I far surpass her. No fault of anyone’s–it’s just that the afternoon is often busier than the morning. When you are stuck behind the register, you can’t be out stocking or doing anything else. Customers come first. I do realize that in the morning Ann has to do the orders and these things called cycle counts (only 2 days a week on those-but one of them is pretty extensive), so it’s not like she isn’t doing anything while she’s there. But…if I do more on register than she did, then I have been stuck up there longer and have had less time to get things done, too. That is pretty basic to figure out.) I don’t know if I can bring that up very easily to Ann because she might not like that I bring home copies of the receipts…I have been doing it for a while now because ever since she said I don’t do my job well enough, I just thought it might be wise for me to have copies of how much I have done on my till. There have been a few days here and there that I didn’t have time to print out a copy of the register receipts, but I do have a lot of them. Sometimes I have printed out the tallies every hour or so, so for some days I have more than one receipt. It just tells how much you have done on your drawer up until that point when you print it out. You can print them out whenever. On some of the crazier days, I print them out just for curiosity…to see how much I have done. But because I am the one who is there on register from 1:15 until 5:30 and then I still have to back up my cashier, many days I wind up with the highest totals. But yet she expects me to get the most done as far as stocking, etc. I don’t see how that works. Arrgh. I wish I could just find a better job that pays at least as much as I make now…one where it’s less stress and people get along.

Like I said, sorry for the rant…it’s late, and I better get some sleep so I can at least be sort of awake for whatever tomorrow brings.