Fitting in. Please read!! I need opinions!!

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

Some days I wonder if everyone is messed up or if it’s just me. I hate for this to turn into yet another job-related rant, but unfortunately, an incident that took place at work on Friday has been stuck in my brain all weekend.

Those of you who have read my work related rants in the past know that I work for a retail chain…small box, discount. We are everywhere. I work in a country setting, but near to a city, and in the city there are no less than 6 stores belonging to this chain. Most stores have around 4 employees total, as we run on a very tight payroll. My store is no different. There is our store manager, two assistant managers (of which I am one) and one cashier.

I went into work Friday afternoon with my usual sense of apprehension. My store manager can flip-flop moods faster than you can blink. There can be days when she will be happy and we get along and everything is fine. Then all of a sudden, out of the blue, something will set things in motion that changes all of that. So many times they catch me off guard, hence my sense of apprehension. Friday was one of those days.

I had just clocked in and was logging onto a register when the manager comes up and asks “Did something happen here last Saturday night?” So, then, in that blink of an eye, I am under pressure to try to remember what happened 6 days ago…if anything out of the ordinary happened. Now, keep in mind that this company is full of screw-ups, so there’s always SOMETHING happening…like our register system was all messed up for 3 days. We couldn’t run our debit machines, we couldn’t print out tender reports. One night I couldn’t close the system down for the evening because it kept giving me errors. But that all took place Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. I honestly couldn’t remember anything out of the ordinary taking place on Saturday. So I said “Not that I remember, why?” Manager goes, “Well I have had 3 customer complaints that said that P(how I’ll refer to our cashier) was screaming bloody murder for you right before close. Two of those people who complained have said that they are NEVER coming back here again.”

Okay. Well, Cashier P probably did yell for me right before close. It happens quite often. Our safe is right up front on the sales floor. (It sounds stupid, but it’s bolted and glued to the floor…so it would take a lot to get it out of the store.) Anyway…the safe is of the push-button combination variety and when you set it, there is a 9 minute delay until you can open it. So, at about 15 minutes until close, I set the safe, then I take my register down, and take our back up petty cash (coin rolls and some 1’s and 5’s) back into the office to start counting to make sure the petty is where it should be. I start organizing the money for the deposit, and fill out the slips and bank bag. I try to get everything done before that 9 minute timer on the safe goes off, but, unfortunately, many nights I don’t get it all done. It’s very easy for our petty cash to not balance out, because during the day, it’s common to grab a roll of coinage of one kind or another and forget to replace it with money from your drawer. That, and we also sometimes borrow from the morning person’s cash to buy extra 1’s and 5’s, especially on the weekends when the bank is closed. Sometimes things get mixed up and it takes a while to sort it all out.

This company is cheap. We don’t have a decent way to communicate with each other throughout the store, aside from yelling for whomever you need. It happens all the time. I wish we had a set of rechargeable walkie talkies or even better, an intercom. Our store is not that big, but for this particular problem, an intercom would help drastically. We do have a cordless phone, and whomever is Manager On Duty is supposed to carry it with them, but none of us usually do because even with the clip that you can use to hook it to your belt, the thing falls off and hits the floor. We have killed several phones by trying to hook them to our belts. We have tried just keeping it near us while we are working…setting on a shelf by where we are stocking. But that doesn’t really work well either. This job is high-stress, and involves a lot of multi-tasking…and you don’t always stay where you think you are going to be. Sometimes you wind up in one spot and then wind up somewhere else. Remembering the phone when you are called up front because the cashier has an issue and needs you Pronto is not always possible. Before long you’ve forgotten where you last saw the phone. The other problem we’ve had is having well-meaning customers seeing the phone laying on a shelf, and taking it up to the cashier thinking that we didn’t mean to leave it laying on a shelf. Long story, short…the phone just doesn’t cut it as a way to communicate.

We do have a bell on each register, which technically is supposed to be used for communication between cashier and management. If you need change, ring once…backup cashier, twice…emergency, ring 3 times. But whoever came up with that idea was smoking crack or something, because more often than not, the bell is used for customers to alert us that they are ready to check out, as we are usually off stocking down one aisle or another. If I came running up there every time that bell rings, I’d never get anything done. (That, and kids think the bell is a toy, which is very irritating. Even moreso when the parents do nothing to stop their child from dinging the thing over and over. It’s not cute, especially when you aren’t even close to being ready to check out. Because we DO run up front as fast as possible, and when it’s for nothing, it’s not funny. We are stressed for time to get stock out as it is, with so few employees, that those few wasted seconds add up. But that’s a rant for another day…). The other thing about the bell system of communication is that it’s totally ineffective if I am in the office at the end of the night. I am counting money, the store is still open…so the door is shut and locked! I would never hear a bell from all the way up front, even though our store is small. The distance is still too great.

So, there’s my cashier, who hears the safe going off. I am still in the office. My cashier probably has a line of people…because it seems that at 10 minutes to close, the gates of Hell are opened and everyone remembers right THEN that they are out of diapers, milk, bread, cigarettes, etc. My cashier is stressing out anyway because she is trying to do her closing tasks, like refilling the bread rack, refilling the 2-liters of soda, refilling the 20 oz. soda coolers, sweeping the floor, mopping the floor, turning the lights to the coolers off for the night, checking the garbage cans under the registers to make sure they’re not full…and god knows what else. (And on her behalf…there’s nothing like ge

tting the front of the store mopped, only to have the 30 last-minuters flock in and trash the hell out of the floor. We have to do it while the store is open. We only have 15 minutes to clock out after we close and she has to count her drawer down and I have to count the deposit and do the end of day on the register. We are usually cutting it close with just that. No time for any other tasks after close.)

My cashier can’t leave the line of people to run back to the office to get me. How is she supposed to alert me that I need to get my butt up front? (Oh, and BTW, after the 9 minutes is up…the safe beeps, and then you have about 30 seconds to get up there to enter in the combination…or else you have to start all over again, meaning another 9 minute wait. Yes, this happens sometimes, too…because even with her yelling for me, I don’t always hear it, and I have missed that 30 second window. Now, we DO still have 15 minutes after close, so I CAN set it again…but again, I will be back in the office counting. And my cashier, after counting her drawer down usually still has to empty the mop bucket (and the mop sink is back by the office)and if she has a few measly minutes after that, she is usually trying to finish up anything that she couldn’t do if she got stuck on register. So she’s not hanging around up front just waiting for the safe to beep. So if I wind up with a second go-round on setting the safe, I have to run back up front when I think it’s close…and hopefully don’t miscalculate. (We also don’t have a clock in the office… and I am usually concentrating hard to make sure I count accurately, so I’m not paying that close of attention to time…and we don’t want to go for a third go-round. We’d be late clocking out and there would be hell to pay for that. It’s much better to catch the safe on the first setting…that way I can focus on counting the money accurately.

So, yeah, my cashier probably did yell for me. Maybe more than once, if I didn’t hear the first call. But why is that so offensive? Are people so sensitive that a cashier calling her supervisor’s name out is something to get that bent out of shape about? It’s not like she stands up at the register and screams for no reason for the whole time you’re shopping. Hell, people’s children can be much louder for longer periods of time.

Also, it strikes me as odd, that all of a sudden, the manager would get 3 complaints about this ONE time….when she has called for me many, many times over the course of the time we have worked together. Why would that number of people get sooo upset that they would voice complaints on that ONE time??? And be so upset that they are never going to shop at our store again….it’s just weird.

I never fully trust people…and this just backs me up as to why. I don’t analyze every move I make of every second of every day. I don’t keep a mental log of those moves. I respond however I respond to things…some of them may be right moves and God knows, more of them are probably the wrong response totally. I don’t always think fast on my feet. I do the best I can. If I had to analyze my moves for every situation that arises in that store, it would be awful. I would have to tell people to give me some time so I could figure out the right thing to say…”Please wait over there and I’ll be back in a bit.” Last I knew, we were all human, and we all make mistakes. My manager has had a customer call the corporate office on her because she (my manger) used the term “hon”. We all use it. We’re a small town and there are more bars/restaurants here than anything else. It may not be “professional”, but it IS a term of endearment. Once you start it, it’s hard to get out of the habit. I got in trouble with the same customer months later for the same thing. I even knew she was sensitive to that term and was trying VERY hard not to use it. She was in the store for well over an hour and I didn’t slip once until the very end. It just came out in a moment where I was very busy with her and several other things at the same time. The point is, that lady might very well decide not to shop here because of ONE LITTLE WORD spoken. You can’t please them all. You just can’t. You can try. But it doesn’t matter what move you make, someone might take it the wrong way, or not like it for one reason or another, and they might get upset about it. If my cashier were to very politely say, “Can you please hang tight right here for just 20 seconds while I go knock on the office door because I need to get my manager up here?”…THAT would probably tick someone off, because they had to wait an additional 20 seconds. If she was talking into a walkie-talkie (if we had one)…she might upset someone because she was focusing on something other than their needs for a few seconds. (And yes, I can see that happening. Like I said, we have a cordless phone. There are times when I am alone in the store, such as mornings…and if the phone rings, there is no one else there to answer it. So even if I am ringing up a customer, I have to answer the phone. I know it’s annoying…because I am talking into the phone and not focusing totally on the customer in front of me. I don’t like it, but I don’t have a choice.)

I don’t know. Am I so weird that I don’t think of calling in complaints for every little thing? I mean, yeah, if there was something absolutely awful that I witnessed, maybe. But I have shopped a million times at many different places. Sometimes the experience is great, other times not so much. I have been in larger department stores and not been able to find someone to help me ( a great example of that is the pet section at Wal-Mart…if you need a live fish for your fish tank…good luck!). I can honestly say that I have never been SO irked at my service that I felt it warranted a phone complaint. Maybe I am just lucky…or maybe I have a high tolerance for irritation. I just don’t know. But I just cannot get it through my head why all of a sudden there would be 3 complaints about my cashier yelling for me…about one day in particular…when she has yelled for me many, many times over the course of the time we have worked together.

And the other thing that bugs me about all of this is the following: We are supposed to greet each customer who enters the store. Our store doesn’t have the budget for a greeter who stands up front. So it falls on us. And like I said, we are many times, off down one aisle or another stocking or doing cycle counts or hanging ad signs…whatever. So we often have to shout out a “HELLO!” from whatever corner we are in. (We are supposed to make eye contact as well…but there is also a bell on the door and oftentimes the ringing is what alerts us to someone’s entry. And while I do go see who is in the store, I often cannot make it up front quickly enough to greet them in a proper amount of time. Hence, the “HELLO!” shouted from the back. I will usually be walking toward the front while I am shouting that “HELLO!”…but I still have to shout it. So, why is it okay to shout “HELLO!” but not for my cashier to shout my name once or twice to make sure I can get my hiney up front in time to open the godforsaken safe so we don’t run overtime trying to clock out on time?

Half of me is trying to wrap my head around the accusation that my manager got three complaints about t

his….and the other half of me is wondering if there is some other motive at play here. I always feel as though I am under a microscope at this place. And I know with retail, many times you are. They have systems in place to watch your moves on the register…if you do too many voids, they think you are stealing. If you do to many order cancels, you show up on a report to the manager.

But I got questioned several months ago, by my manager, as to why I was in the store way past the 15 minutes we have to clock out. She had driven by and seen my car in the lot. (But again, she waited until days later to even ask me about it… and thus, caught me off guard making me look stupid. “Why were you in the store so late last Saturday?” Then I am all…”ummmmmm….I dunno…..what the hell was last Saturday???” On THAT particular incident, I WAS in the store later than I should have been. My cashier’s boyfriend came to pick her up and when he tried to start his car, it wouldn’t stay started. It would just stall out. He tried and tried and tried. I was waiting to see if he would be able to get it started. He finally did, but it was running rough…they took off, jerkingly…and made it less than a mile down the road where the car died again. They wound up leaving it at one of the bars for a couple of days until he was able to get it fixed. I went back inside the store after that because we have to approve our weekly hours every Saturday night. I hadn’t approved mine yet with all that went on with my cashier’s boyfriends car…so I went in to do it. If we don’t approve them, our checks will be delayed coming for at least a week. In order to approve them, we have to get on our store’s computer system…and that system sucks. It’ll work one day and not the next. Sometimes it’ll log you on fast…and other times it takes forever. Well, as luck would have it, that night it was taking forever to log me on…and I had to reboot that computer and then try logging in again. It was during that time, apparently, when my manager drove by. Things happen…if I was in there for any bad reason…to steal, or whatever…I would have done that a long time ago. I’ve been with this company for 10 years. A little trust would be nice.