|
Good for you for trying something new after your whole career spent doing something else, can't have been easy but glad it seems to working ok for you.
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2022 03:56
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 10, 2024 12:06 |
|
|
So I have to vomit this up because it's killing me. So I manage a thrift store, one of several across the country under the same parent company. This company is the living embodiment of "won't spend a nickle today to save a buck tomorrow". I mean this to a savage, rediculous degree. Our cash registers are so old they record the day's transactions on a long strip of paper called the "journal tape". They also, obviously, don't talk at all to the credit card terminals. So to ring up a customer that's using a card, you have to ring them up on the register, and then again on the terminal, print out three receipts (register copy, store cc copy, customer cc copy), etc etc. Real dumb. Where it gets super dumb is every morning, all the journal tapes from all the registers, and all the printouts from all the credit card terminals, and all the cash from all the drop safes has to be gathered up, reconciled, and manually entered into the system by hand. This takes hours every morning, and is all stuff that should be done automatically by any modern cash register linked to a modern POS system. So I did the math. I added all the hours our office manager has to spend doing the report every morning, and multiplied it by their hourly pay to get how much the company spends to just have the report done every year. I then went online to see how much a set of like-new registers, installed, with a new POS system and tech support would cost. Turns out, we spend more PER YEAR, by thousands, to have the report done by hand by our office manager, than it would be to just get new registers and be done with the report forever. I presented my findings to my boss at the time (he's since quit), as well as his boss. Nobody cared.
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2022 21:04
|
|
|
WTF BEES posted:So I have to vomit this up because it's killing me. What would the office manager do if they weren’t reconciling?
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2022 22:32
|
|
|
WTF BEES posted:Nobody cared. Do they have incentive to care? Does it matter to them if the company becomes more efficient? When you present these findings to your boss, they didn't congratulate you and give you a promotion. If your boss presented these findings to his boss, they wouldn't congratulate him and give him a promotion. And so on up the line. Who cares if the company is a garbage failure, if rectifying the situation leads to no material improvement for anyone? Who would benefit from this refinement? An owner somewhere? CEO types at the parent company? They're probably so wealthy that they don't need or have any interest in something so irrelevant as the company they own or manage performing well.
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2022 22:41
|
|
|
Elephanthead posted:What would the office manager do if they weren’t reconciling? Good lord almighty, there's literally endless work to be done. We have a small fleet of trucks that go out and pick up donations, either from lists of specific addresses or just by driving though neighborhoods we've sent mailers to previously and picking them up. Routing the lists of addresses in a sane way day to day, and then coordinating the trucks as they go about their day is almost a full time job by itself (hence the "dispatcher" position at other businesses). Not to mention handling incoming calls for both the charities we work with, calls for the store, accounts payable, payroll, the list is crazy. Before covid we used to have an office assistant as well as an office manager, but they cut the assistant position and just have the office manager do more, with myself and the other manager picking up what ever slack needs reeling in. If our office manager didn't have to spend 3+ hours on the report every morning, that would free them up to do the rest of their work, which would free me up to catch up on other things that need doing that there just isn't time for currently. An example being the ever growing pile of silver and gold jewelry that needs inspecting, testing, and polishing that I have but can never get to, despite my telling my boss I'm probably sitting on 10 Gs or more....
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2022 22:45
|
|
|
litany of gulps posted:Do they have incentive to care? Does it matter to them if the company becomes more efficient? When you present these findings to your boss, they didn't congratulate you and give you a promotion. If your boss presented these findings to his boss, they wouldn't congratulate him and give him a promotion. And so on up the line. Who cares if the company is a garbage failure, if rectifying the situation leads to no material improvement for anyone? Who would benefit from this refinement? An owner somewhere? CEO types at the parent company? They're probably so wealthy that they don't need or have any interest in something so irrelevant as the company they own or manage performing well. I mean I would think the incentive would be more money. We're talking flushing at least $15k a year per store down the toilet, when you could literally spend maybe 6k one time and be done with it. There are also a litany of other problems the old registers cause as well beyond requiring the report, all of which cost time and money on a day to day basis. As far as "having enough money to not care", maybe. I can see that. But we're not so huge a company that I think they have the cash to be that flippant about it. And I don't care about a raise or a promotion, I'm actively trying to get out. It's just insanity to me from a purely.......logical standpoint I guess? "Hey here's an almost 0 effort way to save tens of thousands of dollars a year, per store..." "Nah" It's bonkers to me. Edit: Also I may have made this company sound bigger than it is. There's the store managers (me) , one over-manager that is in charge of the store managers, then the owners. WTF BEES fucked around with this message at 22:59 on Mar 27, 2022 |
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2022 22:52
|
|
|
They'll never care. Until someone who matters enough sees what's going on and decides new POS systems are necessary, it will never change. I had a stint as the admin assistant at an indoor mushroom farm in 2017 and our time clock punched the current time into a cell on a card. People hosed it up all the time and accidentally had it punch in the out-to-lunch field or on top of another time already printed. I had to gather up all of them every week and burn a couple days just entering them all into Excel and submit those spreadsheets to our payroll person at our main office another state away. It was the absolute fuckin dumbest poo poo and would have been solved by an electronic system and saved me and anyone else a lot of time and effort. But glhf getting that through to my manager or the owner
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2022 01:10
|
|
|
WTF BEES posted:I mean I would think the incentive would be more money. We're talking flushing at least $15k a year per store down the toilet, when you could literally spend maybe 6k one time and be done with it. There are also a litany of other problems the old registers cause as well beyond requiring the report, all of which cost time and money on a day to day basis. If at such a small place then there could be quite a few reasons, but if you've thought about it. Your manager who's actually entering the transactions and the owners too have probably thought of it. They may not be able to afford installing a whole new system. Budgeting is hard even for business owners so dropping 6k on upgrades might seem too steep. They might also be looking to sell, or change locations and don't want to spend money unnecessarily.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2022 01:45
|
|
|
These ideas kinda cross into the Bad With Money thread but I'd bet that most small owner-operated businesses are BWM. In my experience working in independent auto shops, most of them seem to be at least partially BWM. The owner(s) sometimes get complacent and let an ever-increasing amount of money slip away due to inefficiencies and whatnot. Or they just suck at the business side in general. Much hand wringing gets done over the plight of the small business man but a lot of them bring their problems upon themselves, especially when it comes to their employees.
Joe Mama fucked around with this message at 02:19 on Mar 28, 2022 |
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2022 02:17
|
|
|
WTF BEES posted:So I have to vomit this up because it's killing me. He's salaried so he's working extra time for free, meaning that labor saving devices are wasted, and that's all your owners see.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2022 03:29
|
|
|
Volmarias posted:He's salaried so he's working extra time for free, meaning that labor saving devices are wasted, and that's all your owners see. This is basically correct, since they don't understand the concepts of opportunity cost and diminishing returns
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2022 04:14
|
|
|
I mean, there's a lot of poo poo employers don't understand, for instance! We're open 8am to 8pm all days(excepting a few near Christmas), this includes weekends. The last four hours of saturdays, and all hours of sundays, have extra pay for employees, meaning that employees are more expensive during those periods. During the last two hours of saturdays and sundays, the warehouse is largely full of listless employees who have nothing to do(and honestly the first two hours are much the same). So rather than compressing the weekend opening hours down to, say, 10am to 6pm, and saving a shitload of wages(and getting more satisfied customers because now the employee concentration is higher during the rush hours), we're just wasting a ton of money and making it harder to properly staff the rush section from 11am to 2pm. 10am to 6pm actually used to be our weekend opening hours. So why did it change? Because one store, from another chain of failing stores that's barely even our competitors, started doing 8 to 8 opening hours during weekends, which caused some marketing ghoul to have a heart attack because "OH NO!!!! THEY COULD CLAIM LONGER OPENING HOURS THAN US!!!! THE TERROR!!!!"
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2022 09:54
|
|
|
I still think it amazingly short sighted and stupid that more places like tire shops and car repair and non-emergency vets aren't open on Sunday.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2022 13:56
|
|
|
Depends on the size of the business, if it's so small it's really only operating when the owner is there then that person does need a day off and it's no surprise they'd choose Sunday in most cases. Below a certain business size and in industries where being closed weekends or Sundays is the norm it's also difficult to find competent staff willing to work weekends. Places like tire shops and vets don't have the massive nationwide apparatus to systematically dehumanize their staff into accepting enslavement to The Company the way Big Retail does.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2022 14:55
|
|
|
It's honestly ridiculous that my store went back to 9s-9p operating hours. When the store was running 10a-7p during 2020 we were well staffed and had plenty of folks to actually do what we needed, including the extra bullshit heaped upon us while still handling customer service.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2022 15:30
|
|
|
Honestly I'm surprised the food 4 less I worked out still has yet to revert to being a 24 hour store. Though seeing what they were doing when I left I'm sure thats just because they don't want to pay people to work those hours. Speaking of my employment, factory isn't gonna work out. My back is far too hosed up, I know its gonna go back lifting boxes of tomatoes, some canned, some not, for 72 hours a week. I did however got a job offer working graveyard at a fast food place so I'm looking forward to that. They even asked if I'm good for full time! .... Actually I tried applying to a nearby Target. Apparently someone with a decade of retail, who worked cashier, floor, garden, cart pusher and inbound receiver who is fork lift certified with 24/7 availability isn't good enough to work at a Target. I mean drat, I figured that I worked at a grocery store would've secured me a position in the food section that they explicitly had a listing for. Guess I have been humbled Leal fucked around with this message at 16:01 on Mar 28, 2022 |
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2022 15:55
|
|
|
Did you apply at Target unsuccessfully like 10 years ago, because as far as I know they still permanently blacklist anyone who fails their ridiculous Retail Drone Programming test.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2022 16:08
|
|
|
remember: they're called ♡~☆~guests~☆~♡
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2022 20:10
|
|
|
Alkydere, I have a question for you. Perhaps you might not know the answer, or the other Amazon goon in here might. My wife ordered, on Saturday, a 4-pack of Energizer CR-2032 batteries. Yesterday, we received, instead, a yellow 6-ring planner/address book binder thing. The latter was absolutely nowhere on the order confirmation, the former absolutely was. How in the gently caress did someone miss that?
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2022 20:38
|
|
|
D34THROW posted:Alkydere, I have a question for you. Perhaps you might not know the answer, or the other Amazon goon in here might. Check the barcode on the item you received instead. 95% of work at Amazon is "scan the barcode, continue on if it makes the machine happy". So someone, not paying attention, scanned the barcode on the planner, computer went "beep!" and things continued normally for the packer. Either something is wrong with the barcode itself, or there may be a stray barcode sticker on the product (or in the packaging you received if it fell off). I remember a twitter thread a while back where somebody wanted to order a bunch of boxes from Amazon and would get a single box of what he ordered + a bunch of stuff inside. Turned out a vendor had also bought the same bulk boxes and then shipped their inventory back to Amazon but the vendor never removed the Amazon barcode sticker (called an ASIN) from the boxes so a lot of their inventory was marked as a pack of bulk boxes. Alternate answer: the packer was likely new and not doing one piece flow. I've seen a packer having an anxiety attack (completely justifiable: you've just realized you work at Amazon) grab an item from the tote of work, scan it, put it down, build a box, get confused, put a second item from their tote in the box, get confused, build a second box, put a third item in it, put the barcode for the first box on the third box with the second item in it and send it down the line. He'd freak out and start doing that within 5 minutes of me walking away after coaching him and getting him to relax every time and then I'd have to come in with the relaxing voice. Dude ended up having an anxiety attack, collapsing, coming back a month later and he was happy as could be pushing carts of empty totes.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2022 21:14
|
|
|
Instead of office chair, package contained bobcat. Would not buy again.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2022 21:44
|
|
|
ASIN and sticker were correct for the item which led to more questions. Anxiety attack makes sense, I would freak too  Thanks!
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2022 23:02
|
|
|
My husband once ordered an $8 piece of plastic and ended up with a high end light saber replica. We sent it back but it was cool to mess with for an evening.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2022 23:05
|
|
|
Yeah, as said the packer was likely loving up in some way or another. I can think of various ways on each pack process how it would happen. The odd thing is that CR-2032 batteries have to go through either AFE or Singles Large/Mix due to being lithium batteries and therefore hazmat. They need the lithium labels on them or the department of transporation gets grumpy. That means two things which honestly confuse me: 1) they'd have to go in a box and the box that would fit the batteries (I'm assuming a "20", the smallest box we have tall enough for the hazmat label) would definitely not fit what sounds like a notebook sized planner (a "50") 2) Those lines have scales on them and a packet of batteries wouldn't weigh the same amount as a planner. The package should have been kicked out. The alternate explanation is somehow the shipping labels got mixed which is entering "wtf?" territory.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2022 23:13
|
|
|
I ordered a Macbook once and got 2 bottles of seemingly high end soy sauce.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2022 23:41
|
|
|
I am now reminded of the pack of Chips Ahoy cookies that were in my post office's Amazon drop with a label put on the wrapper. No box or mailer. Just a naked pack of cookies with a shipping label on it. The cookies were smashed to hell, we put a "received in damaged condition" stamp on it, gave it to the carrier, and they delivered it.
|
|
#
?
Mar 29, 2022 01:29
|
|
|
Alkydere posted:Yeah, as said the packer was likely loving up in some way or another. I can think of various ways on each pack process how it would happen. Everything else in the package was correct, it wasn't just the batteries in that one; the re-shipped batteries were indeed in a 20. It had the lithium-ion warning labels. Except instead of this (at 0.78 oz), this (at 6.7 oz, or almost 9 times as heavy) shipped instead. 
|
|
#
?
Mar 29, 2022 15:01
|
|
|
Star Man posted:I am now reminded of the pack of Chips Ahoy cookies that were in my post office's Amazon drop with a label put on the wrapper. No box or mailer. Just a naked pack of cookies with a shipping label on it. The cookies were smashed to hell, we put a "received in damaged condition" stamp on it, gave it to the carrier, and they delivered it. that's one i learned from the "things I've seen at work thread" to save on packaging, just slap a lable on the literal item and watch it get destroyed in the amazon warehouse
|
|
#
?
Mar 29, 2022 15:30
|
|
|
Meanwhile the actual pack of CR2032s came pre-wrapped in a bespoke little bubble wrap envelope with the ASIN label on it
|
|
#
?
Mar 29, 2022 15:40
|
|
|
D34THROW posted:Everything else in the package was correct, it wasn't just the batteries in that one; the re-shipped batteries were indeed in a 20. It had the lithium-ion warning labels. Except instead of this (at 0.78 oz), this (at 6.7 oz, or almost 9 times as heavy) shipped instead. Oh okay, so it was an AFE package (Amazon Fulfillment Engine, i.e. multiple items) that means something got juggled. I was thinking of something far bigger when when you said a planner, I could see that being about right. The code might have been on something else, or the packer grabbed an extra item out of the chute, scanned the batteries but didn't put them in and put the extra item in the box instead. Or some other mistake. Anyways a little lesson about Amazon. A container is a pallet, a tote, a chute, the box we're sending to a customer, etc. Anything that can contain items. There are millions of them. Containers have two inventories: The physical inventory of what we in the prime material universe actually see in it and the virtual inventory that the computer thinks is in the box. We discovered 8 new inventories last night and I guarantee you at least one problem solver probably chucked their scanner in rage. 8 out of millions. You see, we handle a lot of lithium batteries at my facility. Lithium batteries are known for two things: holding a lot of power and bursting into flames. So the department of transportation requires we put hazmat labels on the boxes containing them. There's 4 battery labels, each with two barcodes. They look like this:  All those barcodes say is "UN3481TopBar" and "UN3481BottomBar", and all they exist is as a checksum for the label printer. The label printer will scan the shipment's barcode, go "Oh, this is a hazmat box, does it have hazmat labels?" If it sees those barcodes it prints out the label and sends it on. If it doesn't it rejects it and the box needs to be manually handled. All container types are very carefully protected in the system, every web tool we have that can interact with containers and their inventory beyond just reading whats in them is very carefully protected on what is and isn't a valid type of container to interact with. But the Hazmat labels aren't containers, therefore no one thought to protect them. So virtual inventory can be shoved in and pulled out of them willy-nilly. Me upon learning about this from the incredibly irate problem solver who discovered this: 
|
|
#
?
Mar 29, 2022 20:34
|
|
|
Having worked with the problem solve dev teams a bit, I actually learned that the apps capable of creating containers virtually don't refer to a central set of rules for container name formats. It's up to each app to enforce the naming scheme (so csX prefix for inbound cases, tsX prefix for totes, sp prefix for shipping packages, etc.). This means a buggy app can create its container type of choice with an arbitrary name and there is nothing to stop this. Even valid-looking container names in one app may not be valid in another, because their rulesets are not exactly the same. It is then entirely possible that other apps that are less buggy won't be able to interact with container "b" (yes, I have seen a virtual container that was just the letter "b") and everything is virtually stuck in there.
|
|
#
?
Mar 29, 2022 22:00
|
|
|
As someone who knows a thing or two about programming...I 100% honestly believe you and it makes sense and more or less what I felt was happening. It still makes my brain hurt. Also...hehehe, a container "b", the back key in the web app menu (that doesn't work half the time). Yup, sounds entirely plausible sadly. Even better since FC Research won't let you check it because FC Research doesn't let you put less than 3 letters in the field.
|
|
#
?
Mar 29, 2022 22:52
|
|
|
I finished ISS tickets early, was tired and decided I should probably go home before I got roped into something. Right as I am letting my manager know, the Transfer-In PA comes up to report that someone on days had received and then immediately reconciled a trailer. Reconcile starts the process of deleting the inventory that was not physically present. So now all the inventory is being deleted and days decided not to start trying to fix any of it. Brave choice given that the one who hit reconcile will be on the hook for those deletions if they go through. There is unfortunately no "un-reconcile" button to hit for these kind of gently caress-ups, so it falls to problem solve to reactivate each case label. There's a 3-day grace-period to recover the inventory on a per-container basis before the deletions are final. If the grace period passes, each item will then need to be manually added back to inventory, so there is some incentive to fix this sooner rather than later. Problem solve isn't meant to take a whole truck of inventory being detoured to them so this will slow the whole dock down quite a bit. My manager graciously offered me the option of staying to help fix it or taking the VTO she had just got approved for me, while holding out the scanner for my badge. Wasn't going to just leave her hanging (and I basically never get a VTO opportunity anymore), so I went home. Godspeed dayshift on fixing your own mess (prediction: they will not fix their own mess). Edit: Oh yeah, this happened: https://twitter.com/amazonlabor/status/1509934286727749675 Yuwe fucked around with this message at 19:59 on Apr 1, 2022 |
|
#
?
Apr 1, 2022 19:25
|
|
|
The only way Days will ever learn is by being forced to fix their own fuckups. Days will never learn: they'll just quit and be replaced by fresh idiots. It's well known at my site if you go from Nights to Days you'll probably immediately be made into a problem solver. Also the best thing about the Amazon unionization is that one of the union leaders thanked Bezos for going into space and giving them time to unionize. Hitting the Billionaire right in his weakspot: his ego. 
|
|
#
?
Apr 1, 2022 23:45
|
|
|
they're playing music from Heavy Metal on our radio now  https://youtu.be/02nAH_oAjeg https://youtu.be/AsLyG6A13f4
|
|
#
?
Apr 2, 2022 02:16
|
|
|
I once ordered a needle felting pen from Amazon and received a fancy fountain pen instead. Close but not quite
|
|
#
?
Apr 2, 2022 09:57
|
|
|
Is there a fast food parallel to this thread? Finished my first day and uh... Apparently I was hired as a shift lead, complete with a manager code.
|
|
#
?
Apr 2, 2022 13:33
|
|
|
Today we had a glitch in our system. Every time someone attempted to purchase an avocado; it required a supervisor override at the register to scan it. I was the only person with said supervisor privileges in the store. Avocados are cheap, and super popular.
|
|
#
?
Apr 2, 2022 13:38
|
|
|
Leal posted:Is there a fast food parallel to this thread? Finished my first day and uh... Apparently I was hired as a shift lead, complete with a manager code. I just alternate between here and the restaurant industry thread and that about covers it.
|
|
#
?
Apr 2, 2022 13:57
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 10, 2024 12:06 |
|
|
Leal posted:Is there a fast food parallel to this thread? Finished my first day and uh... Apparently I was hired as a shift lead, complete with a manager code.
|
|
#
?
Apr 2, 2022 14:08
|
|
