The Quick Draw, The Slug, The Wanderer, and The Vet

Sometimes running a store feels like running the United Nations because you are constantly being forced to deal with so many different personalities. You have to some how manage to make everybody happy, and get a good and accurate count.
Over the years I’ve discovered there are four types of auditors. The Quick Draw, The Slug, The Wanderer, and The Vet.

The Quick Draw – This is an auditor that can count fast, but is reckless and wanton. They are inaccurate 90% of the time, and they only care about hitting their APH. This auditor can easily tack on another two hours to your closeout as you're forced to run around the store recounting all of the areas they miscounted. The Quick Draw is usually young, cocky and unreliable. They tends to be praised by upper management for their speed and are often given preferential treatment. While they tend to have many negative characteristics, they can be quite handy in a grocery store. However, their biggest downfall is that they are unreliable and often forget to show up to stores.

The Slug- This auditor is usually one of the slowest counter in the district. He or she is always the last person left counting. This auditor always takes his or her time, and will go above and beyond the call of duty to make sure that they give you an accurate count. The Slug is often older (usually retired), humble, and very reliable. In my district, Slugs were unappreciated. They were always the last to be scheduled, if scheduled at all, and the AMs always talked about how slow they were (even to their face). This was ironic since these were the people they often called when their Super Stars (The Quick Draws) didn’t bother to show up.

The Wanderer- This is the auditor that always seems to be wandering around the store. You assign them a place to count, but somehow they end up on the other side of the store. They always manage to disappear in larger inventories, and when you finally catch up with them, they swear that’s where you told them to count. They somehow manage to make every event a long journey. If they need to change lasers, or get yellow tags it takes them ten or fifteen minutes because they have to stop and chit chat with half the store, and they always have a perfectly good explanation for why they’re not where they’re suppose to be. The weird thing is, they always manage to count a lot of merchandise, but where they count is a mystery.

The Vet - Finally, there’s The Vet. This is the auditor that has been with the company for several years. The Vet can count fast and accurately, doesn’t like to be in an inventory any longer than necessary, and doesn’t like drama. Vets also tend to make inventories a lot of fun. They tend to know when an inventory is dragging so they will loosen up and crack a few jokes to put everyone at ease. Or when an inventory is not going well, so they push themselves harder to spark the rest of the crew. The Vet can also make a TL job a lot easier because they are just as experienced and can help out when you are in a store full of new auditors.

Now given a choice, I would want to be in a store with nothing but Vets, followed by Slugs. I’d even take a Wanderer, but The Quick Draws tend to be nothing but trouble because they always think they know better than everybody else. This was really a big problem in the district a few years ago when we had an AM who gave out gray shirts like they were candy. Every flashy new kid with quick fingers that came into the district wanted one, and they were willing to do anything to get it. This made for a lot of problems and led to the nickname that we gave to the people the AM favored. We called them "Golden Children" and boy did they earn their name. Fortunately, they all somehow managed to hang themselves and are no longer working for the district. The sad thing is, their behavior cost us a lot of really good people.

Well that’s all for now, thanks for reading and I hope you’ll come back.

Nobody Told Me The Job Would Be This Hard

I was really cocky when I first became a team leader (okay I'm still cocky, but that's another story), but I soon learned that being a team leader presents a lot of challenges. Somehow you have to try and manage a group of auditors, deal with the store manager, and count. This is why I hate the APH. Now how a person is supposes to do all of the above and still manage to have decent numbers is beyond me, and apparently it was beyond the rest of the district too because we rarely hit our numbers, and were always at the bottom of the division.

We did manage to hit decent percentages every once in a while, and the DM would dole out a few complements here and there (which was rare since whenever anything went wrong it was anybody else's fault but his) giving us some hope that the district was finally going to turn around, but somehow that next month we were back at the bottom once again. It may have had something to do with the way we managed to hit those percentages. Sometimes it was done at the expense of the customer (we had some of the lowest PIQUA’S in the division), and sometimes it was done at the expense of the auditor.

I can't tell you how many times my DM or one of the AM's would call and tell me to push the auditors to go faster. I mean most of the time the auditors were either too tired and worn out from working so much (we only had about 35 experienced auditors in the district, and a lot of the anytime people were working between 60 and 80 hours a week), or they were new and only had a few inventories under their belt. Given the small amount of training they received (we all know a couple hours in the office with a machine and a piece of paper is nothing like being in an actual store), it was ridiculous to think that pushing them to count faster was going to work.
I can't tell you how many times people quit in the middle of a store. I remember this one guy who walked up and asked me what time it was. I told him it was 12 O'clock (we started the store at 5 in the morning), well he took off his machine handed it to me and said, "I was only looking for a part time job," and walked out of the store. Classic.

I seriously think a lot of the problems in the district came from having poorly trained auditors, but how can you take the time to train an auditor when you’re expected to hit a percentage in the store, and hit your APH?

It wasn’t always like that, from what some of the old timers told me, back in the day there was no such thing as an APH. A swarm of auditors came into a store, counted it, and then left. They had very few if any accuracy problems, and no store lasted more than three or four hours. I was also told they didn’t worry about how much money a person made when they scheduled stores (apparently a person who makes too much money will kill a stores percentage. I don’t know if this is true, but it’s what my DM told us so I’m inclined to believe it), so there were always experienced auditors in the store. This took a lot of pressure off of the team leaders because they didn’t have to worry about being in the store with all inexperienced auditors.

This lack of experience often made for a lot of problems. At the time these problems caused major issues, but looking back on them later, they made great horror stories to tell when we were all sitting around complaining. Some of the incidents often left us scratching our heads and wondering if the person was actually suppose to be out amongst the rest of the general population, and at other times we knew that it was just a case of brain freeze. I mean we’ve all had our bad day in an inventory. You know the day when no matter what you do, nothing goes right. Since I’m going to be ragging on a lot of other people for their mistakes, I thought I’d start out by talking about one of my own.

It happened in my first grocery store. Now up until that point, I had only done scanning inventories, and very few of them required me to use quantity, so I was like a fish out of water. In this particular grocery store, you had to put in a shelf number before you did each four foot section. I started off great for the first five shelves (there were a total of eighteen), but after that I forgot to change shelves. Well I went and rayed and went to my next area where I forgot to change shelves as well.

Now don’t think I’m trying to make excuses, but the reason I forgot was because I was so worried about keeping up with the other auditors (who had all been doing grocery stores for a lot longer that I had) that I tried to increase my speed. At the end of the night when I was pulling yellow tags, I walked down the first isle I had done, and noticed the AM and a team leaders standing in front of my area having a serious discussion. I waited for the AM to leave, and then I walked over to the team leader to find out what was happening. The team leader turns to me and says, “Some idiot F’d up this area.” I didn’t want to tell her it was me for obvious reasons so I just eased away and finished pulling yellow tags.

After the yellow tags had been pulled, I left as fast as they would sign me out because I knew they would eventually look up the Id number and find out it was me. No one ever said anything to me about it, so I guess it wasn’t as bad as I thought, but hey what can I say? It was my first grocery store. Needless to say, I never made that mistake again. I have however had many brain freezes over the years, but I can usually catch them before anyone else does so as not to embarrass myself. Well that's all for now, thanks for taking the time to read my ramblings, and I hope you'll come back.

The Making of A Team Leader

As I mentioned in my first blog, there were a number of reasons I wanted to become a Team leader. However, the main reason was because I thought I could do a better job than the clowns that were already team leaders. Being in one of their stores was like being in a three-ring circus. There was always some drama. I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that they weren’t very nice to us or the store personnel. I can’t tell you how many times one of the store managers asked how we could work with these people. I also wondered myself.

I think part of the problem with the team leaders was the way they were chosen. There were two ways to become a Team leader. One way was to be young, male and count fast. The other way was too be available anytime, and to be willing to do and go wherever the DM wanted you to. This was due to the fact that both Area Managers (AM’s) were in their early twenties, and tended to want to promote people closer to their own age (because they also hung out together). The funny thing is, it always ended up backfiring on them because their “buddies” would always end up taking advantage of their friendship.

The other problem was that the Team leaders tended to take their job way too seriously. I mean okay you’re in charge, but does that mean you have to treat everybody else like their crap? Refusing to talk to new auditors, yelling, talking down to people. Some even went as far as threatening people with their job, which was dumb given the districts high turn overrate. It was all so crazy. After all, these were the same people they needed to count the store. So it seemed kind of counter productive to me.

The sad part is their rudeness often backfired because most people (except for new auditors who didn’t know any better, or their buddies) refused to work with them. It got so bad the scheduler would never tell you who was running the store (even if you asked), he would always say he hadn’t found anyone to run the store yet (yeah right). Then of course you’d show up at the store and there they were. This was sometimes quite funny since there were people in the district that absolutely hated each other, and they made no attempt to hide their disgust when they found out the person they hated was running the store.

Nevertheless, I still wanted to be a Team leader. I guess part of it was the cool gray polo they give you, or maybe it was the stress and drama that made it so appealing. I can’t decide. Seriously, I think it was the sincere belief that I was ten million cabillion times smarter than those yahoos (which I still believe), and could run a better inventory. So, since I wasn’t young and male, and had a fulltime job, I knew I needed to figure out a way to get in good with management. It turned out it wasn’t as hard as I originally thought.

Now I wouldn’t recommend this to anybody, but I decided to increase my speed by any means necessary. In order to do so, I had to throw caution to the wind. I stopped doing piece counts after I finished counting areas, and did a lot of cherry picking (yes I know it’s wrong, but hey I was on a mission). If we were in a big store like Sears, I always made sure I counted in clothing (since that was where I counted the fastest). I also made sure I counted the largest areas in quantity inventories, and I never counted an area that looked like it would slow me down.
It didn’t take long for them to start noticing how much faster I was counting and they even started letting me count grocery stores, which very few people in the district got to do.

Once I saw my plan was working, I stepped up my game. I started hanging around the AM’s and chit chatting. This worked even better than I thought because a lot of the Team leaders started to talk to me too. Before I knew it, people were requesting me in their inventories. I never refused. Even if the person running the inventory was the biggest jerk in the world, I still went. It wasn’t long before I started staying to help close out a few inventories, and then I learned how to use the “great and mighty” portable.

Finally I went to see the DM and ask about becoming a Team leader. Much too my surprise, he had heard a lot about me from the AM’s and Team leaders, and was more than happy to have me as a Team leader. I began working on the Team leader modules that same day, and then took the Team leader training class two weeks later. The following week I was given a gray shirt! I was officially a Team leader... and it was just in time for January.

The Power Of The Gray

I decided to start this blog because I’ve seen a lot of blogs about Rgis, but none of them ever talk about the real glue of a district… the Team leaders. In my former district we were referred to as gray shirts (hence my blog title).

I first became a team leader because in my district, which will not be mentioned to save the innocent (me), and protect the guilty. Being a gray shirt is the most coveted position an auditor can hold. It makes you a super hero… no a god. A gray shirt was like gold. It could get you a lot of perks, and let gave you lots of advantages mere mortals (the burgundy's) could only dream about. And management only asked for one little thing in exchange... your soul.

At the time I thought it was well worth it since I knew that gray shirt had super powers. It had the ability to make you invisible to hostile managers who treat you like crap when you go help out in their district (I’ve often wondered why managers act this way. I mean if someone comes to our district to help out when we're short, we bend over backwards to make them feel welcomed because they were saving our butts).

Being a team leader also has the power to get you more hours, keep you from having to count crappy areas, and the biggest perk of all… it makes you immune from following the rules everyone else is expected to follow. This however wasn’t the only reason I wanted to be a team leader (because I would never take advantage of a situation. cough…cough), my second motivation was the mean, rotten, evil team leaders that made the job more difficult. These were the meanest people I had ever met. As a matter a fact, I use to try and see if their tails and horns were showing through their uniforms.

They were so vicious, and when I arrived the district was in chaos, and we were at the very bottom of our division. Not only was the district struggling, but everyone was full of hatred, bitterness and resentment. As a result we were short auditors, and every day brought about a new crisis. So I thought if I could just become a team leader and treat people like human beings maybe things would improve (can you say naive).

Well that didn’t happen, but being a team leader turned out to be a lot of fun, and a big pain in the butt. I had my good inventories (in and out in less than 3 hours), and my bad inventories (short 5 auditors and in the store 12 hours). I’ve worked with some really awesome counters, and some real lousy counters. I had my days of loving the job, and days where I wanted to quit.

Nevertheless, my experiences at RGIS, both good and bad, were a blast and I had a lot of fun. I met a lot of crazy, strange, evil, mean and wonderful people. As a team leader you have to deal with a lot of different personalities and you also get to see a lot of strange things. Everything from auditors who bring drama to work, managers who breakdown in January, and crazy store managers that freak out because they get busted for stealing. If you’ve ever worked at Rgis then you know what I’m talking about, but hey it’s all a part of the job.