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.