Friday and Saturday nights are MY nights at the store.
I’ve discussed before how my work week is skewed from the norm and while the calendar says ‘Friday’ to me it is really full-on nose to the grindstone Monday.
I am the closing CSS for the store both Friday and Saturday nights, which means I’m in charge of all the cashiers (more technical term is ‘front-end’) for the evening.
This past Friday night was fairly typical. I was down at the front registers of the store, which is far and away the busiest area in the whole store. I was fortunate to have another CSS with me, as it was only 6pm. I didn’t have to be on my own till 8pm.
Myself, the other CSS and two cashiers were ringing our little hearts out at the registers when I see a tired looking middle-aged man approach the counters from the side area- near footwear. My first thought is he is looking to cut the line. He doesn’t try to jump in however; he taps one of my co-workers on the shoulder and says wearily, “We can’t find anyone to help us in footwear. Is there anything you can do?”
Let me explain about the footwear department. There are several large glaring problems.
1. The footwear department operates under the hopelessly outdated ‘Solo Service’ method instead of the more practical, ‘Self Service.’ Think about when you walk into DFW Shoes, or Payless. A customer can walk around and see the shoes, and then there are stacks of that shoe in different sizes all around. You pull out different sizes from the stack and try them on, make a selection and go on your way. That is ‘Self Service.’ At DSG with ‘Solo Service,’ the customer can see the selection of shoes displayed all over the department, but has no access to the shoes without the help of a sales associate. The sales associate must find out from the customer what type of shoe, color and size they want, then go into the back stock, find that shoe and bring it back, then put any shoes not selected back away in the back stock. This is a HORRIBLY SLOW process.
2. Footwear is always understaffed. Especially with the Solo Service method, if there is not a sales associate for every customer, those customers quickly become irritated with being ignored or having to wait a long time for their shoes.
3. WE SELL TOO MANY KINDS OF SHOES. I have been into the footwear back stock and it is not a place I’d like to go to again. It’s a two story hell filled with 1000s of shoes. There is no organizational system that I have been able to glean and there are ladders haphazardly stuck everywhere. Finding the right shoe in less than 10 minutes is near impossible.
Add into the mix it is Friday night on a holiday weekend as school is just starting back up. The footwear department is inundated with 30 to 50 customers milling around… all to be assisted by a whopping 4 footwear employees. This poor middle-aged man’s situation is dismal and doomed right from the start.
As he stood there in front of the registers I’m not sure what came over me. Maybe because he had his grey-brown hair cut like my dad’s, or I connected with the expression on his face that he really, really didn’t want to be spending his Friday evening out shoe shopping in my store. People are so rude to me all the time that when a human being actually reached out for help in a feeble sort of way my heart just broke over the whole situation.
“I’ll come help you, sir.”
I wasn’t even aware those words were coming out of my mouth until I had already said them. My fellow cashiers turned to look at me over their piles of clothes they were ringing out with raised eyebrows. I know what they were thinking. I can see the long line of people standing in front the counter. But I also see this man standing there too, looking quite forlorn. And darn it, I’m in charge of the store tonight and there’s another CSS here so I say I get to go do some of the lost art of customer service.
“You guys can hold down the fort, I’ll be back as soon as I help out,” I said, nodding my head over to the customers in front of me to redirect them to other lines.
“You’ll never make it out of that department. Don’t stay there all night,” the other CSS warned me under his breath. He folded a pink Under Armour shirt crisply and shoved it into a bag. “You have to be back here before I have to leave.”
I nod.
Duh.
“I know,” I said in reply. And I left my register and went around the counter to the customer.
“Thank you,” he said, running a hand over his eyes. “We’ve been trying to find new cleats from my daughter but we can’t get anyone’s attention to help us. We’ve been over there quite a while.”
I follow him into the chaos.
At least at the registers, the craziness is organized. People wait in line, then they come to a counter, and the cashier rings them out. There may be 30 people in line, but they are all waiting there, single file. It is manageable. Footwear on the other hand gives me the beginnings of an ulcer just from the sight of it.
Kids are laying all over the floor with one shoe off and another on. Socks are strewn about and throw across every surface. Parents and kids pull sample shoes from shelves and carry them about, yelling out to anyone in a green polo. The footwear employees dash back and forth and all around carrying boxes and disappearing into the back stock. Kids chase each other around the displays to the blaring backdrop of the massive big screen TV tuned to ESPN.
I want to run away. Far, far away.
The family I’ve accidentally made my pet project is camped out in the girl’s cleat section. There’s a middle aged woman to go with the middle aged man and two girls- one looks to be a sophomore in high school, the other no more than 12. They actually seem normal. The mom and dad seem to be about the same age and they both appear to have all their original body parts they were born with. Neither one of the girls have those stupid neon feathers in their hair.
The older girl is sitting on the ground with a green Nike cleat on one foot and a black one on the other. The mother is crouched beside her squeezing the toes of the shoes. She looks up at our arrival.
“Oh thank God,” the mom mutters. “We’re trying on sample shoes because we can’t get anyone’s attention to get us anything.”
I try to let out some sort of apology for the busyness but before I can the father gestures to the highest cleat on the display wall.
“We want that shoe, in eight and a half, in black with silver stripes,” he says. I sidle to the wall around a barefoot two year old holding a hiking boot and look up.
I reach up. Immediate fail.
“Sir, can you help me reach?” I have to ask. The shoe is a good foot above my outstretched fingertips. The father obliges and now I’m holding the cleat in my hand.
Time for back stock.
The entrance to the footwear back stock is hidden behind a gracefully sloping blue wall that curves out docilely like it doesn’t conceal all high levels of shoe related terror. To get to the back stock you walk behind the arch and turn the corner to see footwear’s particular brand of hell.
The back stock is two stories tall and runs along the entire north side of the store. It is illuminated by sparse dim florescent tubes about sixty feet above what you actually need to see. The floor of the second level/ceiling of the first is a mesh metal grate accessed by metal ladders. The poor employee needs only to only to glance up to feel incredibly dwarfed by the stacks upon stacks of shoe boxes towering above.
I have no idea where to begin.
A stroke of good luck- one of the footwear guys jogs past with his own sample shoe.
“Hey! Where are the Elite Air cleats?” I holler at his retreating back.
“Upstairs, far left!” he replies without breaking stride.
“For girls?!” I clutch my cleat tight.
He doesn’t reply, he is too far gone, lost in the dimly lit depths.
I go with the only reference I have. I jog (there’s no walking in footwear back stock, you’ll never get anywhere) down the row till I find a ladder. The ladder is tilted to where it falls more into the ‘rickety steps’ category than a full on ladder. Either way, it is panicking to climb. I grasp the arm rails firmly. “I’m a cashier I have no business back here,” I half laughed half sighed.
I scramble to the second level. I can hear echoing hustling footsteps ringing off the metal grate floor from my co-workers somewhere around me. I whirl left.
I’m scanning the tags on the multitude of boxes looking for anything remotely like cleats. Ah-ha! I see the word ‘elite’ and zoom in. Jackpot.
“Eight and a half, eight and a half, black and silver…” I mutter like a crazy person (look what being in the back stock has done to me!) and run my fingers across the labels.
I can’t make sense of the color abbreviations. “Rd… must be red. What’s “Gr”? Is that ‘grey’ or ‘green’? Is “bl” ‘blue’ or ‘black’? Wouldn’t ‘blk” be black? I don’t see that one...” I know I don’t have the time to open every single box.
I quickly adopt a new strategy.
Forget color.
I start pulling out every 8 ½ I can get my hands on. In a few seconds I have a stack of four boxes. Shoeboxes are large and bulky to begin with and cleat boxes are even more massive. I gather them awkwardly in my arms and descend the ladder praying I don’t fall.
My prayers were answered. I peered around my armload to see a chink of yellow light through the gloom to my right. Outside world!
I stagger to it and exit… into a side stock room.
Darn!
A footwear employee is on his hands and knees digging through a pile of enormous orange Nike boxes.
He glances up at me. “How is it my fault this woman birthed a ginourmous son who wants size 14 cleats? Those are specialty cleats and she flat out said if I can’t find some she’s writing a note to my manager that I’m incompetent!” Without waiting for my answer (I don’t even know what I would say) he practically crawled into the deep shelving unit and pawed more boxes aside.
I backed out of the room.
Where’s the exit in here? I squint through the gloom. Why isn’t there decent lighting? It’s like a bad Cold War movie in this place.
I walk as fast as I can without dropping my boxes till I find another gap in the wall. I dash through and pop out about fifty feet from my original entrance. Oh well. I can see my little pet project family is still right where I left them. I also realize my original sample cleat is right where I left it… on the grate floor next to the stacks. Oops.
I deem the lost sample cleat as a casualty to the process. I weave my way through the crowded department floor back to the girl’s cleat section.
“I pulled every eight and a half I could find in the Elite Airs,” I stated as I unceremoniously dumped all the boxes at the teenage girl’s bare feet.
Without a word of thank you, the girl and her parents commenced opening all the boxes. There was no black and silver combo, but I had managed to obtain an all-black pair, an all-red pair, black ones with blue and green stripes, and royal blue with white stripes.
The girl took an immediate liking to the all-black pair and laced them up on her feet. She stood and bounced around on the balls of her feet and jogged a few steps.
“Do they pinch your toes? Rub the backs of your heels?” the girl’s mother fussed as her daughter kicked at a pretend soccer ball. “Do you want to try on the blue ones?”
The teenager plunked herself down on the floor and tapped the cleat’s toes together. “Nah, these are good. I like the all-black.” She yanked the cleats off and dropped them in their box.
“Thanks for your help,” the father said briskly, giving me a little wave. His daughter tucked her box under her arm, the mother gathered up the little girl and they all turned on their heels to join the throng at the front registers.
I was left standing there in the cleat section with three open boxes and all the cleats had been dumped out. I crouched down and pair up the cleats with their boxes. I look up to the front registers to see my fellow CSS giving me a loathing look over the Igloo cooler he was inspecting.
I put my hard obtained Elite Airs in a little stack under the wall display. With the sample cleat lost to humanity in the back stock there was no chance of that cleat being requested for the remainder of the night.
My venture into footwear had lasted 20 minutes.
I started walking back to my register post where I had to serve out a handful more of hours. Part of me wanted to find the family waiting in line and request they fill out a nice comment card for my manager about how helpful I was. Employees do that all the time and usually the customer doesn’t mind.
I didn’t feel like doing that this time. I guess I did a good deed, ‘above and beyond’ my job description if you will. But I didn’t feel great about anything. I was disappointed in the whole situation; the fact that so many people were here shopping and we had so few staff, the footwear ‘Solo Service’ system everyone hates, everyone knows it doesn’t work and yet it still remains. All these things add up to the detriment of the customer experience.
I know I am a ‘fixer.’ When I see a problem, I like to identify and implement a solution. Friday and Saturday nights at DSG are full of problems, and I don’t like the fact that there’s nothing I can do. Nothing except what I can.
No comments:
Post a Comment