Pit of Despair

[notalwaysright]

Tomorrow starts a month and a half long remodel to the store. It's long overdue, but I'm still dreading it, because we are staying open the whole time. Most things are moving, including the registers. The break room is the first thing to go; it's being demolished tomorrow. We are selling some of the fixtures, but corporate is making us reuse some, which is stupid. Everything in this store is old and icky. Why give us nice shiny new stuff to sit next to the yellowed, broken, rusty crap?

We are also losing some space because they are putting in a classroom. They are keeping our one person unisex bathroom, and not adding another one, which is insane. Probably not even getting a price checker, and people ask if we have one every single day. I'm happy they are expanding the break room, though.

I'm bracing myself for the complaints. We really should close for this. People lose their freaking minds when we move seasonal, or change the fabric flow. I can't even imagine how they'll act during this. Oh, and I'm predicting problems in the parking lot. I bet that the remodel crew parks right up front. We have a fairly small lot considering the business we do, so this could get ugly fast. We share the lot with another big box store (that doesn't do our volume, but still) so we could have issues with that as well.

[Trixie]

I feel your pain. My store went through this 4 years ago and I totally understand why people get divorced over remodeling projects. It was pure hell. Ours was about 2 months in total and during summer. There was a heatwave and they had the whole back opened up to move stuff in and out. One moronic worker broke one of the sprinkler heads right above where our lockers were. Luckily I guess my locker was low enough that nothing got very wet but other people weren't so lucky.

Good luck with all the chaos!

[Jay 2K Winger]

Pit of Despair

Don't even think ab--

(koffkoffahem)

Don't even think about trying to escape.

[EricKei]

That is the sound of Ultimate Suffering. It is the sound made by a person who has been slightly inconvenienced at a store, thus ruining his life forever.

[DeltaSierra]

Remodel?

Remodel???????

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means..

[taxguykarl]

Very inconceivable of you, DS.

[BearLeeBadenaugh]

I've been part of the remodel crew at a few stores. Flat out, it sucks. Especially if the place tries to stay open while the work was being done. My favorite remodel, as far as working out well, the general contractor took over one of the loading docks and brought in a semi trailer that we outfitted as the workshop. They also had more than enough parking, also at the rear, that we didn't have to inconvenience the customers more than necessary.


On the other hand, I've seen some horrible situations. Grocery store, we were putting in an entirely new register system, new lanes, new customer service desk, etc. Basically removing the front of the store and putting in all new. I still have nightmares about that remodel. They wouldn't close, not even for a day. Nor would they let us stay in the building overnight. Not only did we have to work around customers during business hours, but they "HAD" to have all of their registers operational, so we could only have one down at a time. Nevermind that some of those registers only recorded $50 or so of sales a day sometimes, they could have easily functioned on 3 lanes and service and we could have replaced 4 lanes at once, gotten everything set up and running on the new system, switch to those, then shut down the old one. Correcting the inventory and merging the databases, *shudder*.

[notalwaysright]

No one withstands The Machine.

They'll be doing overnights the majority of the time, thankfully. Not this week, though. Today was basically a lot of contractors and the project coordinator milling about, on phones, or looking at floorplans. I was disappointed at the lack of demolition. Our aprons are now hung up in the bathroom. It's gross.

Oh, oh, something positive! There are several price checkers on the new layout. Woooooooo!

[Javarod]

Ah yes, remodels, always fun. The Wallyworld i work at was expanded to a SuperCenter last year. That went mostly well since it expanded into the plaza, so most of the construction didn't impact anything, even dock usage as we gained two doors in the expansion, so they didn't have to take any of the existing. Of course considering that the selection was expanded before the store was fully finished, that meant a lot more stuff having to come through the existing doors. And every time i came in on my Monday i had to figure out where things were this time. Now we have a mixture of equipment and fixtures acquired over twenty or so years and two expansions (discount to discount plus to supercenter) including at least three colours of shelving and two types of price checkers.

[taxguykarl]

:Remodels
I had my own fun with that with this thread.

[wolfie]

The Wallyworld i work at was expanded to a SuperCenter last year. That went mostly well since it expanded into the plaza, so most of the construction didn't impact anything, even dock usage as we gained two doors in the expansion, so they didn't have to take any of the existing.

Was management competent enough to have the new docks be the FIRST things operational in the expansion? That way, trucks bringing materials to finish the expansion wouldn't be tying up docks that were needed for merchandise for the existing store.

Some years back, I was delivering office furniture (cubicle walls and such) to a hospital under construction. Needless to say, by the time they're putting in cubicles, things are getting pretty close to finished. The loading docks were to have hydraulic lifts (for varying heights of truck), and the concrete bollards to protect them from getting backed into were already installed. The lifts? Sorry, don't want to overwork them by bringing material across them - they're the last item. Instead, they had a couple 2x12s from the fixed part of the docks to the truck in order to bring material across. This meant that instead of taking off intact skids (fast), they had to break down the skids on the truck, carry the panels across the rickety bridge one at a time, and re-make skids on the dock. VERY slow unload.

[XCashier]

They are keeping our one person unisex bathroom, and not adding another one, which is insane. Probably not even getting a price checker, and people ask if we have one every single day.

Heh. We've got three clearly marked price checkers and nobody uses them; they all come to us and ask for prices! I even demonstrated to one customer how to use them and she gave me a very prissy, "Well, I shouldn't have to do that!" Gosh, I know it's so labor-intensive, shining a light on a label, but life's a bitch sometimes.

And I agree, the single bathroom is a stupid idea. While we have few male customers, we get enough to justify a men's room as well as a ladies'. (Wish they'd put a second sink in them, but oh well.)

[Jay 2K Winger]

Heh. We've got three clearly marked price checkers and nobody uses them; they all come to us and ask for prices! I even demonstrated to one customer how to use them and she gave me a very prissy, "Well, I shouldn't have to do that!" Gosh, I know it's so labor-intensive, shining a light on a label, but life's a bitch sometimes.

And yet, I bet they have a smart-phone with one of those shop-savvy apps that will scan barcodes for products and then find prices at various outlets in the area...

[notalwaysright]

Heh. We've got three clearly marked price checkers and nobody uses them; they all come to us and ask for prices!

Well, I found out we are also getting three price checkers! Since we're a college town, I suspect this will be helpful for the younger people, and utterly useless for the elderly and/or entitled folks who expect me to wait on them hand and foot.

In other news, progress is sloooooooooow. There's some kind of disconnect with the contractor in charge of demolishing the break room. It was supposed to happen Monday, and hadn't started when I left today. It's a combination of things. It seems the initial floorplans aren't complete, and there's a bunch of extra stuff (wires? pipes?) in the walls that he wasn't expecting. Also I heard him on the phone desperately trying to line people up to do drywall. We were supposed to have a finished break room by the end of the week. Hahaha. I won't even see the fun part (demolition!) since I'm not scheduled for a few days.

They rented a vacant store one door over to do staging, which is nice. There's a dozen or more people busy over there, not bothering us at all. We're getting new shopping carts, including the little ones, mesh bags instead of and handbaskets. However we have to keep our floor, which is a bummer, since it's ugly. Later I have some pics, I just have to decide how to post them.

[EricKei]

Heh. We've got three clearly marked price checkers and nobody uses them; they all come to us and ask for prices!

I was looking for a pricechecker at Voldemart today (had some big fat $10 candles on sale for $2.50 because they were seasonal, but most of them were still marked as full price), and after about 5 minutes of checking aisles, I gave up and asked a worker who was unloading stock -- only to stop myself halfway through and say, "That's one of them right above your head, isn't it..."