I hate summer

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Or more specifically...I hate handling summer merchandise.

Summer merchandise means patio furniture that comes in ginormous boxes and requires us to rip apart the entire backroom to make space for it because the backroom's so damn small. It also means trying to unload stacked plastic patio chairs, which come 24 or 36 to a stack and are too high to fit under the ceiling (I say my store was constructed as either a joke or an exercise in how not to build one). When those stacked chairs come in we either have to tip them to move them and hope they don't fall or else unstack them so we can fit them under the ceiling.

It also means pallets of potting soil/mulch/lava rock/bark for outdoor lawn and garden, which have to be unloaded by forklift and taken outside right away, thus disrupting truck unloads.

It also means stocking ugly-ass garden sculptures and statues, which are about as overpackaged as Christmas ornaments. Styrofoam chunks in your hair and clothes=not fun.

We have 3 trucks this week so all this crap is going to be coming in.

Seriously, preparing for summer and lawn and garden stuff is just about as big a pain in the anal regions as Christmas.

[Ree]

I hear you on that!!!

I keep saying that the manager must think the warehouse walls are made of elastic with all the crap that's coming in.

We at least have an offsite warehouse for overflow, but now, he's decided to stop sending it over because he is going to start setting it up in the next week or so, and that means all of the rest of it will be coming back over.

Six-piece sets in huge boxes that won't fit in a bunk; stacking chairs that don't really stack very well; lounges that take up way too much room because only the top part folds; ugly lawn ornaments where every second one is broken

Ah, the joy.

[theredbaron47]

I hear both of you on this one. While I never worked stock at the hardware store, I always knew when truck day had come and went ( every Thursday, I do believe it was ), as the stockroom would have a very narrow walkway shoveled out amongst boxes of stock. And God forbid it was a holiday season; you wouldn't even be able to walk back there without fear of something falling on you.

I'm sorry to hear about your plight, IPF.

[blas]

Summer stuff already? There IS hope!

I saw spring fashions start taking over stores at the mall and I nearly had a heart attack. Oh thank heaven this curse called winter is almost over!

[Gurndigarn]

Summer stuff already? There IS hope!

I saw spring fashions start taking over stores at the mall and I nearly had a heart attack. Oh thank heaven this curse called winter is almost over!

Yeah, but couldn't they have had the common courtesy to wait for spring before putting out the summer stuff? I find that it's like Christmas... starting in September this year. Give it a rest! I'ld like to find Spring stuff, with possibly a trickle of winter stuff remaining...

[mattm04]

My store was also an exercise in how to not design a store. Our back room is also the receiving area. U-boars of product have to go into a hallway. To more pallets down said hallway, to the sales floor, you have to move some of the u-boats. We only have three receiving doors for trucks. One is always occupied by a storage trailer, since the back room is not big enough. We usually have an empty trailer sitting at one of the the other doors for empty pallets, cardboard bales, pallet wrap plastic bales, broken u-boats/electronic recycling and product to go back to the DC. That leave ONE door to receive loads most of the time.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

At least you get a storage trailer. My store has but one storage container, and that's used to store extra fixtures.

We used to have more but then corporate decided they didn't want to be shelling out for rent on storage containers so we lost all but one of them. We'll get 2 or 3 containers for Black Friday and Christmas, but they'll be emptied and gone before Christmas even comes.

Saw on the manifest for tonight's truck that a metric fuckton of patio furniture is coming in. We cleared out a big space for it by moving a bunch of barstools to a different area where there's not much room to expand--and then today on the furniture report I see we have 10 new styles of barstools coming in shortly.

[bean]

Summer stuff already? There IS hope!

Better yet, I was trying to buy WINTER clothing yesterday. You know, since this is... WINTER. I was actually trying to buy clothes in season!

I never did find thermal pants, but I did find winter gloves on closeout ($3.50 for a heavy pair!). However, you can already buy summer clothing around here - shorts, tank tops, swimwear, sandals, etc. Yeah, I know most of Texas doesn't have a real winter, but this is just retarded. WalMart around here doesn't even stock coats right now.

I'm just waiting for Christmas decor to start showing up around Valentine's, and winter wear to show up in April. It almost seems like that when I try to buy shorts these days.

[DGoddessChardonnay]

My store was also an exercise in how to not design a store. Our back room is also the receiving area. U-boars of product have to go into a hallway. To more pallets down said hallway, to the sales floor, you have to move some of the u-boats. We only have three receiving doors for trucks. One is always occupied by a storage trailer, since the back room is not big enough. We usually have an empty trailer sitting at one of the the other doors for empty pallets, cardboard bales, pallet wrap plastic bales, broken u-boats/electronic recycling and product to go back to the DC. That leave ONE door to receive loads most of the time.

You just described the backroom at my store, except we are supposed to have 2 docks side to side, but only one available b/c of an empty trailer parked at one of them.

And we are also starting to see summer stuff coming in . . . for some reason, I've got a stack of kiddie step stools parked on top of my pallet of totes.

And I suspect we may have more stashed that was left over from LAST year on that useless trailer that sits parked (@$400 a month, but that's more of a Morons in Management rant.)

But, with the Kitty, warehouse logic is: if it ain't there, it ain't our problem. It becomes the stores' problem.

And it's still February.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

But, with the Kitty, warehouse logic is: if it ain't there, it ain't our problem. It becomes the stores' problem

That's probably the way it is with just about any retail distribution center.

Our DC can't figure out what merchandise we're supposed to have or not have. We've put items on clearance because it's no longer going to be in our planogram, sold them all, and then gotten them in later on trucks.

We had a collection of furniture--tables, a TV stand and an audio tower--that we put on clearance because our furniture pad isn't big enough to accommodate that collection plus a new collection we were going to get in. We sold every piece of furniture we had from that collection, and then months later that same furniture started showing up on our trucks again.

Manager sent a note up to the DC telling them to stop sending us that furniture. DC said "our computer shows you carry this, and computers don't make mistakes." It took a few more e-mails before they finally caught on.

And of course, we had to assemble the stuff and find a place to sell it at clearance price, as opposed to loading it back on the truck so it could be sent to a store that carries that grouping at full price.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Please kill me

On tonight's truck we got absolutely slammed with patio furniture. The entire right-hand side of the trailer from the door to the nose was patio furniture, with additional items placed randomly on the left-hand side where the conveyor belt goes.

We have all the pieces necessary to put up displays for all the collections and have enough left over for one complete set of each. However corporate likes us to have 3-6 complete sets of each collection on hand (a complete set being a dining table, 4 or 6 chairs, an umbrella, and an umbrella stand). But each collection also has add-on pieces like side tables and different seating options (swivel rockers or chaise lounges as opposed to the regular dining chairs, for example)

I can tell this is going to be a clusterfuck of Biblical proportions. Already the area we set aside for patio furniture is completely full, or at least as full as we can get it and still carry out merchandise in a safe manner, and we are going to have more coming in.

Gas grills and firepits have not come in yet; when they do there will be no place to put them. There is also talk that corporate wants to bring back basketball hoops, which we discontinued some years ago even though they sold pretty well.

On top of this, we are still getting in new indoor furniture items but not clearing out a lot of the clearance items in that department, largely because those items are cheap and crappy or ugly (evidently, espresso-finished furniture is NOT the in thing right now).

And remember, I have to count all this stuff every week to make sure the pull tags match our counts. That will be nigh impossible to do when everything is thrown on top of everything else and nothing is neat.

In summary, for the next 6 months it will suck incredibly hard to be me. Also the backroom may well do its best Mr. Creosote impression and it's anybody's guess what will be the waffer-theen meent that triggers it.

[Blade_Raver]

Summer stuff? I like to buy funnoodles so I can make boffer weapons Good ol' mock medieval combat ftw!