Shit’s been getting worse at work lately. We have been in a constant cutting of hours, to the point where some people can’t even be considered full time. This has been occurring company wide and not just in our own store. Company wide they got rid of over 100 full timers by offering them a part time position without benefits. Most probably did not accept.
Sales have fallen considerably in the five years that they have owned us. The sad fact is that they have absolutely no idea about retail and how to be successful in it. If your business is wholesale, then be in wholesale, stick to it and do it well. Don’t go sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong like into retail. The corporate stores are nothing more than bitches for the warehouse. We are the dumping ground to make the warehouse look better. Why have sales fallen so far in the past? They have an idea that they should be the sole supplier of the store. Here is a list of vendors that I’ve lost since they bought us out. I lost three lines of makeup (Maybelline, Max Factor and Wet & Wild). I lost all of my perfumes. Every Christmas we would do two pallets of gift pack fragrances and we would get credit for all of our markdowns, so we made out like bandits on that. I lost a 24′ guaranteed toy section in lieu of an 8′ non guaranteed warehouse toy planogram. I also lost all of the guaranteed Halloween and Christmas items I used to get from them also. I lost my established private label from the pharmacy supplier in order to carry the warehouse brand, which had roughly half of the SKU’s of my old brand; prices were also close to 30% higher on the warehouse brand. I used to have an electronics section where we sold basic kitchen appliances. Yep, they’re gone too. I just recently lost all sell thru video and it sounds like rental may be next to go. I currently only have two suppliers left. The first is of course my warehouse; the second is my pharmacy supplier which I am very limited on what I can buy from them.
As you can see, I’ve lost thousands of dollars in sales each month because the warehouse wants to be the only game in town. You would think that if you are going to take away all of this stuff that you should probably put something back in. The big plan from the corporate office was to raise our prices. Apparently the big idea was that if we jacked our prices up the customers would be stupid enough to not notice and continue to buy the same products at a higher retail and when we put something on an ad it would look like a really good price. Not so; apparently the customers have a brain after all and we lost quite a few from that botch. Once your sales start slipping tremendously it becomes a panic situation up at the corporate level.
Hours are the next thing to go. I have been on a 35 hour week for well over a year now, and in the last month it has gotten worse. I didn’t take the book keeping job because I really gave two shits about that position. My boss told me that shit was going to get real bad around there in the near future, although he didn’t elaborate. The book keeping position was offered to me in order to keep me in a full time position. That was the main reason behind it.
I was off of work yesterday and when I went in today I found out that my store manager was no longer employed there. Shock, disbelief, anger; and that was within the first 15 minutes of being there. Basically there is a sense of who is next going around there. My manager knew that the corporate didn’t have a clue as far as what to do in running a store, so he would usually tell them what he was going to do and how they should be doing things, which ultimately led to his departure. We were one of the only stores in the company that didn’t get roughly ten jobs eliminated at the store because our manager stood up for us and pretty much stopped that from happening. Now he’s gone and we can all sit and wonder, who’s next?