Well, I get up at seven, yeah
And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time
It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man
'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man
"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson
I was at the Van Dorn Russ's as the store director for slightly under three years. The first 18 months went pretty well -- I felt that I had the support of Operations VP Tom, Larry, who was in charge of the corporate department directors as well as Scott R, the District Manager who was my immediate supervisor. The remaining time was a nightmare.
One very important thing that I was not told was that the store was slated to be closed. It had been losing money for years. It was situated on a very busy road but was difficult to get in or out of. Hy-Vee had built a large store a mile south, which was impossible to compete with, and B&R had committed to expanding and remodeling the Russ's at 66th & O streets two miles north -- more competition. Closing the store was a wise business decision, but they hid the fact from the staff and even from me.
Because the store was losing money it was difficult for managers to earn bonuses, and anyone with any ambition had their eyes on bigger and more profitable stores. There were a few managers who liked the slower pace, and a few who had sabotaged their careers and were stuck there, but between corporate transferring out managers they thought had potential and others applying for positions in bigger stores after being trained at Van Dorn, it was a constant revolving door of managers. The ones that were left were, like me, kind of the misfits of B&R Stores. In a meeting that I had with Patrick, the outgoing store director (who I had trained at Pine Lake) I was informed of the myriad problems with most, if not all, of my managers. My Bakery Manager had instigated an OSHA investigation over an accident in her department. She and her assistant manager had been involved in a relationship -- she lodged a sexual harassment complaint against him, which he disputed by revealing sexual explicit texts that she has sent to him. He was transferred out. My Scanning/Pricing Manager had been written up repeatedly for spreading rumors about other employees. The Deli Manager had recently been written up for having a multitude of out-of-date items on the shelves and was so difficult to work for that we couldn't properly staff the department. One of my shift supervisors wanted to quit during my first week in the store after running over her own foot with a pallet jack. The Cash Office Manager had suffered brain injury a few years before and was routinely rude to everyone in the store. I fit right in with this crew.
Despite the difficulty in keeping qualified staff, I attempted to lead those who stuck around in focusing on being great at the basics and good customer service. The "basics" included obvious things like never running out of ad items and keeping the bathrooms clean. Good customer service included minimizing lines at the checkouts (this would eventually be my downfall). Several of us non-cashiers were trained to run a checkstand and would "jump on" a register when it got busy. This usually took up five minutes and virtually eliminated lines. Saturday morning checking became a regular thing for me, which was unusual, since the only cashiering that I had ever done was when I substituted for the Save Best store director one week. I set up next to Bev, an experienced cashier, so I could ask her questions.
One of the things that corporate management never seemed to understand was how difficult it was to properly staff a store with low sales. As I explained in a previous post, the labor budget for the store and for each department was based on a percentage of sales. You multiplied the budgeted percentage by projected sales to come up with what you could spend on staffing, then divide that by average wage to determine the number of hours you could schedule. The problem which never would be addressed was that it took a certain amount of labor hours to simply prepare a department for the day's business, even if the sales turned out to be $0. For example, in the production departments, such as Bakery, Deli, Smokehouse, you were making product, not just opening boxes and putting items on the shelf. This took time and people to do it. Even non-production departments needed employees to keep the shelves stocked.
While it's always a good idea to evaluate your staffing needs -- you don't always need as many people as you think you do -- there's a limit to how much cutting you can do. One of the more ridiculous recurring budgeting scenarios was departments whose budget didn't even allow for one full-time employee, (not even a full-time manager) yet since product ordering, stocking and basic customer service still need to be done, employees would be pulled from other departments. Week after week I would plug sales projections into the spreadsheet that I had developed years before only to see the depressingly low available hours appear. Some of the hours projections, if followed, would have made it difficult, if not impossible, to carry out our responsibilities. I made the decision to staff my store at a level that I believed was needed to be able to provide good customer service and meet the basic requirements to operate a grocery store. This meant that I was voluntarily forgoing any possibility of receiving a quarterly bonus for meeting the budgeted labor goal. But it also meant that my employees would not have their hours cut to achieve an arbitrary number.
My immediate supervisor at the time, Vice President of Operations Tom Schulte, scheduled an appointment with me to "show me how to write a schedule". I welcomed the input, because I sure didn't know how to cover all the departments with the labor dollars available. His input, however, was a huge disappointment. He started reviewing with me the math needed to calculate available hours for each department, which I already knew how to do. My method of sales projections were always spot on, and the math for calculating hours was pretty simple. I told him that I knew how to do the math, but what I didn't know how to do was write a schedule that would enable me to properly run a store with those hours. He didn't know what to say to that, he just mumbled something about none of the previous store directors could make labor either.
I have to say that my relationship with Tom during my first year as a store director was pretty good. Despite having made some foolish mistakes in my career, I think he was impressed by the efforts I took to prepare myself for the job. He was understanding about the reality that the store was losing money due to circumstances beyond my control (we were budgeted to lose money -- but lost even more than what was budgeted) and focused on my efforts to improve the operational aspects of the store. Any time he stopped by for a "store walk" I received good feedback and no nitpicking when things weren't 100 percent. Company president Pat Raybould was another story.
Pat had two idiosyncrasies that made his visits to the stores dreaded events. Whenever he was out of town he would bring back ideas that he saw in other stores and pushed for us to adopt them, no matter how inappropriate. After visiting a store in Texas that had a giant display of nopalitos (cactus leaves), he would decide that all of our stores need cactus leaf displays. On one trip where he stopped in a small town Casey's convenience store he noticed that the Casey's seemed to be the center of activity for that little town. From that, he came to the conclusion that we needed to make our stores the center of activity. To do this we were supposed to schedule "events" one evening a week. We started out with a kids' night that was well-attended, but didn't result in any measurable increase in sales, which was the whole point. Most of the stores did this for a few weeks and just quietly stopped, hoping that Pat wouldn't notice (he didn't).
Pat's other bad habit was that he never forgot about someone's screw up. Another store director relayed a story to me about a visit from Pat on National Doughnut Day while he (the store director) was running himself ragged getting ready for the day's massive doughnut sales. Pat wanted to talk to him "upstairs" and brought up an incident from several years previous when the Dairy manager was doing a poor job at rotation. According to Pat, this incident was evidence that the store director was didn't have his head in the game. It didn't matter that this store director was a top performing leader, had taken action to solve the problem with the Dairy manager, eventually firing him, and it was several years in the past. In my store he would get it into his head that certain people were problem employees. He saw one of my janitors get a cup of water from the Deli soda dispenser and became convinced that he was always slacking off. Our evening supervisor didn't notice that lines were forming at the checkstands (and no one called him) and Pat became convinced that he wasn't doing his job, despite the evening supervisors having duties such as adding new items to the shelves and unloading the trucks that took them away from the front of the store. He would also quiz employees about areas of the store that they had no knowledge of and draw the wrong conclusion from that.
One of my weirdest Pat encounters involved an odor that was detectable as you first walked in the front door. It was fishy, but not really that strong. (This was an old building with plumbing issues -- there were always odors) Pat was on a mission to find the source of the small. We ended up back at the fish case. We stood in front of the fish display and could not smell any fish. We went into the back cooler and found some fish where the paper covering the fish was askew. Pat determined that a fishy smell at the front of the store, which you couldn't detect right in front of the fish case was somehow caused by fish in a closed cooler at the back of the store.
Fish...that reminds me of the stupidity of the full-service fresh meat and fish case. Hy-Vee was known for having a full-service meat case 24 or 30 feet long if I remember correctly, staffed by three or four employees all day and evening. In order to compete when Hy-Vee built a new store just south of us B&R decided that the Van Dorn Russ's needed a full service meat case. There were two problems. One was that our display case was a measly 8-12 feet long and we did not have enough staff to man the counter. In the evening we had one employee, who in addition to serving customers had to clean the back room. In a money losing store, this was a ridiculous addition.
Another useless section that most Russ's Markets had was what we called Specialty Foods. It mainly consisted of "fancy" versions of mainstream products like mustard, or whole grain flour. Some of those sold well, but most of the specialty items went out of date before we could sell even half a case. It also included "international" foods. Some of those, like Mexican or Mediterranean foods sold well enough, but we also sold foods from the United Kingdom, a nation not known for their cuisine. One of these U.K. items was spotted dick. Spotted dick is a traditional British steamed pudding made with suet and dried fruit. I was at a conference in Florida with a several other Russ's store directors and Pat when I struck up a lunchtime conversation with a store director from another state about specialty foods. I used "spotted dick" as an example, and repeated the words "spotted dick" several times. Pat, with an uncomfortable look on his face, asked me if I needed to use that kind of language. I quickly backpedaled in my mind, scanning to see if I had dropped an "F-Bombs" or any other "bad words" -- nope, I came up blank. It turns out that he didn't know what "spotted dick" was and thought I was referring to another type of dick. Classic Pat.
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