1. Imagine having to ring out a customer during peak holiday season, and while your customer is asking you questions and talking to you, someone ELSE is speaking into your ear (via the required earpiece) even though the conversation in your ear is not for you, and being required to ALSO answer the phone in front of you. That's 3 conversations, all while you are waiting to do a "stock check" for merchandise that SHOULD be on the sales floor, but corporate wants to maintain a specific visual appearance in the store, that is a hinderance to sales, efficiency and customer service. Now do this for 8 hours, four or five times a week. SENSORY-OVERLOAD, UNFRIENDLY ENVIRONMENT, STRESS-INDUCING.
2. Imagine having a "Floor Leader" whose responsibility is essentially NOT to help customers that approach them, but instead find them someone ELSE to help them. Customers are often told "It will be a few minutes until someone becomes available". Meanwhile, the Floor Leader simply stands in that one spot watching the floor, while the customers/guests, ask you, "why couldn't that person help me"? FRUSTRATING, DEPRESSING, DEMORALIZING.
3. Imagine working in a place that sells 1000 rugs, but only 10 to 15 are even on display. STUPID.
4. Imagine taking returns for web orders that require writing, by hand, the date, the entire order number, the customers name customers address, phone, your own sales associate number and name, and then also writing down by hand, the names of the items being returned, the sku numbers involved, all of it, onto a triplicate paper form, , then having to get a managers signature, then offering the last page of the triplicate to the customer and telling them they will get their refund AFTER the warehouse receives and processes their items in 15 business days. It is 2015, not 1990. Why can't we just SCAN THE BARCODE on the shipping form they brought in? RIDICULOUS, ANGER-INDUCING, CONFUSING, INEFFICIENT, and NOT CUSTOMER FRIENDLY.
5. Imagine working in a place that forces every employee to RE-APPLY when the "Legacy Stores" are remodeled into the newer, larger galleries, REGARDLESS of length of employment or even an incredible work history. Same is true for seasonal employees that intend to become permanent employees. They must RE-APPLY to stay onboard. New application and everything. TIME-WASTER, LACK OF INTEGRITY, NO LOYALTY.
6. Imagine having to ask your manager to unlock the drawer so that you can get a gift card for your customer. On the earpiece of course. Who does this? What retailer locks up their gift cards? Don't they trust the people they hire? IDIOTIC.
7. Imagine taking messages all day long from customers calling the store, who want to place orders or who have questions about their orders, because there are not enough people on staff to manage the calls. We tell them someone will call them back later the same day. And that is true, about half of the time. Customers will call two, three days in a row, and tell me that no one has called them back. They are angry. And imagine working in a place where managers are actually instructed NOT to answer the phones, so they can be "freed up" to do other things... like item #2 in this list. And yet, you are told that the store is not understaffed. LIES.
8. Imagine having a sales goal that is TWICE as big as last year's numbers for the same day. So stupid. Not a 10% increase. a 100% increase. No retailer does this. UNREALISTIC.
There is more. But I'm tired of typing.
