I was reading through the comments on here and I saw a comment on one of the posts which said this website is a fake news site and that there’s been rumors of DSD exit for years and nothing ever became of it. While I do remember hearing rumors of DSD exit as early as 2017 I feel as if it is only obvious that we will be exiting DSD in the near future. Don’t think it will be this year and I can’t say as to when it will be but it’s definitely coming soon and until that day comes the company will only get worse until that point. So anyone who thinks we won’t exit DSD ever we are going to exit DSD it’s inevitable. I used to feel as we would never exit DSD but I’ve lost hope in that we would stay in DSD and know that the day is soon to come.
Back in 2017 the only reason I think people were saying that we would exit DSD is in response to Keebler exiting DSD. But in 2017 sales reps still had adequately sized territories, sales reps had people cover there vacations(SrSSRs and SAs), full timers were order writers but were more of less helping the sales rep they worked for most of the time as opposed to being overstimulated with work like they are now, there were a few full timers that didn’t write orders and there was a ton of part time help. Sales reps would work with you and we all worked together as a team so we knew most of the people who were on our team. And we would work together often which made work somewhat worthwhile. There were still opportunities to advance and people interested in becoming sales reps. Back in like 2016 or so they did lay off some sales reps but I think that was more of less because of there not being as many stores as there used to be and some once busier stores not doing what they used to do. And in years past anytime they had an idea that didn’t work they went back to what it was like or came up with a new idea unlike today with the world of mission 1.
Now things have completely changed. There’s hardly any reps left and the ones left have these mega sized territories. All full timers are order writers and given such heavy work loads which explains why the job doesn’t get done right or at least not to the degree that they want it done. We all work by ourselves so we don’t even know some of the people that work on our own team. We hardly have any part timers left to fill the gaps most either quit or aren’t being used very often and most people being hired are order writers because apparently that’s the direction our company is headed. And it’s only going to get worse. I say so because we are more than a year into mission 1 and it’s so much worse now than it was just a year ago and it sounds like it’s going to get worse.
I saw some comments on here about a position called territory manager which basically sounds like a cross bread between a sales rep and a RMS. It was mentioned that it already exists in some areas and is being tested in others. My area doesn’t have territory managers at the moment but I am sure that’s soon to come. I’m guessing we might be one of the last areas to get this given that we don’t have any sales reps or RMS’s who are eligible to retire and no sales reps or RMS’s have left the company(at least not yet but I’m sure there’s people looking at other jobs). As soon as reps start quitting they’ll probably roll out this job to my area and make the remaining reps territory managers. It sounds like what a territory manager is is basically a sales rep with an even bigger size territory(say 60-80 stores) that has RMS responsibilities. I’m guessing they’ll be getting rid of both sales reps and RMS’s and this will be the replacement role where all RMS’s will eventually become territory managers and same goes for any sales reps that is kept on board. This means they’ll likely dump even more onto the order writers where we’ll now have to sell in displays to stores which right now isn’t our responsibility but those of the sales rep. It was constantly reiterated at the beginning of mission 1 that the job of the order writers is to order and the job of the sales reps is to sell and order writers weren’t even encouraged to sell. Earlier this week it was mentioned on a team call that we didn’t meet our Q1 objective and that they are starting to encourage order writers to sell displays into stores. So I kinda know where this is headed.
At this point it won’t hurt for me to get out of this company as soon as I can even if it means taking a job with lower pay in the meantime while waiting for something with better pay to open up. It’s just gotten to the point where there’s nothing enjoyable about the job anymore and I’m sure the company knows mission 1 is a failure it’s just they don’t care and want to make the dsd exit process easier knowing that everyone will sooner or later quit. With the order writers now having even more dumped on them than they already do more will leave the company with very few left and that’s how it will be until we exit DSD. I have a feeling the reason behind all this is to get more people to leave the company so that when they do exit DSD they have less severance packages that they need to give out. I know the idea of DSD exit once sounded like it was just rumors and speculation but with the way things are going it’s kinda obvious it will happen at some point. This isn’t the Nabisco company we once knew. It’s all gone downhill and the only option we have is to either find something else or stay here only to see it go even more downhill.