Was just told that all buy more get more signage has to come down immidiately. No more Holiday Blast. The company is losing money on the promotion. You would have thought that they put some thought into this.
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@aqsk that s---s. Our 3 office associates get plenty of hours now during 4th quater. Especially now that they have to print signage and sort it. Might be a regional thing.
@7qsx In our store the two HR/Office associates are not allocated hours for printing signs in the holidays. They were told by regional HR to complete their HR duties and not to be concerned with signing. In fact, they cut their hours and they barely have time to complete the payroll and their HR duties.
Actually it is the office associates job to print the sign. HR/Office associates are allocated hours for sign printing during the holidays.
Your cash office person is getting a snow job. There is no corporate mandate. The store manager is feeding her a line. The same thing was told to our cash office person. She asked the DM when he came in if it was true. He said no. Your store is just trying to squeeze more work out of your cash office person. They try to squeeze us too any way they can.
In my store the cash office person prints the signs. I think she wants to kill herself. She puts them in the department mailboxes or brings them to the morning rally. She says it is some type of corporate mandate.
@4ifn I really envy you. You are obviously a well managed fully staffed store with a lot of working sncs. Three of us have to sign the whole store instead of just a department. It has gotten to the point that we hardly scan the signs anymore because we have virtually no working sncs in our whole store. Keep up the good work.
In my store we all do signs. Every associate on the floor is responsible for doing setup for their department. Everyone that works morning shift is pretty much trained on signage. We dont have a dedicated sign team. We all get the job done. The only 2 departments that dont have signs to setup in my store are Appliances and Footwear. They are 100% digital signage.
@3cij I don't mind doing a set up for example the only thing I ask is 3 things.
A working device
Proper Signs
Enough hours
Those never happen. You either get a device that half scans or the battery doesnt last. The signs you have are no good you have to print emergencies. Or worse the hours we got for the set up arent correct. The hours are cut to the bone and expect you to have the whole department set. How is that possible when hours have been cut.
The quality goes down when the time goes down. You can only do so much with limited time. You might have a stronger overall team, but in my store the managers wont help you. Especially the SM all he does is page that we have to speed things up yet hes sitting in his office doing nothing.
@-3cij.
@3cij You are very fortunate. Obviously in your store everybody helps out and puts out signs. I envy you. In our store only myself and one other person put up signs. The salespeople refuse to do so and store management won't make them help. You are really lucky and so is your signing team.
@QwBnp9P-3cij F--- off, company kiss a--.
@3cij - Okay Eddie, settle down and don't have a stroke. We understand that while you're out on your yacht cruising the Caribbean it is difficult for you to comprehend the difficulties we peons encounter on the store level. Rest assured that we will continue to handle the signing situation to the best of our abilities while you continue on with your incompetent and out-of-touch business directives.
You guys are nuts. They’re just signs people.
You pass them out to everyone, takes about an hour to put every sign up. We could change signs everyday in my sears it wouldn’t impact anything.
You people are so lazy it’s unreal “OMG- we have to put up signs!!” You get a check, do your damn jobs or quit, no wonder the company is hurting with slugs like you.
“They wanted me to put up signs, can you believe it? I couldn’t take 11 of my 12 daily smoke breaks and I could only talk to Jenny for an hour down in her dept. but when they wanted me to sign instead of text my friends, that’s where I draw the line”
It’s a JOB you are expected to WORK when you are there.
@2btn. What is a troll in this sense? Why would I have done a sign audit?
Instead of closing stores, Hoffman Estates should just "Deep 6 RES". Guaranteed that'll slow the quarterly cash burn, although how insignificant it may be on the bottom line financials.
What's a sign audit?
@2ahh - Did you do a sign audit while you were in the store? Was every sign generated for the current promotion in place? Only 100% compliance is acceptable by SHLD corporate, even though corporate does not supply the tools, payroll hours or cooperation to make 100% compliance even remotely possible. That is what this post is all about! What are you all about, troll?
Odd I was just in a Sears store yesterday. The signs were up, and the promotions are working.
Wonder what this post is all about.
We don't even scan the signs in our Sears store anymore. There are only 2 of us left to do signing due to major cutbacks in hours and staffing. Also it is rare if we can find a snc.
@1cld - The sign audit has been bogus from day one! Corporate sees it on their end as being 100%, in reality it's between 10% and 100%. In our store the signs were scanned at 100% before they even hit the sales floor. Various factors then determined how many of those signs were actually set up. Payroll hours have never equaled the actual amount of work that needs to be done! If the majority of the division's signs were stickers, then approximately 50% would be set up. As the signing crew shrunk and some divisions took on the responsibility for doing their own signing, the completion rate ranged between 10% and 75%. For some of the smaller divisions and/or divisions that used larger signs the completion rate was 100%. Don't even mention the sign auditors that corporate would randomly send to the store. Most of them were so befuddled that they would easily rate your store at 100%. Even the more savvy auditors could be "guided" to achieve a 100% score. Like with most of the programs developed by SHLD, the signing system is a total farce!
@QwBnp9P-1dyq - So essentially the sign audit is totally bogus. Corporate see it on their end as being 100%, when in reality it's 0%.
Manager did tell us to take signs down today... but it was just the 25% sidekicks only.
Gahhh...what a waste of time, something we don't have due to no payroll. Everything else had to take a backseat so that these signs could be put up since the store was way over payroll for Thanksgiving week. It's a waste of material and money too. Those signs for hundreds of stores must have cost tens of thousands of dollars, at least.
I haven't seen any uptick in my store traffic after this promotion became effective. Ever since Black Friday, sales have returned to the normal downward slope and crashed to a flat line.
If this is happening, it is because shoppers do not see the signs in the store showing them the price they will pay and the offer is convoluted.
For example, in the Woodbridge NJ Sears, there are no signs at all on Craftsman workwear, yet it's all ringing 50% off when you buy two or more. That is the same thing as buy one, get one free -- which resonates better with a shopper.
Meanwhile at the Kmart in the same town, the same thing is happening. Shoppers don't see any signs for bogo items because no one in the store put them up. Bogo free cosmetics? Holy sh--, incredible deal! No retailer ever does that. And none of the people shopping the store know about it because no one did the signs.
Both stores have store managers that think all the advertising is done by corporate, but an important part of having sale prices to generate the company revenue is the shelf tags, overhead signage, and banners at the entrances and throughout the store.... even more so, now that print ads delivered to all the homes surrounding the stores has been cut to the bone. Yet, those signs don't get put up regularly or on time, resulting in too much product sitting on the shelves.
On one blogsite, it was mentioned both of these stores have no price checking scanners for shoppers to use in the store. That adds to the guessing game of "is this on sale".....
@QwBnp9P-nva What are they going to be calling this one? "Holiday Desperation" sale?
Nothing said about this at my store. And I question why they'd choose to give up on it before it hardly even started as the current sales aren't any different than they had been off and on forever. I figured prices were due to go down after a bit...
Had to remove them in my store too. Apparently a new promo is going to be set for Sunday.
Confirmed. We took all of them down in my store today.
@ebk it's legit saw softline taking down the signs.
Bring back the deals they had on Black Friday and customers will come
Stop confusing ads and thinking they can outsmart the customer anymore
Buy more save more is a dud and whoever dreamed this one up should be demoted!!
They didn’t tell us that AT ALL.
Was anyone else told this?
Is this certain stores they haven't told us anything yet yikes this is big takes out the popcorn.
@avj Think the promotion isn't strong enough in some areas....like apparel and footwear. It's not that they are losing money but that they need to strengthen their message.
It's sad that they're still losing $$ despite sales. I take it they haven't been that successful drawing new customers into their stores.
I don't think Sears makes it to Christmas 2018. I could see some of their best performing stores with little competition (both Sears and Kmart) get spun off to other companies that are in better shape (even though the buyer would have to put in tons of $$$ to renovate).
Sears and Kmart put themselves in this position partly due to lack of investment in their stores. Walmart and Meijer do full renovations to their stores every 10 to 20 years. There's a Meijer near me that originally opened in the late 1960s or very early 1970s (it was there in 1973) that looks much newer than that on the inside. Go into your local Kmart or Sears and you can easily tell that little work has been done since they opened.
The fall sale was at least have some deals across the store. This new BOGO sale kinda s---s big time. No real good deals. Although how aggressive can they be at this point? 70%-90% off of everything?! Might as well be a liquidation sale (which is likely to happen anyway).
Hmm...haven't heard this. I would think it wasn't that the company is losing money but that we need to be more aggressive as the promos aren't that great right now. That is what we are seeing.
I'm guessing this applies to both Sears AND Kmart locations?
Good lord....and the deals were not even that great either at my Kmart. Oh no wait, this is just part of the transformation guys, don't worry!!!!