Earlier this week on Monday we had one of those weekly territory calls and this week we got a new FTOW to our territory. He was previously on another territory but was moved to the territory I usually work on. On the call my RMS mentioned to him about giving his contact info to the stores he’ll be in most of the time. When i got my tablet I was told that my job was to order and the reps job is to sell so I was never told to give my contact info to any of the managers or receivers at any of the stores I usually go to. Pretty much because the rep is supposed to be their go to person but it seems as if they are going to eventually dump the selling responsibility on the FTOWs. At least according to if one is being asked to give their contact info to the stores which I was never asked to do(at least not yet) but we’ll see what happens.
So of course things aren’t going to get better. Especially if you signed up a while back because you wanted full time work with benefits but didn’t want manager like responsibility. My prediction is that they will be getting rid of both the sales rep and RMS position and create a position where one person is in charge of a territory of about 60-80 stores and will be managing 5-10 merchandisers who will be writing orders and selling to the stores but with the same rate of pay again exercising their cheap labor agenda. So it will sort of be a combination of the sales rep and RMS role. It will basically be a sales rep role but they will be managing the merchandisers which includes typical manager responsibility such as hiring, onboarding, training, scheduling, writing up, suspending, firing, etc. The team I work on has 1 DM, 2 RMS’s and 7 sales reps. So basically see that consolidated to 1 DM and 5 territory managers with the 2 RMS’s being 2 of the 5 territory managers and 3 of the 7 sales reps would be placed in this role with the other 4 given the option of either taking a package or knocking themselves to an order writing merchandiser which most of the effected reps taking the package like they did with mission 1. So basically merchandisers will report to the territory managers, territory managers will report to the DM, the DM reports to the RDR and so on so forth as you climb up the chain.
This is not something I would like or want to happen but I am just sharing a hypothetical analysis as to how I think things will turn out just based on what’s going on right now. As to why they don’t just exit DSD I feel has a lot to do with it not being as simple as it may sound. Nabisco sales are still too strong though stagnant compared to where they once stood so to just dump all that product to warehouse isn’t all that easy. They practically dominate cookie aisles in most stores. So I think they are stuck with this though I definitely think what they’ve been doing is a way to get people to leave so that they are down to so little people to the point that going warehouse is their only option because they have nobody and can’t get anyone to come on board.
Su-ks to see what this company has become but it’s best to start looking for other opportunities and get out as soon as you can. I myself am looking for new opportunities myself and think everyone else working on my team is probably doing the same. It’s just a matter of what’s out there and what pays better.