Thread regarding Sears layoffs

The "box" problem results from a cut-back from using mainland China employees. Their replacements are known to be either in North Korea or Borneo. While I favor the Tibetan employee, it's known that the Korean take fewer bathroom breaks and those from Borneo have less flatulence and (not) prone to whine. Thanks goodness for a Global economy and an abundance of workers worldwide !

We still ship from the store for orders. The problem is they will not purchase boxes to ship items. Too expensive. We were told to use any box we could find, which means we use old boxes from other merchandise or we just put a label on the original box and ship it. We did this at Christmas so many of the presents were delivered in the box with the picture on it. People were pi**ed.

Also, I'm surprised you had peanuts in the box. We usually use the trash from the clothes or ad paper to put in the box because we have no peanuts or bubble wrap. We ship mirrors and other glass items by building a box and taping the heck out of it. And the tape we use is super thin and breaks easily. We get at least 10-15% of all the stuff we ship back as "refused by customer"

We also have no shopping bags. We use the white trash can bags off the shelf.

We buy most of our supplies from Staples at the other end of the mall because we order supplies and they cancel the order because it is not in the budget.

OMG, everything I order from Sears or KMart comes in oversized boxes filled with packaging peanuts or air pillows. I assumed they got this for free they waste so much.

I guess I can't say for certain, but in my store, we always have the supplies we need. Our store manager is very good about ordering things the second we tell him to.

Yep. I order every couple of weeks, and I have seen everything. But truthfully, we have seen all kinds of stuff in general as we order nearly everything online.

We're having that same issue with receipt tape lately. I'm not sure if our SM is just repeatedly forgetting to order it despite being told that we need it, or if corporate is denying our orders, but we seem to just completely run out of receipt tape every couple weeks. We'll have to send someone out with the P-card to the local office supply store and pick up several packs. By my estimates, we're paying at least 60-100% more doing it this way, so if corporate really is denying our orders, it's sure not saving any money. Maybe if every receipt didn't become twice as long due to all the coupons that got thrown out anyway, this wouldn't be so frequent an issue.

Sounds like the store I worked in up until my recent layoff. We couldn't even get shopping bags. We would literally have to do a disbursement from the cash office and send an employee to Sams Club to purchase thank you shopping bags. This was a very frequent event. What is so crazy is I am sure this cost much more than just purchasing them from our supplier and shipping them to the store. My guess is they didn't have money to pay for the bags and could not get them.

I'm not sure how the process works now, but a few years ago, we actually processed orders in stores to ship to homes. We'd get the paperwork in the same manner as any given in-store pickup order, but with information on where to ship it. Unfortunately, we weren't always able to convince those with ordering power to order us proper supplies, so we would have to make do with what we had on hand in the store. That most frequently meant that we actually wouldn't have any packaging peanuts (I believe we only ever got three bags of those in the several years we were shipping orders) but also that we might not have an appropriately sized box.

We'd try to improvise with things that could normally be found in the store. That often meant using various boxes from merchandise, or repack boxes, or sometimes even a combination of the two. I recall having to attempt shipping absurdly sized items like those huge collage picture frames. I'd have no choice but to cut apart several boxes and kind of try wrapping the thing up in cardboard. For some items, such as flat-pack furniture, we'd just ship them as-is. I'd guess that 4 out of 5 times, they were returned, as UPS was seemingly incapable of getting them to the customer intact. Naturally, that meant they were completely unsellable when we got them back. As for padding, apart from the very rare times we had packaging peanuts, we'd preferably use the big wads of plastic that came off the apparel, although we'd usually have to fight with the claims person for that. When it got really bad, we started taking leftover sales ads and crumpling up the pages and tossing them in the boxes.

Of course, everything I'm describing pertains only to those of us who actually knew and cared about what we were doing at the time. There were plenty of our coworkers who just half-assed it wherever possible. I recall numerous cases of people throwing expensive or delicate items like tablets into a large repack box with zero padding. Also infuriating was how when we occasionally got in the very large shipping boxes, people would just use them for layaways.