What a week it was this week at my store. I was back from vacation on Monday and I was not happy with the way my store looked. It is always hard to return and see things that don't meet your expectations. It wasn't really any body's fault it was just a lack of direction because of the store manager's were on vacation last week.
I got in early on Monday and walked the floor and wrote down the things that needed urgent care. I compiled a list and then looked for all of the things that I was expecting in my box from the other managers. There was one piece of paper in my box, i was getting quite frustrated at this point. I decided that I would follow up with each manager one on one and then discuss my expectations of them as a group at our Wednesday manager's meeting. Hopefully, by this point I would have the expected paperwork.
Once the day got started I realized that this week was not going to be an easy one. We had a number of sick calls one employee had broken her foot, one had a migraine, and one ended up having to leave because her roommate was in the hospital (sadly this roommate passed away later this week). The schedule was going to be a mess this week, especially since I had another employee on vacation, and began training one on Monday as well. By the end of the week the schedule had not gotten better as a matter of fact it was worse as one manager had a medical emergency and one employee failed to show up.
Now while the schedule was a mess, and getting things accomplished was almost impossible we were still able to get the basics completed early in the week and get caught up with meetings and paperwork, and by the end of the week, even with very few people we were able to make some progress on the lower level. We actually got a number of displays up in the dorm section and cleaned out a majority of the conference room.
Now that I got through the frustration of returning to work, and survived the first week back I feel I need to discuss a couple of the difficult customers that have arrived in my store straight from the loony bin this week:
1) Snapple Lady- This woman comes in and buys two Snapple's a day, she has actually be coming in for a while now and she was always a bit nuts but this week she had a break and has completely lost her mind. On Tuesday she came up to me and asked if I was the store manager then she proceeded to yell at me in the middle of the store about how I am part of a conspiracy to make her fat because I am putting chocolate at every register, and she has no place to put her bag so she needs to buy chocolate. I am not sure I understand her reasoning and why she needs to buy the chocolate. But a conspiracy, I mean come on its retail lady, we make money on impulse buys, just because you are too darn stupid to realize what we are doing is not my problem.
2) Critical Sweatshirt Woman- Today was the critical sweatshirt woman, who works at the university. She asked for some help selecting a sweatshirt for a guy and every time I showed her a sweatshirt there was something wrong with it. This one is too frumpy, too thick, too blue, too grey, she didn't like the sleeves on one, and the imprint on the other. She wanted this one in a different color with a different font on the front. OK, well lady this is a college bookstore, we carry items that are approved by the university, and there are only so many arms in a college bookstores clothing department. She did end up buying a sweatshirt however, just not one that I recommended.
I had so many other ones today it was ridiculous but I guess I wouldn't have anything to write about if the Snapple lady and the bible lady didn't exist!
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