Songbird76
Well-Known Member
It is pretty big, but we're still running out of space. There are 3 smaller halls at the back, accessible by garage type doors, and they have started moving some merch into those halls where it was previously all storage, but that's why I don't like stocking....there's no room left! It's hard to find a place to put more trays, so you end up having to scan things into other containers so you can empty containers to replace them with a new one. You end up spending more time moving things around than you do actually stocking. And a bunch of people haven't been trained properly, so they don't know the rules. Like, you're not supposed to put more than 3 different items into one tray/box, and when you have different items in one, they all have to be different colors. When you are walking orders, your scanner tells you what color the item you need is supposed to be. So if you need something blue, it takes forever when you pull out that tray and there are 6 different things and 4 of them are blue. The idea is that you are supposed to be able to go to that location, pullout the tray/box, and reach in and grab the item you need. But people keep putting things in until it's completely full, and then you can't find the item you are looking for. When you are stocking and you have to move stuff around to make space, it's almost impossible to find a tray that doesn't already have at least 3 items in it, and many times they are all the same color...usually blue or black because those are the most common colors, especially for jeans. So you can't consolidate the trays because they already have more things than allowed in each one, and then you can't stock the new trays because you can't get rid of any trays by consolidating.It is a huge warehouse. Like Santa’s workshop!
Yesterday was a disaster with stocking. They must have gotten new trays and whoever did the stickering messed it up. Each tray or box is given a barcode and number. That's how you know where to look for an item when you are walking orders. The scanner gives you a location, you go to that location, and find the tray with that number...the item you need is in that tray/box. But they sticker both sides and the front. Someone got out of sequence, so the stickers on the side didn't match what was on the front. When the people putting stuff into the system put items in the trays, they scan one of those stickers, and that attaches that item to that tray. Except then that item was attached to one of those numbers and not the other. So I'd scan a tray, it would beep at me to tell me to count the inventory in that tray, but the item number wasn't right....that item was attached to a different tray, because that sticker was on two trays. So what was in the tray wasn't what was attached to it. The supervisor had to go through all the carts of new trays and find all the ones that were stickered wrong, and then fix it. And it only beeps at you to count if there's more than one item in the tray. I had a bunch that were just one item, so I have no idea how many I had already stocked before I got one I was supposed to count and noticed that the inventory in that tray didn't match what the system said was in it. Fortunately I only got through half a cart before that happened, so it couldn't have been more than probably 20 trays. But, there were a lot of other people doing stocking, and a lot of them, having not been properly trained, don't know you are supposed to count when it beeps at you. So they just put it into the shelf without looking at it. So who knows how many messed up trays were stocked. Mine ranged from 9799 through 9862, so we know at least 60 trays were probably affected, but they weren't all on my cart. It's not rocket science...I don't know how the stickering went wrong. Between sorting that out and then trying to make space for new merch when the trays were all overflowing...I was so glad to be done yesterday!! And I can't wait to go back to evenings when they are better about rotating tasks so you aren't ALWAYS doing stocking, or ALWAYS doing returns.
