I've heard about rodent problems.
I've heard about heat and AC malfunctions.
I've heard about leaks.
I've heard about crappy IT systems.
I've heard about the stores falling apart before everyone's eyes.
And just as I thought I've heard or seen it all, there's a cleaning crew out there sweeping the carpet of a Sears. Sweeping a damn carpet. All because the company won't spring for a new vacuum. Hot damn.
Even people who are broke as a joke own a vacuum cleaner. Geez.
Eddie, pull the damn plug.
@2lpw Thanks for the warning about the $1 soap!
@1sgr "Roughly half of our shopping carts have bad casters, cracked baskets or bent frames."
Somehow, I'm not sure how long ago, my store ended up with multiple shopping carts that say "Sears Grand" on them, mixed in with our regular slightly-smaller "Sears" shopping carts. I don't think there's ever been a "Sears Grand" within at least fifty miles of this store, so they must have been shipped in at some point. Anyone else seen this phenomenon at your store and know more about it?
I was so use to mice runnng all over the sales floor that one day at my new job I saw movement from the corner of my eye and immediately that mouse instead of a client walking into the room. Pretty ad that is my memory of Sears. I also laughed when the air conditioner was on the fritz for a few hours and it reached 75 degrees inside before they fixed it ( same day btw) and 75 would have felt like heaven back in the day when I remember routinely working with sweat dripping and feeling faint from the humid heat and lack of water. I also brought wet wipes in my purse because there often was no toilet paper or even paper towels. Soap was often out so hand sanitizer was also included in my bag. The store did start using those dollar scented soaps from checkout but they mad my skin break out and itch.
@1hgu - At least I give your depositor credit for keeping it in the toilet. At our store we would find deposits on the floor, the walls, in the sinks, in the urinals and on the ceiling. Yes, on the ceiling!
@TvpbCwv-1sgr Holy damn lol I thought my store was at its worse jesus man they are trying to do anything just the store still open thats just plain insane.
@1sgr no rodents, because even rodents have standards and don't want to be seen in a Sears/Kmart
We've used to have a middle-aged guy that looked to be about 400 pounds. About once a week he came in to do #2. He made the most "concerning", screaming noises while doing so, almost like childbirth. You could hear him 100 feet away from the men's restroom. The customers gasped and asked what was wrong in there. There were mothers that covered their kids' ears when he was in there. The MOD would crack the door and ask if everything was alright since he sounded so distressed. The smell--well, it was just atrocious.
When he was finished, we would have to take that stall out of commission for the rest of the day, because his deposits wouldn't flush without overflowing. There was no way to make it go down with the plunger or any way to plunger the toilet without making a mess since it was already close to overflowing, so the cleaning guy usually had to deal with it the next morning. I remember being there before the store opened--the day after his deposit--and the cleaning guy was just a real happy camper.
Our "depositor" never purchased anything. He just walked in, headed to the restroom, emerged after about a half hour and left. I think he was finally confronted by a manager because I haven't seen him since.
Oh, let's see...
-The plumbing doesn't work, as in the toilets clog if you look at them wrong. We have to keep a mop, bucket and shop vac handy because the floor drains in the restrooms don't drain. This happens about once every two weeks, once every couple of days when we are going through our busier stretches.
-The window panes of the front entrance doors flex excessively. They'll literally blow out a pane or two once a year or so.
-The breakroom doesn't have a sink. Anything that requires water requires you to use the restroom sink.
-The store manager unplugged the water fountain coolers as part of an "energy conservation program". Our breakroom water cooler dispenser (which we won in the credit contest a while back) is unplugged and empty. We also aren't allowed to plug in any phone chargers in the breakroom (like 0.5 watts is going to break the bank!). We are told to shut off the computer monitors of all the office computers and kiosks yet the actual computers run 24/7. Little do they know that the monitors go to sleep and that they use just as much energy when "turned off" and that the actual computer unit uses more electricity than the monitors. So we spend time running around the store to turn off 30+ computer monitors every time we close for the night.
-The aIr conditioning is inoperable, the store manager claims it will cost $100,000 that the company doesn't have to fix or replace. The heat still works for right now.
-When the heat runs the drop ceiling tiles shake and vibrate. One of them fell loose and came crashing down in softlines during Q4 last year. That could have been a lawsuit if it hit somebody.
-The dishwasher doghouses are made of cheap particleboard and won't hold the installation screws very well. Quite often a customer will be looking at dishwashers and will pull one open and it starts to slide out. God help the store if a dishwasher falls out onto the customer.
-Moldy insulation in exposed ceiling area in the backroom. There are severe leaks during rainfall, some of the leaks are directly under backstocked product. There's a strong mildewy smell in backroom.
-The technology is on its last legs. The Signwriter printer is constantly breaking, fat chance that it will ever be replaced. The office printer, same thing. None of the SNCs scan or hold a charge longer than an hour, so it's real fun when you have to do an adset or price integrity audit! The registers are slow and we have a computer graveyard. The phones are from 1980 and are well past their useful life and hang up in the middle of a phone call.
-We have maybe two or three dump truck's worth of broken/excess fixturing that we will never use again and another dump truck's worth of assorted junk that we can't be bothered to toss. Makes for a real safety hazard navigating around the areas this stuff is stored in. One of those areas is the signwriter room.
-Vinyl flooring tiles are cracked/chipped away, the adhesive below is exposed. Potential asbestos issue?
-The carpeted areas (all of softlines, mattresses, and the office, plus the entry runners) haven't been vacuumed in over a year. The vacuum cleaner that the cleaning crew uses broke for good and the store manager won't take a cheap vacuum out of the box and ring it up for "store use" on the register for Triple S to use, so the Triple S lady goes around with a broom and dustpan and sweeps the carpet. It's kind of funny if it wasn't so pathetically sad.
-The Triple S lady waters down the soap because the store manager doesn't want to go "out of budget" to buy some. Don't know how she will get around the need for paper towels and toilet paper.
-The contractors that come in to do the waxing are just too incompetent and lazy. They get wax on the carpet, wax on the fixtures. We've had loose debris like RES signs, paper clips, coins and even an SPP pamphlet waxed to the floor. They'll screw up so bad that we have to schedule them to come in again and we'll have to move ALL the floor displays in HA and HI to the warehouse all over again, because they can't be trusted to avoid splattering wax on the displays or scratching/denting them with the polisher. Since we've "used up all the payroll" we have to do this during store hours. Makes it hard to sell something when I can't show the customer the product.
-There's a cloth sheet hanging over the former portrait studio. It looks tacky and some weirdo homeless person regularly sneaks behind it to leave their mark in a well-hidden corner in that area. The shoplifters leave their tags and empty boxes back there.
-There are two security cameras up on the ceiling with cracked lens covers and it has been that way for two years. The contractor that came in to replace the light bulbs broke them somehow (they also left a huge mess in softlines). Not only is it tacky, it's supposed to conceal the actual camera.
-None of the spider alarm wraps work. They are cut loose all the time in tools and never seem to go off. Unless the shoplifters are defeating them, the batteries are long dead and "we don't have money in the budget" to buy new spider wraps.
-Roughly half of our shopping carts have bad casters, cracked baskets or bent frames.
-A good portion of the doors in the building are hard to open, close or won't stay shut because of the sinking foundation.
I do have to say that miraculously, we have had no problems with rodents, but that could always be next.
LOL, at least the "cats living in the ceiling" should be helping to keep the mice under control!
Mice, roaches, mold, cats living in the ceiling, no heat in the winter, no A/C in the summer, no hours, no raises, no toilet paper,.......
Management acting like they don’t know our store is a ring fence property that will be sold eventually
@1syz That’s funny
Its been years since I was at the store, but battery acid all over the battery racks in the auto centers. You could taste it in the air and your eyes would burn if anything disturbed them.