Wow, what a year we have had in our furniture and mattress department, down double digits. We used to have enough staff to cover our operating hours and have two or three people to help customers on busy weekends. Since we made the staffing changes this year, we can't even cover all seven days, let alone have extra people on busy days and sales events.
We keep having customers leave the store because they don't want to wait for the one lady who works there to either come back from break or finish working with another customer. Last weekend we had multiple customers get tired of waiting and leave since nobody else in the store knows how to sell the stuff. We just give customers her schedule and ask them to come back when she's working.
We took a detractor because we have full floor of furniture and mattresses to sell and nobody in the store with the time or know how to sell it. As we head into the holiday season we have so many general selling seasonal people, but still just the lone lady up in the furniture department trying to manage markdowns, keep up with signing changes, and wait on customers when time permits.
Why would we cut staffing in one of the few areas where a customer actually needs a colleague to make a purchase. If we are going to staff big ticket like toll booth, maybe we should tag the stuff with UPC's like everything else in the store so that we can help customers without the special training and access to the systems needed to sell furniture.
It shouldn't be easier to buy furniture yourself from our website than it is to come into our store and get help and advice to make a purchase. We used to have smart people running this company, what happened?