Thread regarding Sears layoffs

Yeah, our clean and bright started the day after Christmas. We have gone through this before and it last for around a month and then back to the normal dust and grime. Just like the simple store process with the back room being totally empty. That lasted about three months and now we are stocked to the max with no where to put anything.

There is no clean and bright that can fix the stained ceiling tiles, the bathroom toilets that have been broken for months, the missing floor tiles, the dressing room doors that are off the hinges, the shelves that are leaning just waiting to hurt or kill someone, the rusted, flaking, dirty shelves the merchandise is on, the broken, empty freezers, the broken displays, the dented appliances, the dirty mattresses, the dust and mice feces covered backroom and food aisle, the scuffed, dirty, dingy floor tiles, the lack of heat and A/C, the leaking pipes, mold and mildew, broken loading dock door, stuck registers, old broken printers and copy machines, the flaking, peeling paint and the stored files that are infested with roaches and mice.

@3ipy Also would love to add our manager comes at it like its a big thing yet I don't see him help out hes like "everyone needs to do their part I know hours are bad, but it needs to be done" I don't see his lazy a-- helping out.

Clean and bright has always been a joke at my kmart store. Like they would replace the 1960s asbestos flooring for a new one. Ha Eddie. Maybe. No new wax etc. It must be down into the asbestos about now after all those years if waxing and stripping that u have done to ur advantage. U are fighting like hell. Ok. It is mostly just dusting the shelves and spray painting the newer 90s shelves with a new coat of paint without personal protection equipment. The end is coming and no clean bright will work eddie. Maybe u should huff some of our paint fumes. He needs it.

@2wwn; Our store has those things. They're almost always crap. As with any Apple product, the batteries wear down and lose their ability to hold a charge. I think they were all refurb'd to begin with, because this company would certainly not splurge on new iPod Touches. Of course, the biggest issue now is that even if we can get them sent out to be repaired/replaced, whatever company is doing the refurbishing is totally incompetent. It's like they're using Elmer's School Glue to reattach the screen to the body, so a week or so after you get the iHeld back, the screen falls right off without provocation. As finicky as the old gun-style RMUs were, I'd take those back in an instant.

Somebody went on a cleaning rampage through our back office. Basically anything that wasn't merchandise, an immediately usable store supply, or personal property was just carted off and tossed in the compactor. Entire binders full of invoice registers and other reports that we're supposed to retain, gone. AP reports, gone. Signage for future promotions, gone. I'm pretty sure a LOT of personally identifiable information went in the trash without being shredded too. The office certainly looks very clean at least. Kind of like an office in a store that's about to be liquidated.

Just more lipstick on the pig until the end. No one buys it not customers or associates.

@yem batteries. Did your store ever get the iPods or have they given up on those at this point?

Remodel? To what extent? Where is the money coming from to do a remodel? Considering they haven’t got enough money to stock the stores, how in the heck do they have money to remodel?

They are cleaning things up in hopes to sell the locations en masse.

We've been through the clean and bright blitz before and it's a huge joke. As another poster confirmed earlier, it's mostly about spray painting shelves and hosing down the sport court, none of which has any notable effect on the store's appearance. It doesn't correct stained carpeting, cracked or damaged floor tiles, water stained ceiling tiles, damaged cash wraps, doors that bind and a litany of other bigger fish.

As far as the spray painting goes, we don't sand and primer the shelves before painting, you know, the RIGHT way to do it. All we are instructed to do is to wipe them down with a rag and go over it with white spray paint. After a month or two the paint starts to peel. Hmmm...wonder why?

The sport court "washing" is a huge mess. Those take about two weeks to fully dry. If we leave them outside they get taken by tweakers who will take anything.

All stores are scheduled for remodels this year.

They are literally counting tiles to replace, ceiling tiles,fixtures and shopping carts that need "work" at our store...where was this 10 years ago when they really needed it? Afraid it is wayyyyy too late now , smh.

@jsg- How do you get away with having a register with non-functional SYW connectivity?

As much as they breathe SYW down our necks, you would think that having SYW up and running would be top priority.

Strange, because in my world, the registers could be slow, broken, or even break out in flames but by God, you still better make your SYW loyalty percentage. Oh, and credit, too.

@oed: how drunk were you when you posted????

@jsg most of our Catalinas are broken too... Just saying, it's sad.

Hand held scanners need there batteries replaced every so often. They need to be ordered by sm or hr

these stores off not knock down are gutted. the lave come from the location, not the tiles cleanliness on the roof

@kor - Although our store didn't receive the complete C&B treatment, we loaned several associates to a neighboring store to assist. They told us stories about the "just paint the shelves" fiasco. From what I heard more paint ended up on the associates, floor and merchandise than on the shelves!

At our store a crew was sent in to power wash the sport-court. They stacked the sport-court in 3 by 4 foot sections, 3 feet high, onto merchandise carts and power washed the whole stacks in the parking lot. After allowing the carts of sport-court to dry for several days, our associates then proceeded to reinstall it. Not only were the stacks of sport-court still holding gallons of water, but only the top few sheets were actually cleaned. The power washing had simply pushed all the dirt and gunk down into the lower sheets making them a caked-up mess.

And just think, some high level management person got paid big bucks to devise this monumental failure.

Ancient POS systems? I don't think it matters if they are ancient, they should just WORK. My store has 12 registers up front. Five do not turn on at all. Here's a rundown of the registers we use:

1. Drawer is broken and requires a cashier to jiggle it to open or close. Flatbed scanner does not work. Catalina printer broken.

2. Faceplate missing, touchscreen on monitor doesn't work on the top half. Cashiers have to hunt and peck for the corresponding keys on the keyboard. Handheld scanner does not work. Flatbed scanner does not work. That means every Barcode gets keyed in.

3. Handheld scanner does not work. CPU regularly overheats and register shutsdown.

4. Side and drawer faceplate missing. Screen has a two inch burnout mark in the right lower corner. Handheld scanner does not work. Receipt printer constantly jams because plastic gears are broken inside. Cash only at this register because the card terminal connection on the back of the register is broken. Catalina printer broken.

5. Cracked drawer faceplate. Keys broken on keyboard-- cash tender and price check. Touchscreen doesn't work on the top inch of the screen. SYW and store coupons will not work at this register (We tell customers to call SYW after they pay.) Catalina printer broken.

6. CPU fan sounds like a loud vacuum cleaner at this register. Keys broken on keyboard-- price check.

Flatbed scanner doesn't work. When the handheld dies, the cashier has to key in barcodes. Card terminal loses connection and reboots several times a day during transactions.

1. Wired handheld scanner gets hot to the touch. Flatbed works when it wants to.

And, out of the seven registers, three have broken lights above the register. We have to put up a handwritten sign to show the register is open.

This is frustrating for cashiers because they get blamed by customers for slow checkout or double charges on credit and debit cards from malfunctioning registers or card terminals. The worst register of all (#2 above) is used on every shift!!

After our store closed some associates were asked to stay on for an additional two weeks to prep the store for handover to the mall owner. The list of conditions that were required prior to the handover was exact; examples, no missing or stained ceiling tiles, no remaining fixtures, displays or cash-wraps, all floors cleaned or swept, etc. The work was tiresome and dirty, however, we finished up several days before the handover inspection. The inspection went fine and the handover took place at month's end. Just days after the handover, a demolition crew arrived and proceeded to gut the complete interior of the store right down to the bare block walls, including the roof!

I remember when they actually tried to have us paint over the old-style shelves we still had making up most of our store a few years back. No scraping the gunk off them, just paint it all over. Aside from the fact that someone must have selected the worst kind of paint possible, which resulted in it almost immediately flaking off unprovoked, or even sticking to merchandise after it had had weeks to dry, you could see the obvious crap right underneath all the paint. There were still pieces of scotch tape, sign residue, gum residue, and whatever the heck else all just under a single layer of paint. In a way, it made it look worse than just leaving them alone.

As for our registers...not even half of our front end registers work. Almost all of them are missing their front face plates, exposing all the circuit boards inside. Most of the monitors are cracked. A few of them are also missing the top plates, or they are so broken that they don't fit into place. One of the service desk monitor swing-arms is broken, so the monitor is tilting at a precarious angle.

I work at a Kmart in central PA. Our floors haven't been cleaned or waxed in over five years. We have worn spots in the tile at the front end. There's still carpet in one part of the store. We don't have a vacuum for store use and it is so full of dirt you would think it was a dirt path outside.

Its doeant matter how much you scrub these stores. They are falling apart. Old fixutes, beat up floors, dirty carpets, ancient POS systems, crappy quality merchandise,etc. Its not going to change anything. Its too late. The bad perception of the company is too intense.