Thread regarding Sears layoffs

Are stores seeing holiday inventory come in?

Just curious if stores have inventory coming in or not. There are no longer any Sears or Kmart stores near me, figure it will be very telling if the usual inventory ramp up hasn’t hit yet.

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| 1588 views | | 8 replies (last October 4, 2018) | Reply
Post ID: @OP+VtASm1c

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Waaaay too much for the amount of people we have working in the store. But it is the same junk from the past four years. We still have over 200 Christmas trees left over from last year and now we get more. Must be cleaning out the warehouse.

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Post ID: @ziw+VtASm1c

This is all very simple. The company has closed a lot of stores as these types of orders are usually placed well before closures are announced. He merchandise is still ordered so it must be redirected to remaining stores. It has been this way for years now, I would except it to get much worse though. I recall a few years ago before my store closed we got so many Christmas trees it was comical. I was told then it was a redistribution because we had fewer stores. Now we have even fewer stores to send stuff to so I’m sure it will just keep compounding.

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Post ID: @zou+VtASm1c

So this all sounds just too familiar. When Kmart filed bankruptcy it was because their CEO decided he could save the company by buying a ton of inventory and shoving in the stores for Q4. If they sold through they’d be saved. Just one problem, the distribution infrastructure was not prepared to handle the on slot of huge inventory flowing through it. Not enough people, equipment or systems where in place....the entire supply chain became paralyzed. It destroyed Kmart and Conaway (the CEO) who lied during an earnings call and told everyone they were in good shape when in fact they weren’t.

Now here comes Eddie, reducing staffing levels to the point where no one is around to unload the trucks and relen the floors...and he’s calling it transformation. I see another supply chain disaster in the making and with the already crippling financial situation this will end soon and not we’ll for senior leadership

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Post ID: @bfq+VtASm1c

@VtASm1c-zat Why does this I remind me of our store's holiday season from a couple years ago?

We were told by our SGM to hide a few weeks' worth of z-racks and baker's racks full of merchandise that hadn't been put away in a random room somewhere in the back of the store. He wanted to do this instead of increasing the hours in softlines to get it done but at the same time he also wanted to make it appear that the store was on top of things when the district manager visited our store since the word was it was top priority to get everything to the floor in 24 hours or less. I told him it was a bad idea, we all told him it was a bad idea, but he probably just thought that we were minimum wage dummies. Even our ASM said that we should just go over hours to get it done, but what did she know???

When the DM did come down to visit I was stuck at the CAC most of the time that day, as usual, and I overheard her saying that she thought it was "odd" that key merchandise was not on the floor and wondered why it wasn't on the truck because it was supposed to show up a month ago. This led her to the realization that some resets were not finished (uh oh). She asked our store manager if he was "positive" everything was put away, he lied through his teeth and said yes.

Well, someone who didn't get the memo about his "foolproof" plan of foolery because she didn't work for a week or two. She started her shift that afternoon. After she clocked in, she beelined to that room and emerged out to the floor with two z-racks FULL of the mysteriously missing key merchandise RIGHT in front of the DM and SGM, with several more left behind in that room, and started to put it away without a care in the world. Let's just say that an hour later we had several people suddenly coming in on their day off to put stuff away.

I soon discovered that it's not always the DM's fault for low hours, and that the SGM decided not to use those hours to make his payroll costs look good. So when people want to blame the DM for cuts in hours, no, it's not always them that are calling for it. Sometimes its the other way around. We were supposed to have about 20 extra hours according to our ASM.

I wondered what our SGM was thinking? It was like playing a game of kick the can to me. I guess he was young and dumb, he was only late 20's or early 30's and probably his first real job.

Not surprisingly, he didn't stick around for too much longer after that. He was gone by spring.

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Post ID: @lkn+VtASm1c

Tons

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Post ID: @eft+VtASm1c

Oh, we've got plenty of Christmas freight coming in. Pallets and pallets full of it. Unfortunately, with as short staffed as we are, and additionally with what few people are still on the schedules no-call/no-showing for half of the days they're scheduled, the few reliable people who show up all end up stuck running registers with almost no time to actually put any of the new freight out.

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Post ID: @zat+VtASm1c

our store is

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Post ID: @mqi+VtASm1c

WTF is inventory?

I see more and more stuff(I'd call it inventory but it's all sh-- now days) get sold out every day then nothing ever comes in to restock it.

I saw a DeWalt display that was new.

That's about it.

Besides, no stores have enough staffing to actually change out to holiday displays.

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Post ID: @why+VtASm1c

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