I have worked for Sears for almost a year now & in the amount of time I have seen it go down hill more than I could imagine it could. First of all they no longer have customer service reps, ONLY in the lawn & garden, appliances & electronics are the associates allowed to go out & help the customer.
When I started working there I worked in the tool/paint department, 3 months later corp offices changed the way it was run & put in a cash wrap station, put cashiers there (non commision) the cashiers are not allowed to leave the station to go out & help the customer, nor are they trained or expected to know ANYTHING about the items they sell or even where the items are located, they are only allowed to stand behind the cash register & ring up the items & take credit card payments.
When the change happened the tool department was split up, all the major power tools & paint became 2 seperate departments with commision employes asigned to each department. Just in the past 2 months they combined the 2 departments again, BUT for the employes that were in paint got a drop in pay, the paint department did pay $4.50 an hour plus commision (the % of commision depended on the item sold, it ranged between 1% & 3%) now they are paid $3.25 an hour & the ammount of commision stayed the same even though their work responsibilities have doubled.
I could go on for hours about all the things Sears does. The store I work for use to carry rugs, they would have to be ordered, but we did have some very nice rugs. About 4 months ago they discontinued carring them & decieded to sell off all the displays for $99 no matter what the original cost was, sounds like a great deal & it actually was but what VERY few people knew was that Sears did not actually own the displays, they were property of the venders, Sears never paid one dollar for them but they were selling them & making 100% profit from it. I took advantage of it & bought 2 rugs that originally would have cost $800 each. The current store manager has only been there for about a year, so he told the venders that he didn't realise that Sears did not own the displays & that he had them distroyed.
From the day I started working there they have never told us that customer service is #1, the things they push on us the most is credit applications, protection agrements & sales figures. Also for every credit application that a Sears associate gets they are paid $2. When a department gets the most protection agrements the manager of that department gets a prize (this past year they gave them DVD players) but the associates that worked to get thoes numbers for the store didn't even get a "thank you".
The #1 complaint I have about Sears (it maybe just the store I work for) is the bathrooms, I have seen cleaner bathrooms in a sleezy bar at 2am, in the store I work at they have removed all the stall doors in the mens room, there are no walls between the urinals, there are 4 sinks but only 1 works, the other 3 are cover with trash bags with signs that say "out of order". They recently painted the mens rooms, VERY dark navy blue, actually they spray painted it, so there is paint all over the floor, ceiling & toilets, there is only 2 floresent light fixtures in the entire bathroom so because of the color of the walls it is so dark in there, your lucky if you can find any toilet paper in it.
For some reason for the past 6 months we get a visit from someone in the corperate office once a week, not to make sure that things are running well or to make sure customers are getting the best service, but to make sure that the items in the store are in the exact place on the shelf that they want them, for some reason they think if a screw driver or a lawn tractor is 2 feet over from where it was before then we will sell hundreds of dollars more of them, or to make sure the associates are using the right color of sticker that say an item is out of stock & is on order.
I recently was asked to fill an end cap that was very low on stock, most of the items that we were out of on the shelf the store was actually out of stock, so I just found a few items that were in the same price range & quality that we had oversock of & filled the shelf, later I was called into the managers office & asked where did I get the idea that I could just pick & choose what could go there, I explained to him that most of the items we out of stock & the end cap would pretty much have been empty if I hadn't done that, his responce to that was. There are specific plans (they are called planograms) to every square inch of this store & I DO NOT have the right to just pick & choose what goes where.
So I asked him what I should have done instead. He told me that I should have come to him, after I had searched the store from top to bottom to make sure that we in fact were out of stock, & then he, the department manager & the operations manager would have called a meeting to discuss what the appropiate action to take would be, if to leave it empty & express ordered the items that belong there or to call up corp office to see if they had a alternate planogram for that specific end cap. Then I was threatened if I was to do something like that again I would get a formal writing put in my file. Now how anal can you get over a 2 foot end cap.
I think I have rambled on enought about Sears but I have only covered about 10% of what goes on there. I highly recomend to anyone looking for a tool, appliance or anything of that nature you go somewhere else like Lowes or Home depot. If you want a tv. Vcr or dvd go to Best Buy, Walmart or somewhere else & if you are looking for clothing or anything houseware related, go to Pennys, Dillards, Belk, or anywhere for that matter. Send Sears a message.
Jackson
Asheville, North Carolina
U.S.A.
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