No, really.
I’m a part-time sales associate at a mall Suncoast, part of the enormous corporate monstrosity known as the Musicland Group - immediately we’re Sam Goody, Media Play, and On Cue, and in a larger sense we’re also Best Buy. At my little Suncoast we’ve got four of us part-time sales associates, two assistant managers, and a general manager. We’ll call him R. We’re all quite personally close, although the problems I’m fixing to explain have become a real issue. Over him there’s a district manager and a whole bunch of people in suits.
I dearly hope that general manager isn’t reading this. I hold just a teeny bit of personal respect for him and hope he’d recognize himself.
Anyway, conditions have been getting from bad to worse at this undeniably crappy job. I mean, we’re really all too old and too educated to work at the mall, we know that. We’re here mostly for the discount. Which is sweet. Corporate policy from above is growing increasingly intolerable, however - for a while they were going to fire me for my hair color, uniforms came in, the numbers are harder and harder to meet every month, we’re forced to try to con the customer into buying more crap, the busywork we’re forced to do is completely useless and ill conceived, etc. And there’s nothing we can do about this sort of thing, although I’ve been fiddling around drafting a letter about how some of these forms and sheets we have to fill out could be dramatically improved to be helpful. But really, there’s nothing you can do when the suits decide to crap on you. And if we had good in-store management, I could handle it.
That’s kinda the problem.
Our manager sucks. It’s gotten worse over time. There’s a neat and obvious progression - for example, the assistant managers who got hired three Novembers ago got one training module and one video (out of several we’re supposed to get). The part-timer two Novembers ago got one module, no video. I, last November, got the employee handbook to sign and that’s it.
So training’s an issue. Not that I -want- to do awful training manuals at this point, but we’re supposed to. More than that is just general incompetance - R is just not a natural leader. He’s indecisive, dosen’t want to hurt people’s feelings, is incredibly inconsistent. Offers little praise and lots of mixed messages. The dress code states that if your size is unavailable in awful Suncoast polo shirts, you can wear a black collared shirt as close to the concept shirts as possible. I’m female, 5’7, 100 pounds. The shirt they sent me is a medium. And I don’t mean a woman’s medium. If I get some better option, the male assistant manager, 5’10, 175, wants my shirts. He and I do not usually swap clothes, in a normal world. But when I asked R if I could just follow the dress code (which explicitly states that clothing shall not be too loose) and wear a black shirt, said no, that he didn’t see what the problem was. Hell, I’d think that a valuable, reliable employee’s ruffled feather-smoothing would be a good enough reason for some small action on his part, right?
Other issues: R dosen’t hold up his part of the numbers, forcing us to work extra hard to carry his dead weight. R always ignores our stated availability hours. R is often late. One of our assistant managers just quit, partly to go back to school but partly becuase he couldn’t take the crap anymore. The other assistant had quite a few reservations disappear back in April, which are important to our personal numbers, and the sales tracking sheets got “lost”. When he brought it up, there was much mumbling but no actual action on R’s part. R sharks sales from us; when we sell focus items on the floor we often find that he gets the numbers. I’m sure if we were to gather and make a list, which I keep urging us to do, there’d be a lot more here.
Something has got to be done. This used to be a great, congenial workplace where I got to work with my friends. We’ve lost one of those friends (who replaced -another- assistant who got fed up and left in March), the mood is dark, the shot is rolling after dark. Who’s willing to say something? Me, I know, both the assistant who left and the one who’s here, possibly the other associates. The other associates seem reluctant to do anything to hurt anybody’s feelings, however. Assistant-still-here and I were going to say something to the district manager when he came to visit a few weeks ago, except he cancelled his visit.
My question is, how is best to present this?
We can call the DM. However, unless we all conference-called him, that would just be one or two of us and not a real represenation of the store. Plus, the reluctant ones probably wouldn’t go in for it.
We can write a letter to the DM. This was what I was planning to do. My thought was, we could come up with a general statement of concerns we all agreed upon, sign that, and attatch personal detailed statements. Thoughts on this? How to make it most effective?
Assistant-who-stayed just called me in a tizzy because he got his biannual evaluation. He’s extremely pissed. I’ll have to see it to see if he’s justified, as he’s a little exciteable, but he wants to attatched “employee’s comments” to the back as we’re allowed to do. He wants to do our protest in this manner.
Would this be more or less effective than a letter? Should we do both? The assistant who left in March is willing to offer his statement as well. What would be the most effective format for such a thing? Should we cc it to R? Should we suggest courses of action - I mean, I just want him to leave, I don’t want to get him fired. The thing is, I -like- the guy personally, I just can’t continue to work like that. Please, somebody give a hand. We’re in a quandary here, a really uncomfortable place with a whole lot of personal feelings mixed up, and my choices are to watch everybody I like quit or involve myself in a whole different ugly thing.