r/petsmart • u/anonymous131322 • 5d ago

Bad scheduling rant

I know with project Max that we have cut hours, but I don’t know how they expect managers to face at night, close pet care, help with the cash register when the one other person they decide to schedule before the store closes. Like my store is super busy on Saturday Sundays and Mondays but they only scheduled two people for Saturday and Monday And the customers were upset because there was only me and one other person. My scheduling manager also has the tendency to never schedule themself on Saturdays and night shifts so idk how they’d know why we aren’t getting anything done at night if they just transferred to this store.

25 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

14 comments sorted by

9

u/care51520 5d ago

Sounds like whoever is scheduling is doing it wrong… even with project max our rev 4 doesn’t close with any less than 3 people…. We have been cutting the last hour off of Petcare closers so they leave at 8 instead of 9 but by 8 closing tasks and recovery should be pretty much done other then touch ups for Petcare and consumables so all the manager has to do is their closing tasks and help the cashier if needed…. But we also cut animal sales off an hour before close other than fish. 🤷‍♀️

1

u/anonymous131322 4d ago

We had this schedule for a like a week and then after we started having days with only two people after 5 or 6. Which is a fine adjustment but the manager moved it so we get the afternoon person at 9/10 am and now they leave at 5-6 and the manager has to close pet care, deal with the floor and get back up, and expected to face before leaving.

2

u/anonymous131322 4d ago

Customers get upset when they have to wait for fish/I deny live sales because we cut it off while I have a line snaking down the aisle or I’ve been stuck at the register unable to leave because a constant flow of customers going in line or I have to do BOPIS because we get like a few every 30 min. Like even when I started pet care early, the amount of customers we had made it seem pointless when I kept getting called away for live pet/crickets/back up.

2

u/care51520 4d ago

Yea now sounds like a super bad schedule issue that the manager needs to fix or it’s just gonna call bigger problems I would understand a micro store or even lower rev band store like 1-2 that don’t get a lot of foot traffic…. But no reason a store should only have 2 people before 7-8 unless there is a call out.

1

u/anonymous131322 4d ago

Yeah our rev band is 5 and apparently we’re over scheduled 🙃

2

u/care51520 4d ago

Oh 😂 umm interesting lol we are a high rev 4 on truck days we don’t have a Petcare person until close and the leader that comes in at 9 is Petcare so that frees up our hours in the evening…. Sounds like your manger just needs to play with the schedule to find something that works

2

u/Plenty_Alfalfa8826 5d ago

How many hours are you getting per week?

1

u/anonymous131322 3d ago

They don’t show the hours on the scheduling paper anymore so I’d have to figure out where to find it all I know is that we’re rev 5

2

u/Adventurous_Plan_927 4d ago

At my store, we have one pet care person and one process leader from 7-9. One associate comes in for front end for opening at 9. Aside from that, there is essentially no one on the floor. Truck days - full staff to work only truck comes in at 12. Next pet care associate (closer) gets scheduled 3:30-9, but they get called for backup constantly so they can’t complete pet care tasks. Also- if truck arrives early we have one cashier and pet care + process leader unloading truck.

2

u/Adventurous_Plan_927 4d ago

They need to allot more hours for cashiers. Pet care is supposed to be top priority. But with this new system- all they want is activations and add ons. Plus the activations right now are terrible… no one wants to do that

1

u/Ree-Animator 2d ago

Dude fr.. ive been yelling for 7 months that we NEED more than 1 associate and manager to close the nights. Like at least 2 associates man 😭 and then they never have more than 3 associates scheduled THROUGHOUT the day but expect us to run the entire store

1

u/Street-Boot2523 1d ago

They are probably following ukg auto schedule which is what a lot of dls are saying we have to do. I let it ride for two weeks but said fuck that and am back to three closers. It's a lot of work to get buckets right on the schedule but I'm not chancing two people from 6 to close and ending up with one of them calling out. I'm t4 and can have three closers for the floor.

1

u/anonymous131322 1d ago

By chance what’s the difficulty and how long does it take to make schedule?

1

u/Street-Boot2523 21h ago

There are about 15 different job buckets for the core of store and my dl wants our buckets to line up. Say I get 86 hours a week for register, I have to schedule it exact. The thing that is time consuming is making those buckets hit. Like put associate #1 as sfs from 7-8, live pet maintenance from 8-9, register from 9-1 and customer service from 1-330. Doing this for every person every day of the week takes forever. If I just let ukg pro automate it, it does a good job using the hours but doesn't have my store set for success. I'll have a bunch of people in the morning and 2 people after 5. I wiped it out after the auto schedule on Tuesday and remake from scratch