I worked at a home improvement warehouse called "
Home Base" For about 6 to 8 months sometime after I got out of the service. Having construction experience, i was put "on the floor" in the Building materials and Lumber departments.
It's not that the work was hard, it was the management was so crappy. My list of grievances can be listed as such:
- The manager of the store that I worked at, seemed to have it in her head to run the place like a grocery store. My Peers had took to calling her "Bitchy the 8th dwarf".
- My immediate supervisor was a major A-Hole, and told me point blank that my job was to make him look good. But it's not like I hadn't dealt with his type before in the military, so I took that in stride. He was a washout of a private contractor who was trying to get ahead in this home base retail chain. His favorite thing to do was hang out and shoot the bull at the Contractor desk while i busted my ass.
- The Management always tried to do more with less people. One of the biggest complaints customers had was they couldn't find anyone to help them. Here's why:
In each department there was supposed to be two people on the floor. Especially on weekends. Considering how large the place was, even this is understaffed. My most "Fond" weekend memory was working Building materials and Lumber BY MYSELF. There's supposed to be 4 people on this saturday. Nope, just me. So i had to bounce around from
1 getting price checks because the girls at the registers had no idea what they were looking at.
2 cutting window glass for customers
3 cutting lumber for customers
4 answering any "how to" questions from customers.
5 haul whatever the contractor desk asks for to the front
6 "Face" the shelves AND the lumber
(see bitchy the 8th dwarf)
7 check price stickers on the racks
8 sweep crap off the floor
9 spot for, or run the fork lift
ANd I had to do this ALL at once. Being pulled in 9 different directions at once, I quite literally froze in place for several seconds wondering if i was about to have a nervious breakdown. Before I had reached that point I had quickly found that i could get from one end of the store to the other by going down the VERY BACK row without getting intercepted by someone. It's not that I didn't want to help or teach people how to do stuff, I did, and I enjoyed it, I just had too much to do.
After that saturday, I gave them my notice. On that notice, they burned me, by remarking "said retail was too stressful" to make sure I could never get another job . Seeings how they are no longer in business, I had the last laugh.