As none of you know, I work on the sales floor at Target on the closing team. Some of you work in stores so this might hit a note with you.

Lately they've been having me cover some pretty large areas, usually a combination of sporting goods, toys, and "e"s which range from detergent to home storage, to automotive.

And for those of you unfamiliar with terminology at Target, "zoning" means pulling things forward and making an area look nice. Go-backs are things customers have put in the wrong spot, were sorted at customer service, and are given to the sales floor team to put back in the appropriate spot.

Well, tonight was particularly crazy with kids running rampant destroying my zones faster than I could set them up. My go-backs were constantly accumulating despite walking briskly/working up a sweat trying to get everything done before closing. At the end of the night everyone brough up about two carts total for the entire store, and I had three overflowing carts surplus from what they needed me to take care of.

So... everyone gave off a really bad vibe at me when I walked back up to guest services with three stuffed carts. At least, that's what it felt like from all the "Oh sh**, look at those carts" that people said.

What bugs me is, it feels like my supervisors are giving me extremely unreachable goals and expecting me to do them in half the time that it would take me. Then they don't factor in that guests still need help finding things. Half the time my superiors get upset at me for not responding to back up calls to the front lanes (despite being the farthest from the front lanes, thus the most inefficient person to walk to the front of the store and cashier).

So yeah, I pretty much feel like a total failure right now for not accomplishing the goals assigned to me. Thoughts? Comments? Etc.

Please, be nice, because this is obviously a 'work sucks' rant. It's just very stressful to have people getting mad at me for not accomplishing seemingly impossible tasks.

Better than your job.

Work is rather good for me (being a game tester). The only thing I can really complain about is the lack of reliable hours, but that's the nature of the industry.

All I can say for you is that retail sucks. I used to work at Toys R Us, and while I mostly did the cashier stuff, I know the horror stories. *vibes*

My work is amazingly supportive. I've had some pretty severe health problems for quite a while now, and consequently have been missing a lot of work.
Plus they've always had to put up with me being half asleep a lot of the time due to insomnia.

Hmm, I'm a pain in the ***...

What work? Im an unemployed poor slob of a student.

I get $15 an hour to sell Epson Printers in best buy for 8 hours a week. It will be 12 in the next week or so :D.
It's not fantastic, but it's easy. Get's boring.
For only 8 hours, that's roughly 100 bucks a week after taxes.
With the extra 4 hours it'll be more like 150.

I'm considering a second job, perhaps at Costco. They pay like 11 bucks an hour to be a cashier or stock stuff as starting pay.

Honestly, I worked as a cashier at Target, and it was one of the worst jobs of my life. I only did it for 2 months because it was to cover my spare time over Christmas.
I'm never going back.

It's alright. I just got word yesterday that I can officially work from home 3 days per week, so that frees up a lot of extra time for me to spend with my family. Woohoo.

I work in a warehouse. Inside that warehouse, I work in the freezer. It is cold there. How cold? Below zero. That's cold. It sucks, but it pays well. What's my motivation? I want to build up as much cash as possible so that I don't need to work there anymore. I want to finish off my degree and get on with my life. I hate the job with a passion, but I keep doing it because I know it's one of the fastest ways for me to do what I want to do in life.

I'm a Music Retail store manager. and since we're small i also double up as teacher, repairman and sound tech... I don't know if it's here or if it's the business, but the people are so arrogant sometimes. some of them can barely play but need top of the line gear.. I guess business is business. it's still very annoying.

it's a challenge though, i like challenges.

My last day is next Friday. If all goes well, I'll be working my new job before the end of the month. I'm happy.

Sorry 'bout your luck; I'm not a huge fan of retail..

Well, at the moment I'm installing Kubuntu on my new work-Thinkpad, so I guess they treat me well.

I get $12 an hour working in a textiles and soft furnishing shop. It's awesome.

Unfortunately I think I need to tell them I'm leaving sometime soon. Damn Uni.

Lucky *******.

Axis, try educating 120 14-year-olds-who-don't-want-to-be-at-school everyday.

And yeah, it sounds like you're getting the shaft. Be sure and point out to your superiors (or better, their superiors) that you may not be doing all the little things as fast as they want but you ARE taking care of the customers needs.

[Edit: Ok Brian, thinking about it, maybe you AREN'T so lucky. I find it almost impossible to get any work done at home with a 5yr old and a 1yr old needing attention all the time.]

My son goes to the babysitter, so I am home alone. Well there is my cat. And the closet bursting with souls, that tends to creak and groan.

I teach guitar lessons, but I want to move to Hawaii and be a surfer.

I have no job. I sit here and play games all day and go out with friends every once in a while. I guess that can be considered a job if you will.

I have the best job ever

Are you serious?! Awesome! Why don't you move here (TX) and teach me to play guitar (better) and then we can vacation in Hawaii, you'll look for a house, we'll both learn to surf, then I'll come back home and you'll stay there, AIIGHT!?

I love my current job, but, oh, the stories I could tell of my time as a vet tech. >_<

I'm a TA for the CS dept. at my university (which is kind of ironic considering my last thread...) Anyways, I teach MS Office to lots of students. It's great. I even have an assistant this year!

I like my job. I wish it payed more, but who doesn't?

I work graveyard frieght at a grocery store that I live next to, so I dont even have to drive to work. Graveyard means no pain in the *** customers to deal with. I just go in, do my work for 8 hours (or more or less depending on the load of stuff) and go home. Yea graveyard means I have to sleep during the day, but it's not that far off from what my normal sleep schedule would be (go to sleep at 3am, get up at noon, instead I go to sleep around 8 and get up at 4 or 5).

I just wonder if I'll be able to keep the job when classes start up again..

I work at Toys R Us, that's worse than Target. We are always disgustingly understaffed on the closing shift. We'll have one person in RZone/Electronics (there always has to be one), one at the service desk, and one person with the sales floor all to themselves. And a manager. And that happens like 3 times a week. And since it's a toy store, we always have tons of kids to mess things up.

And we call our go-backs reshop. At Christmas time we usually have about 20-30 carts of it. People scan their items at the price checkers, and if they don't like price, they just drop it. There's always huge piles underneath them at Christmas.

And today I get to work from 12:30 to 9:30. Kick ***.

I work at a bar inside a movie theater. I know. It's weird.

Anyway, my latest annoyance was the other night when three black people came in and ordered a crapload of food and drinks, and then asked if they could pay with food stamps. I told them no and they paid with quarters.

It's annoying.

We also have a few of really irritating employees who like to come up to the bar and order food during the prime round (7:00pm-8:30pm) which is when everyone likes to come to the movies, so obviously we have alot of customers. It occurs to me that these people should probably be off doing their own jobs instead of bothering us up at the bar/bistro. Instead of doing what they are paid to do, they like to stand there and place long complicated food orders and then complain about the price. They also like to send the food back if it isn't done exactly the way they want it done.

Luckily, we're having a meeting tomorrow morning where these issues are going to be adressed.

I get about £9/hour doing application development for a company that does customer service development (basically we send out mystery shoppers for large companies and give them back the results, amongst other things). Usually pretty good, only sometimes get very short deadlines (like hours) to extend the system in some way.

i work in a research lab at my university. get paid a $1300 a month salary. it's a pretty kickass deal because i don't even work full time, and i enjoy the research :).

i did work at a coffee shop for a year (caribou coffee as a barista) during high school. ****tiest job ever, with low pay. never working in retail after that incident.

Axis:

I work for Walmart. I've been in the same situations as yourself and understand completely how you feel like you're not accomplishing anything. I'm not sure how Target covers off areas but I'll leave it how I finally got a grip on my own nighttime shifts at Walmart.

Focus on a few major things;

-Your Area comes First. It doesn't matter if you're in the only associate in that end of the store, if your schedule says you're supposed to be in Sports, you focus directly on sports and that area only. Keep your aisles and endcaps zoned plus watch for recovery merchandise. I know your management team will go "Oh you don't mind covering toys/seasonal/hardware/fabrics/housewares, do you?" but you need to voice your concern about having to deal with all those departments yourself. Focus on one area at a time and try to deal with the bigger aisles first.

-Customers in the store come first. Don't worry about answering the phone, unless its a cashier. Cashier calls are generally price checks, but don't become overwhelmed by it. Keep in mind that the customer at the cash wants to buy product from your store, which increases sales and (in my case atleast) bonuses to associates. Take their money, say thank you have a nice day, smile if you want and go back to your department. People in the store are typically there to buy stuff. Make sure you're helping them find it all. This sometimes means running all over the place.

-Recovery Carts suck. I really don't have any overly helpful advice for this. Make sure when you have a few minutes you take a walk to the front of the store and check for recovery. Keeping ontop of recovery while zoning can normally make things go smoother (as you're putting things away, quickly zone over your aisles, or vice versa).

Multitasking is the key to working in a retail environment, and I've been in the same position as you. There was a period last year when I was the only nighttime employee on my side of the store, covering 6-8 departments at a time. Speak up to your direct assistant supervisor, or the store manager. Its unfair for them to expect you to cover so much floorspace but they will demand it of you if you're not saying anything.

I really don't get the bit where people in retail sit and whine about having to deal with people. I find that much better than doing anything else when you're working in a shop.

I think I have the least boring job here. :/

Atleast airplanes are alot cooler and more exciting than retail.

I get paid to hike out in the woods and fight fire. It's awesome except for whiny *** crew members that need a chainsaw to the face.

I work retail too. Don't take the job so seriously, and don't let anyone (customers, supervisors) push you around so much.

Okay. Step one: Smuggle myself across the border.

i work at Sears in Home Improvement in consultive Sales.

Pros:
Good enviroment lots of ways to help people solve their problems.
Good managers that are very supporting and don't give me unreasonable goals.
Always have been staffed well since ive been there. I may close alone but only for my department.
They train us well and i can rely on most of my cooworkers do at least know what they are doing most of the time.
Alot of resources for assisting customer service issues from batched delivery problems to damaged/ defective items.

Cons:
Pay could be better maybe $10/hour during slow times $14/hour during better sales periods.
Unreasonable demands from customers with warranties and discounts.
Sales fliers are too sparatic and random they don't make sense alot of the time for example sale signs are re printed mid week with the same exact price.
Plan-o-grams (charts used to graphically show merchandise locations on end caps and aisles) are not physically possible with the shape of boxes and spaces, and down right confusing sometimes.
Too much policy changes by the flavor of the times that don't last or contribute to anything but another bottom of the totem pole beatdown.
Stock stock stock, too much stuff is needing to be ordered while its shown on sale.
System integration, our Point of sale machines use 15+ year software that has alot of limitations while we have to use slow windows 2000 Terminals to assist with online orders that can't even be ordered to the store anyways.
(i spent an hour ordering a part for a customer for their riding mower and it took almost an hour to complete the sale which i got 0 credit for...)

I work in a snack bar at a country club.... can you imagine the people there?

seriously the AC sucks its over 100 degrees in there and we have to cook food fast or the members get cranky

specially the golfers they are the worst

and guess what no tips

8 an hour and i work the most i have 38 1/2 hours in 4 days...

gonna end the week with over 50

Well.. I pull tower guard at a small COP in Sadr City, Iraq. It's 130+ degrees during the day, and we have no AC. While on guard I wear 70+lbs of body armor and personal equipment. The SAPI plates in the body armor are made of ceramic, so it's like wearing an oven. It gets very hot and I have heat rash all over my back and chest.

Patrols are worse. 2-5 hours riding around in a truck that is so cramped you can barely fit inside with all your equipment on, Barely has any armor to speak of, and the AC in the trucks is worthless.

If I'm lucky, I get to take a shower maybe every 4 days. Shave every 2 if I'm lucky.

Every day when I wake up, I wonder if it might be my last. Or maybe I'll get wounded that day... what if one of my friends dies? What if our truck breaks down in the middle of a patrol?

And all this, for what? Presence patrols, Anti-Mortar patrols and guard. What is this accomplishing? I don't know. I don't ask questions because I do not get paid to ask questions, all I do is what I am told to do.

These are all things that make my job suck. But I still do it and I don't complain.

It was never all people in general for me. It was those 4-5 A-holes a day that come in, ask stupid questions, act like they're smarter, cooler, and better than you and seem to think that despite their being an ***, you love nothing more than to be in their presence.

It would take all day to fully explain the pain in the *** that is the customer, so if you really want to understand, go work in a retail place. You'll figure it out.

I work as a forecast analyst in the workforce planning department of a major corporation. It's pretty high-stress but the pay is good and I never get bored.

First summer job I've had: working at a marina, physical work outdoors in the sun, with boats, for $15 an hour. Hell yes.

Walk your supervisors around the areas they've assigned you to show them just how large the area is and talk to them about what's up.

I get payed to clean and glue together dinosaur bones. It's cool, but also mind-numbingly boring if you try and work too much. I usually work about 4 hours a day, which seems lame, but it's a summer student job.

I just got back from a week long dig. We've got a sauropod or diplodocid or something that we're trying to get out. It's getting frustrating because the bone isn't very good quality and stuff is spread all over the place. Just when it looks like we're about to get one bone out we hit on another one that has to come out first.

But I'm not complaining yet.

I'm interning at Sony Pictures Imageworks for the moment. It's pretty neat, and there are a lot of quirks that come out of it. Much of the work, however, as expected for an intern, is menial / unskilled stuff -- but some of it is pretty neat/intriguing/fresh etc

I work at target as well. But I'm a cart pusher

I hate how massassi always tells people not to ***** about work.