Shrinking payroll dollars

Amazing what the office expects us to do with a smaller and smaller payroll budget.

One problem is that minimum wage has risen far higher than it should have. What's wrong with a high school student making $5.15 an hour? Or someone with limited skills, or someone we're training.....for a while there I was blowing my payroll on incompetent dolts. Now everyone knows what they're doing, more or less. Pay should be based on skills, not on the cost of living.

So what does corporate expect us to do? Let's see......the most important thing is to provide a level of service that you might expect at Tiffany's or other exclusive stores. Problem is, we're not all that exclusive. We are, yet we're not. We get people from all walks of life. Some spend a few dollars while some spend a thousand dollars. Some people want help while others want to be left alone. We're to provide one-on-one attention to all.

Some customers are lonely and pretend to need help so they can chat a while. The majority of our less-affluent customers have a limited intellect such that it takes two or three times longer to explain things to them than to a normal person. There are more returns from them, many due to using the product wrong or deciding that they spent too much. Shoplifting has gotten completely out of control.

People come in seeking advice and after we've spent considerable time with them they go somewhere like Wal-mart to buy. THEN they come back to us and expect us to trouble-shoot why their item isn't working as advertised. "Because you bought the cheapest model out there" doesn't satisfy them. They come to us for replacement parts and are angry because we can't tell them which part fits their generic item....different companies, different size parts....I'm not familiar with Wal-mart's inferior products. There is a reason that our products cost more--QUALITY. So my employees are also helping people who aren't even buying anything in our store, all out of my small payroll budget.

Then there are all the children using our store as a playground/zoo. The parents shop or talk with friends while the children RUN through the aisles, terrorize the staff, pull items off shelves, break things, SCREAM AT THE TOP OF THEIR LUNGS, climb up shelves, and otherwise use staff time. There's the time we spend telling the children to WALK, use their "inside voices," "find your parents, NOW!" and cleaning up the mess they leave behind.

Other things corporate expects us to do are reasonable enough, I guess, but with so few employee hours we're usually rushing around like madmen to try to get everything done. Last week was a rare quiet moment. What with all the ordering, stocking, cleaning, merchandising, pest/rodent control, paperwork.....there's a lot to do but few people to do it. Many days I feel that we can take care of the customers well or we can take care of the physical store well, but we can't do both. So we end up doing a shitty job on both and getting flak from customers and corporate.

Are there any executives reading?? We're humans, not robots! There's a limit to what we can do! Give us the necessary resources and see how much we can accomplish. Let it stand as it is and spend more money recruiting and training new employees when the current employees find higher paying jobs or less stressful ones.