The last time I ranted about my job, I made mention of the fact that home office seemed to have two mutually exclusive goals in mind for our store: 1) Have minimal or no overstock, and 2) keep receiving and merchandising (without storing where it can’t be bought) the oodles of overstock still being sent to your store.
It has filtered down through the chain of command, however, that our store will no longer be a “regular” store. Instead, it is going to be traited from now on as what is known as a “hometown” store. I’m not sure of what all the implications of that are, but it does mean less freight will be sent to the store. Yay!
But there is a downside. I only have experience with one other hometown store, and they don’t have department managers over each department. Rather, one person may run multiple departments.
In other words, though this change won’t affect our pay at all (so it has been said), it may very well result in some of us losing our positions and being forced to step down or pursue something else entirely, neither of which most of us want to do. As far as hometown stores go, though, we are a pretty big store with big departments (again, comparing it to the one other such store I have experience with), so perhaps such merging of departments will happen where I’m at. I can only hope not.
This year was hyped as the “year of change,” and that it was and is. I’m looking forward to 2007. Perhaps then we’ll get some time to adjust. :)