SM = Store Manager (Express)

5.30am - Arrive at work! Quick walk around to check standards left from last night – not bad but make a note of a patch of bad facing up and Start to cash up Self Service Checkouts. A quick word on the self serve checkouts for those that haven’t had the pleasure of working with these, they greatly improve the customers shopping experience as it gives them something new to complain about. It also means a cut in your wage budget.

6.00am - baker (who is also stock CA) arrives and starts bakes off after helping dual control the SSC pickups.

6.10am - Put out papers and magazines

6.30am - Just 300 price changes to action before we open!

7am – Open store. Ambient turns up…and so does fresh! Leave the drivers to figure out who gets turned around first (I can now swear in Polish after a few of these encounters) and I deal with bread and milk deliveries that turn up like clockwork everyday at the correct time. If I have a DM on Duty he will now continue with the price changes – yes we are now trading illeagaly. Admin CA turns up – got two now!

7.45 – Bread and milk now worked and ambient is now in warehouse which can hold 4 cages comfortably and is now holding 10. Baker now helps with fresh delivery. Admin gets put on till

9.30 – Fresh done – someone makes the tea! Check emails for anything urgent. Counts not scheduled on system again and three requests for info from EOM.

9.45 – gap scan for me and admin CA gets to actually do her job as we now have another CA to man the tills.

10.30 – check RDR and find we have two cages confirmed on system that didn’t arrive. Unconfirm deliveries and ring distribution direct. Spell my name for them three times and take ref number

11am – sign off all the morning reports, check yesterdays cash loss, shrink and waste figures. Send an email off explaining any adversity (bad stuff). Customer tries to return some clothing she bought at a superstore, explain we can’t refund items we haven’t sold, explain that when the superstore told her over the phone that Express stores can take back anything that they were… mistaken. (cleaned that one up for you) Breaks start and stock starts his routines. Another CA starts and climbs over the ambient cages now blocking every doorway and starts to breakdown the delivery. I help in between answering the bell, helping customers and answering the phone. Catch the admin Ca before she goes and do the legal training with her – as she’s quick we decide to do her review as well. It goes well, we work out TNA for her to be T/L and sort some timescales. Best bit of my day so far and the more astute may have realised the first part that actually could be called management.

12pm - Do the 11am reductions (yes, I know) whilst on the shrink conference call. Hear some colleagues lie badly and others who really don’t know what they are talking about. The store I’ve been helping out at is getting some good results now so that cheers me up.

1.30pm – till checks done, recorded – all ok.

2pm – handover. We rumble, do safe check and discuss week to date figures. Next steps are handed over. We’ve left 2 cages for him to do which isn’t too bad. Remember the request for info from this mornings emails and action that. Grab early shift on the way out and late shift on the way in and do team 5 en masse.

3pm – sign off one of the new late shift CA’s on Bronze and start silver. It means my DM only has one CA for an hour but what can you do?

4pm – look at holidays and tasks for next two weeks and allocate overtime available. DM’s will make the calls for cover over the next couple of days. Get a call to do a disciplinary at another store and as it could easily lead to dismissal I make a note to pick up the paper work ASAP to make sure we haven’t already shot ourselves in the foot.

5pm – Say goodbye to everyone and leave the building, praying I won’t get any calls tonight.

Well that’s an average early shift. It would be a bit different if I had a manager running the shift but as SM’s end up running shifts more often than not I didn’t use those days. As a day in the life doesn’t really capture everything the following deals with the stuff that doesn’t happen everyday but is still an important part of an SM’s life

Meetings:
We have few meetings but I think its worth talking you through the experience. Meetings are called periodically. These are timed to ensure maximum disruption to stores. For example when you have planned to put up capping shelving, do your Christmas rotas and personal day arrangements, your presence will be requested at short notice, the other side of London to discuss putting up capping shelving, Christmas rotas and float day arrangements. These meetings normally run from 9am to 6pm to make sure everyone gets screwed by the rush hour, twice. After a meeting has been announced all managers rearrange there rotas and personal lives and try and figure out how to get the work they had planned to do now that they will no longer be in the store. This will inevitably lead to spending more money on staff to meet the shortfall. It should be noted here that a frequent topic at meetings will be payroll overspends. Pointing out any irony here is to be avoided at all costs.

Conference Calls:
This is where managers talk about their performance in the last week and use the phrase “I’ll get back to you on that” a lot. This gruesome experience is made all the worse for putting managers in charge of parts of it. This leads to managers performing worse than you asking you why your performance is so bad. Shouting “my figures may be bad but they still piss all over yours, you pretentious little twat” at these people is of course justified but very much frowned upon. People get upset about this sort of thing. No, really they do. Just don’t do it.

Working Week ?:
I always enjoy answering the question “when does our week start?” The working week starts on Friday for payroll, Sunday for holiday weeks, Monday for accounting and on Wednesday for promotions periods.

Maintenance:
Express don’t have someone in store to fix things. We share our guy with at least 30 other shops and see him maybe once a fortnight We have a single number for all maintenance problems you may find in store! Just ring one number, go through the option system (shouldn’t be more than 20) and then you can speak to a bored sounding Geordie who can tell you what you should have pressed.

IT:
Our IT department is based in India which makes sorting out complex technical issues that bit more challenging. The accent / language barrier isn’t really an issue though, as you will only get two replies from the helpdesk – Turn it off and then back on again, or… I can’t help you with this, I will pass this on to the second level support. If you get the second reply its time to transfer to a new shop as this problem will now never get fixed. Some believe that second level support just doesn’t exist, others that they are a rumour created to give false hope to managers at the end of their endurance. Only one thing is known for sure – they’ll never fix your problem.

The Express Philosophy:
Remember if it worked in 1972 in a superstore it will work 30 years later in an Express!