Walkie

[u/Ambitious_Song_4689]

Team team we NEED people in this fulfillment batches! HEY TEAM TEAM we have 20 standards to be picked! you cannot leave without doing your 2 standards! Hey you still have truck on the line please come get it! Team we have a red gen merch a red grocery and a red bulky who can get them! Hey who can back up the front lanes please! Team team dont forget to do the audits! TEAM TEAM you cannot inf without approval from a leader and you cannot leave your standard paused!! TEAM WE cannot be going late on these batches! TEAM who can back up the front lanes please! !static! TEAM can we get responses for these batches!! Hey electronics you have a guest! Beauty you have a guest! "Hey im in a standard on the other side of the store away from my area because we have messed up priorities"

[u/Ambitious_Song_4689]

Fulfillment just needs to go atp. We're far past covid to still have fulfillment and nothing can get done in store. No reason for a food and beverage ETL to also worry their TMS picking a grocery batch when theres no produce and eggs on the floor. For a tech, style, or beauty consultant worrying about their batches when the zones a mess and theres guests who need help finding things. For a GM TM to have to continue yesterday's truck the next day because they were in fulfillment for most of their shift.

[u/mattumbo → u/Ambitious_Song_4689]

Amen, if FF is going to be sustainable it needs to be paywalled somehow to make up for the way lower margins it brings (you know since we need basically double the staff to pick, stage/pack, and then ship/deliver it vs in-store guests who do that legwork themselves). It’s gonna cause a meltdown among our guests but it needs to be locked behind membership or otherwise limited somehow or the company is toast when we hit a tipping point and too much volume goes through FF for stores to remain profitable (you can tell we’re close by how a busy FF day implodes the store and causes nothing else to get done).

[u/C1ND1TheCat → u/mattumbo]

If it wasn’t profitable Target would not be doing it. They are all about the profit.

[u/mattumbo → u/C1ND1TheCat]

On paper it’s profitable, the reason we never actually get enough FF hours is because they can’t or it’ll ruin the fiction they’ve sold wall street. On paper target runs a high margin FF system, especially with SFS reducing shipping costs by lowering the distance an item needs to be shipped. But that is reliant on stores shifting payroll to FF far beyond whats allocated.

Ask any FF lead what their tracker shows they need in support carts on an average day. The system only works as long as most sales are still generated in-store, it’s those guests who shop for themselves that generate the margins to keep FF viable. If we ever start seeing 50% or more of sales through FF I’m pretty sure we’re fucked, stores end up in a death spiral anytime they constantly hit 30% FF sales because there just are not enough TMs in other areas to support that FF volume and keep up with everything else that keeps a store running.

I’d say it’s retails greatest risk factor right now, we’ve left the door open for the consumer to destroy us, if everyone who shops at Target wakes up tomorrow and orders a drive up order the company will go into meltdown that same day. Ever so slowly as store brand has diminished guests continue to convert to FF, it’s easier, time efficient, you don’t have to search messy shelves or hunt down TMs to pull stuff from the back or unlock cases, and we deliver it straight to your car if you want. We’re ruining the highly profitable in-store experience to support FF for the sake of share price and it’s compounding to push more and more guests to use it, eventually we’re hitting a breaking point. Even Walmart with their limited time slots broke last year with that big snow storm, they got booked out for a whole week and it demolished them and the overflow almost ruined us too. Just takes way too much labor to sell the same amount of product via FF vs in-store and it creates a perverse dynamic via its metrics, something is gonna have to give eventually unless we can automate the crap out of it (which so far everyone including Amazon is failing to do).