My first day at work was chill. It was like a paid training. I went through things like the company policy and general knowledge about human feet and shoes.
The store itself is sort of organized. The shoes are displayed on shelves following a certain kind of float, and the other pairs we have in the same style are stacking below the display shoes. This way we can easily tell whether we have a certain size of a certain pair of shoes. To make the things even easier and neater, we keep the boxes in the order of from the smallest to the largest sizes. There are two rows of shoes on the shelves against the wall. For those ones on the top row, the stocks are place on the top against the wall. So in order to get them, we have to use a special tool to get it off.
For the display shoes, they are always the right ones. We would keep the security tag on the left shoes of some more expensive pairs. For very expensive and popular boots, we keep the left one in the back room that only staff are allowed to get in. The store follow this kind of rules to minimize the potential risk of thievery. The display shoes are usually the smallest ones. When a display shoe is sold, we would replace it with the next smallest one.
When a sale associate is walking around helping customer, we call it “on the floor” in the shoe store. I had some short time on the floor during my first few shifts. My manager will usually assign a certain area to a certain associate, and that associate will help the customers that are shopping in that area. When there are not a lot of customers shopping around, the associate will do some auditing in the assigned area, or sometimes the manager will give some specific tasks. But customers are always more important, we would stop whatever we are doing if a customer needs help.
When a customer come in to the store, we would always make sure we greet them with a big smile. It’s important to give the customers some space, so we would wait for another 30 seconds before we approach the customers for the second time. Sometimes we can tell whether a customer needs our help. For those who are doing fine, we just let them shop on their own. For customers that needs help, we have to pay close attention, and approach them first when they seem to have trouble. My manager told me that it would be too late if a customer asked for help. “We always want to make sure we offer our help before they ask. It’s proactive”, my manager said.
(to be continued)