Hallelujah! Zellers Is Being Purchased By Target

I worked in two different Zellers stores from 1991 to 1997
and have always had fairly strong opinions on why the chain would fail. In the
early days of my employment I was working in a very recently converted former
Towers store. Immediately I was thrust into an environment full of grumpy
employees who were taken over as well, who had their wages frozen indefinitely
as the pay scales of Zellers were less generous of those at Towers. It is quite
possible that some of these folks were just plain overpaid to begin with, and
maybe that’s what killed the Towers chain amongst many other things. Anyways,
Zellers did not seem to bring any sense of excitement to anyone. Many felt they
were a small fish being gobbled up by a whale. I once overheard a former Towers
assistant store manager say that the takeover was handled badly, with no regard
for the employees. Surprise surprise. The way Zellers upper management took
care of business became more and more apparent as I continued in my employment
there.

At first I was hired as a cashier. Before long a full-time
position opened up in the Housewares department of the store. I got the
position and found myself inheriting a complete disaster. Boxes had been
opened, were torn and tattered, merchandise was strewn across the floors,
display models were incomplete, missing, or existed for items no longer sold,
and items were not where they should have been on the shelves. At first I was
shocked, but as time wore on, I realized that I was only expected to have
things picked up off the floor and thrown back on the shelf each night, just so
that the cleaners could mop the floors. This was a far cry from my previous job
in a grocery store where we could not leave the store until everything looked good. This included
“facing” items on the shelves- retail lingo for bringing things to the front so
that merchandise was accessible and made the shelf look full even if it wasn’t.
At Zellers the only time this practice was followed was in the days prior to
what we used to call “Royal Visits” when managers above the district manager
level would visit. I found this somewhat puzzling. Why didn’t these people
leave the visits unannounced and show up dressed like regular joes, and see
what the front lines, the stores, actually looked like on a normal basis? These
guys, and yes, they were ALL men at the time, mostly grey haired tall men in
impeccable suits, wanted everyone employed at the store to make a huge fuss
over them.

The sad part about these visits was the way the store
manager and department managers were treated. They were essentially given no
salary budget, yet were expected to have things looking spic and span at all
times. Sometimes the upper management guys would pull a power trip and force a
store manager to clean up a department himself while his shocked employees
looked on. It was a real power trip for these bullies as they threw their
weight around.

Oddly enough, I was encouraged to apply for the store
management program, and being a high-school educated kid with nothing to lose,
I took them up on the offer. In late 1993 I started my first assignment in
another store, and for some time was pleased to be amongst employees that
seemed more positive. I was told almost immediately that the store I was now
working in had not seen the salary cuts of the previous store, but that they
were coming, and come they did. Almost overnight the location went from being a
decent place, to the same shithole as the first store. Somehow they thought
that less employees would save them enough money to make the store more
profitable. In the ensuing year I learned many things about how the company
operated, and here is a list of “beefs”:

-         
Aisles cluttered with junky unnappealing items
that were old, tattered or had been returned. We were told NOT to reduce these
items to clear. The end result is that they never sold and wasted space. The
stationery department was one of the worst examples.

-         
Sale items were seemingly never in stock. In
fact, the store was in stock, but the
merchandise was on a pallett deep in the stockroom where no one could get it.
The stockroom was tiny, so tiny, in fact, that in stuffing it with more
palletts, the aisles between the rows of palletts were eliminated. Essentially
we had a block of palletts about 8 across and 10 deep, the only way anyone
would find the sale merchandise would be if they hauled each pallett out and
stuck it in the aisles of the store. This, of course, was forbidden.

-         
Outdated computerized inventory system. I’m not
sure if it was replaced, but up to 1997 the PIMS system was in place. This
system, developed in the 70’s, was supposed to automatically re-order items as
they got low. Someone had the great idea of building a little caveat into the
system. If the number of items went into a negative, the item would not be re-ordered
and a problem would be flagged. Somehow this would keep happening on stuff like
sewing items, and since the store didn’t have anyone investigating the problem
items, entire aisles were full of empty shelves and pegs. Customers would come
back time and time again asking when we would get the items. We essentially
looked like idiots when we told them we didn’t know.

-         
Poor quality merchandise. The worst by far was
the shit ass Permatech/Eurotech line of small appliances. Sure they were
cheaply priced, but even for $10 I would expect a toaster to work when I
plugged it in. We saw the same garbage get returned over and over for years,
but they kept selling the junk.

-         
Credit. These fuckers were making 30% of their
profit on credit. You know, the kind of profit that requires people to be slow
on their payments so they can reap huge interest charges. Cashiers were hounded
to push this on everyone, to the point that they were giving long speils to
customers like a Jehovas Witness does at your front door if you don’t slam it
on them first. Even worse, Zellers willfully declined to use debit machines in
their stores for fear that people would stop using thier credit cards. The
finally made the switch sometime after 1997, likely due to customers leaving
merchandise at the register and leaving in a huff, vowing to never shop at
Zellers again.

-         
Lack of staff. Did you know that in the 1960’s,
American railroad companies tried to save money by deferring maintenance
projects? The result was bad track with slow trains, and a mess that ended up
costing a fortune to fix, unless of course, they went bankrupt first as
customers turned to trucks. Well, Zellers somehow though they could run stores
without those pesky employees gobbling up their profits. A prime example of
this was how they would let one employee be in charge of helping customers in a
30,000 square foot area on a Sunday afternoon. Why did this happen? Most times
there was no one to cover lunches. Other staff had to abandon ship at a seconds
notice to open another cash register to reduce exorbitantly long lineups. Cashiers
were getting lunch breaks at 2 and 3 in the afternoon “because it was just too
busy”. They were made to feel that they were part of some sort of important
struggle to help their comrades survive or something. Customers in the
meanwhile were looking for help in the aisles, and nobody was there to give it.
Once I was working cash in such a situation. An item didn’t scan or had a
problem (as was often the case) and the customer asked “why don’t you call the Hardware
department?”. My response: “That’s because I AM the hardware department, and
for that matter, toys, housewares and linens”.

-         
Cheesy gimmicks. Zellers was a firm beleiver in
this weird sort of 1950’s corny style of advertising and promotions. Instead of
trying to sell cool stuff, they resorted to silly balloon drops, flashy flyers,
Zeddy, and good old “Zellers Radio”. What was Zellers Radio, you ask? A stupid
tape message that would play every 10 minutes that usually began with
“Shhhhhaaaappers!!”. The elevator music they played was no better. The grocery
store I worked at previously played some classic pop music from the 70’s and
80’s. Still a bit lame, but not as bad as muzak. It seemed they did not want to
deviate from the practice of appealing to the senior citizen crowd. The TV ads
weren’t any better. For the longest time they were a televised version of the
weekly flyer. Later on they got some Hillary Duff clothes in their stores and
managed to get some decent ads going. This did not last, and an ad campaign was
launched with purported Zellers employees saying “we’re getting better and
better”. Wow. Talk about admitting you suck. It’s like they were begging people
to give them a second chance, and forgive them for the shit service they gave
them before.

-         
Ridiculous policies for shoppers. Come on, if
someone isn’t satisfied, give them their money back. Sure there is always some
fucker trying to rip you off, but why treat everyone like criminals? People
usually got store credits after getting the runaround and waiting in long
lineups. Supervisors would tell their employees to enforce these policies until
someon really lost it. What then?
Give the customer what they wanted and make the employee look like a complete
asshole in front of them. Seems these little Hitlers didn’t have the balls to
enforce these policies themselves.

-         
Clueless upper management. It seems that they
only way these morons knew how to react was to fire people. It seemed like
management shuffles were happening constantly as someone got the boot for
underperforming. And do you know who didn’t get fired? Guys like the Regional
Director of Stores who showed up on the front lines during a “Royal Visit” and
yelled at people. Such a nice human being.

-         
Panic at the sight of Walmart, but reacting like
a deer in the headlights. Instead of trying to figure out what  makes Walmart a generally better place to
shop, Zellers instead tried to undercut them on many items, and lost an arm and
a leg in doing so. Walmart isn’t just about price. It was also about the
“shopping experience” that Zellers never seemed to be able to figure out. It
seems the cheaper “solution” to the Walmart question was usually taken. Why
make fundamental changes to your stores when you can authorize a 10% cut in
prices on ass-wipe?

-         
Morning meetings. The dreaded daily “pep talk”
was nothing more than an attempt into performing better OR ELSE. What was
discussed? The weeks sales, which didn’t really register in most people’s
minds, and a couple of minutes of badgering employees to get more credit card
customers, and just generally work harder if sales were supposed to get better.
One time our store manager decided to go off on a rant about employee morale
and how the employees had only themselves to blame for it. In his mind the
skeleton crew often appointed to run the place, should all work twice as hard
to acheive the results of double the people. He couldn’t seem to understand why
people were not motivated to shed blood, sweat and tears at minimum wage.

I left the company fifteen years ago. I had always wondered
if things had improved after I left, and after reading other people’s blogs
posted since the announcement that Target was acquiring Zellers leases, it was
obvious they had barely changed at all. It was eerie to read what employees
were saying about the company as it was so familiar.

Shame on you Zellers, and good riddance. It’s sad that the
employees of the companies are the ones to suffer, while the upper management
folks will all leave with a huge chunk of change. Pathetic.