Parks Place

When we last left off, The Culling had just occurred. Overnight the store was stripped of leadership and some very tenured members of the staff were suddenly left wondering where they would fall in the shuffle. As stated before, all acting Department Supervisors were guaranteed an interview for the new Zone Manager position. To put it into full perspective there were anywhere between 14 – 16 department supervisors all going for 5 Zone Manager positions. 

As we all know only the best of the best ever get chosen for these sorts of jobs. There is zero chance Ivan The Terrible would show any amount of favoritism about these positions. And he certainly wouldn’t use this opportunity to get rid of people he didn’t like. That would be morally and ethically wrong. 

So Ivan fired the two hardest working ASM’s in the building, including Lexco. He couldn’t do that to the DS’s he didn’t like but his choices for Zone Manager reflected his personal bias. He did put Princess in place, which I agreed with. He did also promote Hammer, which I couldn’t be mad at. The man had 20+ years of experience leading. His other choices were… dubious to say the least. 

He promoted the DS from Plumbing and the DS from Electrical. I don’t necessarily think either choice was bad. They were just not put in the right roles and were not given the tools or education needed to succeed. His final promotion would be his most egregious though. He promoted the front end DS. We’re gonna call her Bubbles because I want to and you can’t stop me. 

We will explore these in just a moment but I’m sure you are wondering what happened to the rest of the DS’s that didn’t get promoted? Well most of us were shifted into specialist roles if we were in departments that had them. Obviously I ended up in Flooring again. Some of the others left, Diamond being one of them. It was a rough time. 

So when the dice stopped rolling and the damage was tallied up we lost about 50+ years of experience from the sales floor in just over a week. The store was in a rough state. The remaining ASM’s tried to hold it together but anyone could see that there wasn’t a lot of planning that had gone into this transition at the corporate level. 

As far as I could tell there was no training program for this new position. There were no clear guidelines or reasonable expectations for how the Zone Managers were supposed to operate. And the turnover rate would prove to be excessive over the lifetime of the program. But honestly that didn’t affect me. I was back doing something I could do blindfolded. The only difference is that there wasn’t a DS to fall back on. 

I think it is a testament to my knowledge and skillset that I rarely ended up dealing with a Zone Manager directly. They kind of just left us alone in the department because they knew I had it handled. And while I took some pride in that it was also incredibly frustrating to feel like I was doing their job and not being compensated for it. But I imagine based on my own experience that isn’t exactly uncommon in retail. 

I mentioned before that the turnover rate was high for the Zone Manager role. Our first person dropped off after about a month. It was the electrical DS, whose name I don’t even remember. I also don’t remember who replaced her because they were hired from outside of the store and lasted about two weeks. 

This seems like a good time to say that I applied for every open Zone Manager position as soon as they were available. Every. Single. One. Of. Them. Besides my initial guaranteed interview I did not receive another one, despite applying for the position 17 different times. If I needed a bigger indicator that Ivan didn’t like me then this was it. 

But that’s beside the point. Two things happened around this time that stand out to me. The first was they promoted one of our Cabinet Specialists to ASM over the speciality departments. We’re going to refer to him as “At The End of The Day.” Because he ended almost every one of his sentences with it. He was a genuinely good person and he was an expert at cabinets. 

He was not however a fantastic leader or people motivator. He was kind of like using 60 grit sandpaper when you really needed 220. For the most part he left Flooring alone so his abrasiveness didn’t really affect me much. 

The second thing that happened was we hired a part time associate to help in flooring. I’m gonna call him Oddball (Yes after Donald Sutherland’s character from Kelly’s Heroes). He was very unique. Clearly had a great deal of intelligence but was also very out there. I do not know if he knew what a shower was. But he was reliable at work so I didn’t really care. Oddball would go on to be very valuable to me as far as maintaining the department was concerned. 

This seems like a good spot to close for now. I’d judge this to be about two to three months into the Zone Manager shuffle. By this point I have almost been with this company for three years now.

A lot happened very quickly after this so I’m going to save that for Part Seven.  Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed it.