Backroom workers critical for stores

Keep product stocked, properly displayed

By George C. Ford, The Gazette

As shoppers hit Corridor stores for the final weekend of purchasing gifts and buying groceries for Christmas dinner, there are employees they probably will never see who are critical to the operation of retailers.

Backroom employees handle incoming and outgoing shipments, prepare merchandise for display, replenish stock when it is running low on the sale floor and handle a variety of other tasks, according to Barry Donovan, manager of the JCPenney store at Westdale in Cedar Rapids.

'They are very pivotal for a successful Christmas. Without them, we would not be open,” Donovan said.

'They handle the logistics of where we put merchandise in the store. They do all our visuals, right down to whether we have ordered enough register tape.

'Who is going to pick up the hangers? There are a lot of little details and without our support team, we would not be able to make it through Christmas.”

Donovan said it all starts at the store's loading dock when a '96-hour truck” arrives three times a week,

'It's tough when you get a full truck piled up to the ceiling and you have a day to get it out to the sales floor,” Donovan said. 'The key is having a great support team because you have another truck coming in.

'Our pricing team stays really busy, changing prices as many as four times a week during the holiday period. That includes changing the signs throughout the store as well as the tickets on the merchandise.”

Dave Blum, director of the Hy-Vee Food Store on Oakland Road NE in Cedar Rapids, said every department has support employees that the customer never sees, but are just as important as the people they see every day.

'We have a product management team that is responsible for receiving all products and entering them into our computer system so they ring up correctly,” Blum said. 'They are responsible for programming all of our manager sales as well as posting the signs and removing them when the sale is over.

'If the store is a body, those folks are the heart. They keep the product coming in, which keeps us functioning.”

Blum said an overnight crew that works from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. is crucial to the store's operation.

'My store closes at midnight and we open at 5 a.m.,” Blum said. 'I have a crew that works all night to restock the store and pull all the product forward on shelves.

'They make sure the customer at 7 a.m. has the same quality service as the person shopping at 7 p.m. Those people are very important to the structure of our store, but most shoppers will never see them.”

l Comments: (319) 398-8366; george.ford@thegazette.com