The Trip

October 19, 2010: The Trip

Holiday season is right around the corner (well technically it's not even close yet but Stop & Shop is already stocked with all the holiday merchandise).  The company has an annual event where all managers and department heads travel to a chosen location to view how the holiday setup is going to be.  Usually it is only managers and department heads, but because of my work ethic and my store manager's push to make me a lead clerk (not going to happen) I was going to be sent to not only help set up, but to sit in on all the meetings and discussions of how the holidays would be handled. 

I guess it is supposed to be a big deal for me to be around these "higher up" people in the company, but I just see them as co-workers.  I went with my department head at around four o'clock in the morning to set up displays.  The event this year was taking place in Woburn, Massachusetts.  The corporate officials are fools; every year they set up the event in an almost dead store.  Their sales are already in the tank and it is very unlikely that they are going to sell even one tenth of the product that we will be putting out.  The point of this exercise is to get a visual representation of how tables are supposed to be set up during the holiday time to market products in a more effective way.  We piled box upon box of gingerbread houses to build a larger gingerbread house.  It was a house of houses pretty much if that makes any sense.  Next up came the pie table.  Pies are key for the holiday season starting around Thanksgiving and going until around New Years.  We set up approximately seven six-foot tables of pies and then moved on to cookies.  Cookies are more for the Christmas season.  Three more tables.  Altogether the work took approximately four hours and there was about $28,000 worth of product on the sales floor for just bakery alone. 

Vice president of the company, Joseph Alejandro, came to speak to everyone about how this year was going to be through the roof in sales and he expects every store to exceed their sales from last year by thousands of dollars.  From there all the department heads from the New England region were taken from table to table and shown how displays should be set up.  I, personally, would much rather be back in the bakery making new products.  My store manager took me to the side and told me that me and my boss should listen closely because the sales in the department are dependent upon us alone.  At the end we were served lunch and sent back to our respective stores with a sales plan for the holidays.  Poor Woburn is expected to sell all this product coded way before even Halloween.  There goes their sales percentage.

Albeit it was a boring day, but all part of the process.

Until next time.

Stay Sweet,

Lil' Buddy