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The Backroom Meltdown: How a Routine Corporate Performance Audit Instantly Exposed a Hungover Manager and a Chronically Untrained Staff.

Retail store chaos

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When a retail store in a chain isn’t generating as many sales as the other, the corporate offices will want to know why.

The auditor in this story was assigned to review a location that had dwindling sales, especially on Tuesdays, and corporate wanted to know why.

It turned out, the store manager at that location was someone that the auditor had a bad history with, so he wasn’t upset when he realized that the guy was constantly hung over and hiding in his office.

I definitely think that the manager deserved to be fired, and it should have happened long ago. Read through the full story below and see what you think about it.

Too hungover to open the store and use me as your stand in manager? Not my problem goodbye!

So, retail can be a hot mess at times. This hot can be compounded by incompetent and just useless managers.

How do people like this get promoted to being a manager?

So, I was told by corporate to help / advise / keep tabs ( insert jargon here) of a manager called Donovan. Again he is called Donovan because that’s his actual name.

Now, Donovan was just clueless as a manager. He didn’t know his ear from his ankle and couldn’t distinguish between a profit or a loss let alone what profit margin was.

Figuring out why the sales are so low is an important task.

He also hated me because of my job and what my position was. Now the issue that I had to help with or observe was the fact that the stores turnover on Tuesdays was very low.

For example when stores were making $10000 daily targets, this store was making $3000 daily dollar targets. So, I get told to come in on the Mondays and see what is happening.

Setting things up for a new sale is very important.

Now Mondays is where sales people prep the store for the weekly sale, which runs Tuesday to Monday the following week. So, it was the opening day of sales basically.

I arrive at 7:30am on Monday expecting the store to be open for employees to set up for the day ( Customer hours started from 8:30. Donovan is nowhere to be found.

Well, I think he figured out the problem.

I message and call him. Nothing. It hits 8:30…. nothing… at 9 he opens the store looking worse for where.

Basically he just opens the store, ignores customers and just tells everyone to get to work. No briefing no nothing. He doesn’t greet me.

Donovan can’t even do his job when he knows he is being monitored.

So, basically I spend the time helping the salespeople and figuring out what they have to do. The poor sales people are freaking out. One guy even quit on the spot ( understandable). So, I jump in. I guess my gaming and coffee session will have to wait.

I help them change prices, shift displays, heck I even dealt with yelling Karen’s. All this is happening while Donovan is passed out in the office.

This guy has a bad relationship with everyone in the company, it seems.

Now, Monday is critical as the store launched sales on Tuesdays. Managers always brief sales people on price changes, how to set up displays etc.

So, as I am helping doing this, the regional manager (RM) comes in. He and I have a very frosty relationship (another story for another day). This is 12pm. Like 3 hours after opening.

At least he will see where the blame should be placed.

RM demands to know why I am doing this. To be fair, I bluntly told him that I am trying to help the sales people set up for the upcoming sale and Donovan is ” busy in his office”.

The RM storms into Donovan’s office and fireworks flew. Basically RM saw that Donovan was hungover and not doing his job.

What does this have to do with not performing his job?

I report my findings to RM and he tells me to finish helping out until 2pm ( my contracted hours). He weirdly thanks me profusely ( RM doesn’t usually thank people ). I finish up and go home.

This is where the petty revenge comes in. Donovan says he gave me the job because he signed off my commission to another guy and “helped me set myself up” as a consultant. So, basically he tried to throw me under the corporate train because he wasn’t doing his job.

I’m amazed that he got the job in the first place.

Now Donovan was also hungover and was like this every Monday. He thought that he could get me to do his job for a couple of weeks while he could have some blowout weekends with the boys.

After a long legal process, Donovan was fired. He even had the gall to ask me for a job!

It is crazy that someone like this can get promoted to manager and then keep the job for so long when they are clearly useless. How some companies stay in business is beyond me.

Read on to see what the people in the comments have to say about this story.

This commenter says he is a great storyteller. He definitely had a good story to tell.

Even the regional manager had to appreciate his work.

This commenter loved the story. I agree, it was quite good.

The crazy thing is that it took ‘a long legal process’ to get the manager fired. You would think that the company would have been able to fire him on the spot for what he was doing, however, that was not the case.

With how much money that manager was costing the company in lost sales, how could they afford to keep him on at all.

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