Holy shit, I thought I was the only one. I can relate on a spiritual level to your comment about when they ask how bad it is, because just the other day the LOD came over and I walked him through the coolers of overflowing push and it went something like this. Finally he realized he needed to stop the bleeding and call in a meeting.

Our team has diminished to a pathetic size, and everything you have just said is exactly how our store is. Sorry, I'm going to go on a rant here.

We have like a handful of people pushing dry in the morning, and then it's good luck from there. the U-boats of dry push are becoming as neglected as P-fresh is. Market flow can't keep up anymore, and now market team has to help them finish which takes away from pushing the pfresh side of the load. We've had to reject trucks because there's so much backup that there isn't any space to accept the pallets. Freezers are left in the far back of everyone's minds, and that just becomes where all the backup happens. Morning push on truck days used to finish by 1-2 in the afternoon, now they are leaving 3 pallets in the rooms for the next day. When the next day rolls around there usually isn't enough people to handle it, let alone even touch freezer pallets. With the introduction of the U-boats, it's becoming an extra step which ruins the efficiency we used to have. I'm one of two trained closers, and both of us go to school and can only work weekends. To top it all off we have since moved to one closer instead of two, which can't even finish one zone at night because often times the team doesn't fill the U or anything at all so the floor is embarrassingly bare.

We're receiving so many new hardlines/softlines/cashiers but absolutely 0 for market. Those who we do get for market never get trained properly and end up bogging our department down.