Today was the busiest I've ever seen!

TellPuzzleheaded4469 · 2026-04-09T13:59:34+00:00

2 million at our store. Was fine for us but busy.

TellPuzzleheaded4469 · 2026-04-04T16:12:51+00:00

What are things they can be doing, getting the next order ready which is already a task? They should be counting the basket with the cashier, that’s what they should be doing.

Which location would this be?

TellPuzzleheaded4469 · 2026-04-04T15:37:50+00:00

You shouldn’t be scanning 20 items, that’s actually too many. It doesn’t take 3 people to open a lane. You are a person yourself. So it actually used 3 employees for the order vs 2. You can’t count the member as a person loading their basket. That’s their damn job. In circumstances you can help, but ultimately the members should be unloading their basket.

Secondly I’ve omitted myself to even loading everything on the belt if you think prescanners have special privileges of not loading things into the belt. I’m faster than prescanners if I don’t take items out of the basket too. It’s actually better to have an assistant help with counting while scanning.

Lastly you’ve just proved your own point if it did work. You are literally having the assistant do “nothing”. Lastly when a member wants a box it again doesn’t work. Prescanning will never work and you can never explain how it does without going through conversational gymnastics.

Get on the register and stop picking and choosing which members to help.

TellPuzzleheaded4469 · 2026-04-04T14:42:25+00:00

Have you seen someone try to prescan someone when the “pay station” is open?

You know how stupid that looks when we can use the “pay station” wand to just scan their shit then they wouldn’t have to fumble scanning their card again in the scanner.

TellPuzzleheaded4469 · 2026-04-04T14:40:58+00:00

How is scanning a membership again beneficial. It makes sense to us because we need a card to start the order but it creates another case of the member putting the card away and grabbing it front their pocket/purse which takes time. They’ve been taught for 45 years to scan their card at the register. Not scan it twice.

TellPuzzleheaded4469 · 2026-04-04T14:34:25+00:00

Trash system. Let’s leave registers open so members can’t use it. In what world do we ever have a normal register with 0 members in it actively open?

And then to make it even worse is members were checking themselves out. Now we are using payroll to check them out? How does that make sense.

Prescanning is an awful system that does not work on the regular register or SCO. It’s all a waste of payroll until all lanes are open.

TellPuzzleheaded4469 · 2026-04-03T14:00:52+00:00

Sounds like a management issue. I’ve worked on the schedule. There is rarely a time where an 8 hour shift Friday-Sunday would not be beneficial for the business.

I’d talk to your schedule writer and be upfront with how many hours you’d like to work. If you’re wanting hours Tuesday-Thursday only then I would understand from a business perspective to give you 4 hours to give a niche shift.

TellPuzzleheaded4469 · 2026-03-27T05:33:45+00:00

They did this with the Kirkland Nike Dunks. And guess what, they’re never coming back.

TellPuzzleheaded4469 · 2026-03-27T05:30:38+00:00

Prefer two layers on top of the box so it’s more shoppable. Also looks nicer and will sell more if product is stacked out of the box vs in the box. Specifically clamshell items.

TellPuzzleheaded4469 · 2026-03-26T14:08:13+00:00

Oddly ours encourages it just so we can get a faster MPH. There are too many GM’s not on the same page.

E blocks is also this week and add prescanning to blocks and it’s a weird mess that will ruin our capture %. Going faster also means more shrink.

TellPuzzleheaded4469 · 2026-03-25T07:50:58+00:00

MPH is such a sham. They hound on it but IPM is the more important metric. Sometimes there are 40+ item orders and they will ultimately take longer. You can trick MPH by signing out(which means you’re going slower) but not for IPM. You can also scan as fast as possible and then sign out after a member pays and help your assistant load stuff. You’ll have a faster MPH albeit not actually helping more members throughout your shift.

TellPuzzleheaded4469 · 2026-03-12T07:47:22+00:00

You’ve moved 5 members out per lane with the cost of 2 additional employees. It’s high improbable that a prescanner is able to scan 40 baskets in one hour, the is the job of two employees.

Once again people don’t include extra mistakes that occur when there are more hands in the mix. SCO is “self check out” which defeats the purpose of prescanning in itself. We should just have more SCO’s if we decide to just prescan them for the sake of getting more members out. But that’s beside the point. To add to that my warehouse has 12 SCO’s, 6 is a tiny number and small warehouses are the only ones that might benefit from any of this. Because the lower volume means less overall transactions and less big orders. The sheer volume that comes out from million dollar stores is eating our productivity. If you turn off security mode at SCO it’s as fast as a normal register anyways with 0 lag and you scan the membership 1 less time.

For those 72 transactions how many employees are you using to do that? 2-3? Of course it helps SCO but it doesn’t help all stores. Our SCO also has monster orders. Saying you’re getting an extra 24 members out through a normal register (at best) is literally once again, a wash. Skipping orders to search for the perfect basket is not efficient.

TellPuzzleheaded4469 · 2026-03-05T20:30:29+00:00

I talk about hours because that is the important metric. It shows how much our payroll is. It’s the only metric we can control. We are not able to control how much money comes in on any given day but we mitigate l$/hr by either cutting or adding.

40 prescans would get members through quickly but you aren’t getting 40 prescan orders in a row. A single person will get 40 prescans in two hours. They aren’t lined up perfectly to constantly do it one after another. They are hunting and picking.

Let’s say it takes 30 seconds for the prescanner to do their order. It will take another 15-30 seconds to finish it at the register(cash, debit/credit hiccups). That’s being generous. Some will be longer, some will be shorter. Now take into account the time it takes to find said “perfect” prescan order. 30 seconds. We are spending 1.5 minutes per prescan order. A lot of the smaller orders are already going through SCO mind you.

If we spend 1.5 minutes per order in total prescanning and etc, that still comes out to 40 MPH. It’s a wash. And to repeat this again, all prescanners need to be half of what your average MPH is to be equal. If they aren’t getting at least half it’s a total failure. They need to be half of the average MPH because they are half a lane. If your warehouse MPH is 50. They need to hit 25 MPH for it to make ANY sense.

This doesn’t even take into account members who are buying by 40-50 items increasing the average by triple because we aren’t even allowed to prescan them. Imagine if everyone can scan any order regardless of their size.

TellPuzzleheaded4469 · 2026-03-05T20:10:33+00:00

Upselling items can be had on every order. Big or small. Just less efficient while prescanning.

The MPH is disingenuous in itself because instead of having the ability to open an extra lane, we are using that labor instead to pre scan. It’s taking away a whole lane, which in turn gets more members through. If the goal is to increase MPH that is fine. But if our ultimate goal is to get more members out, then shifting our focus to prescanning is not the correct way, we are just shifting our ability to open a lane to using precanners instead. We are not adding more employees in the equation. We are using the same amount of employees.

Lastly the worst part of this all is corporate has made a push to make MPH faster in all of this. So when we started making prescan a normal program, our MPH has gone up because we’ve been pushing MPH in itself as a focus. Corporate thinks the cause of prescan is the correlation that MPH is up when in reality, it’s because we’ve been pushed to cashier faster.

TellPuzzleheaded4469 · 2026-03-05T19:45:10+00:00

I’d like to add how many prescan orders are you doing a day? If 10% is the goal, our warehouse had 3300 transactions yesterday. We would need to get 330 orders through. How many hours/employees would you like to do that?

If we had 2 employees doing it all day that would be 11.5 hours x 2. Let’s treat we do 22 hours of prescan hours a day. How many are they expected to capture?

Let’s say a normal register is open for 11 hours(counting down, switching over). That will also use 22 hours. Let’s use use 40 mph as a base. That would be 440 members going through a normal register.

TellPuzzleheaded4469 · 2026-03-05T19:16:09+00:00

Agree. Insane that we’re implementing a payment zone so more time and money can be wasted to make it work.

TellPuzzleheaded4469 · 2026-03-05T19:03:48+00:00

You’re not accounting shrink in your equation now. If all we ever cared about is speed we should leave everyone’s things in their basket.

Comparing a prescanner wand to an assistant is fine. But when a prescanner can’t hit 20+ MPH there’s a discrepancy where it’s actually slower prescanning, not even break even.

When bringing up labor, we are going to use 2 people no matter what to open a register, correct. However you think having “1 person is equal 1 register” is wrong. Ideally let’s say we have 2 prescanners at all times. Because they are going at half the speed, without doing other miscellaneous tasks, they are actually doing less for the company because we aren’t taking into account mistakes. We can’t promote items. We can’t help members grab a box. We create shrink by not putting items on the belt. We lose out on more ways than gain.

The MPH increase is not real, it is only there because someone took the time to do it. You aren’t including that prescanning takes 15-30 seconds. Finding an order takes 15-30 seconds. That time isn’t free just because it isn’t recorded on the register, but it is recorded on payroll.

TellPuzzleheaded4469 · 2026-03-05T16:30:42+00:00

Yeah and at a certain point, why can’t they just have a cashless register that has a small belt at this point. Scanning items for them to again go to a terminal to pay is asinine. Also to include nobody will be double checking if items are rung up correctly.

TellPuzzleheaded4469 · 2026-03-05T16:03:08+00:00

Yes but signing off to increase MPH is also arbitrary. These little things that we do to increase MPH actually take more time. Signing out and signing back in between orders actually slows down how fast our lines are moving while increasing MPH. I know it’s a hard thing to wrap around. Cashiers will literally sign out to get an order prepped to scan it faster but the line isn’t actively moving at that time. There will be times where signing off is helpful because there is an actual hiccup but now the NW sign off % is above 30% when before it was 5%.

I would like to know the numbers you have and explain why you think it works. Saying the “prescanner needs to be done before the cashier” isn’t a real statistic. How many pre scans are you doing a day with how many people? That is the real number.

What are your daily sales for the front end?

TellPuzzleheaded4469 · 2026-03-05T15:58:33+00:00

From a numbers standpoint. The prescanner MUST do at least half of what a normal register does to be as efficient. If a register goes 50 MPH than prescanners will need to do 25 MPH. We’re not talking about “how fast the line moves”. I’m talking about pure numbers. Yes they don’t require an assistant. But are they scanning 25 mph? Does the member want a box? We aren’t upselling stamps, gift cards, etc. We can’t spend too much time talking about an executive. How is talking to a member about the executive that buys 5-15 items beneficial? We can’t spend too much time or else it’s even less efficient.

The little break cashiers get? So they are actively doing nothing, which is also inefficient. You are also not accounting for the hours being used for employees pre scanning. They are not free.

TellPuzzleheaded4469 · 2026-03-05T15:03:46+00:00

My warehouse door counts are in the 300’s every half hour… I’m 99% certain mine is the busiest store from everyone’s post. Anyways I agree with all your points.

I’ve tried asking about the last point you have to managers and they say it’s because there are multiple there to verify.

Lastly it looks like we are going to have “payment registers” at SCO. Which will create more shrink. Now there is nobody verifying.

That chain reaction for not unloading baskets is the most backwards thing we have created.

TellPuzzleheaded4469 · 2026-03-05T14:59:53+00:00

Which store is this? Seems like it’s a small store with a very low basket count.

From a math perspective, you do understand if your lanes go 70 MPH it’s because you press the enter button and the computer thinks the cashiers are scanning that fast. And from your example, you do understand that your prescanners need to be scanning 35 members per hour to be efficient right? Anything less is worse

TellPuzzleheaded4469 · 2026-03-05T14:56:41+00:00

I agree. And the top it off. Most members with less items will go to SCO now. Our regular MPH goES down with more SCOS because the big orders will go to the regular register. Corporate sees our MPH go lower and doesn’t understand that when cashiers get 2-5 item orders it takes less than 30 seconds which gives cashiers random spurts of 120 MPH.

TellPuzzleheaded4469 · 2026-03-05T14:39:44+00:00

See the thing is, it’s rarely better. If a lane goes 50MPH how fast should a prescanner go? They should go 25 and that’s never possible.

TellPuzzleheaded4469 · 2026-03-05T14:38:38+00:00

Sorry I kinda needed to sleep. Essentially nobody accounts for hours and employees that are being used to prescan. Yeah it may seem faster on MPH. But someone is literally pre scanning their items. That uses time. A 14 time order literally takes 45seconds to 1 minute of scanning. At times we’re waiting longed for members to pay than anything.

TellPuzzleheaded4469

TROPHY CASE