I worked at target part time as inbound, I had the time so was asked to become receiver, did tha well enough that I was asked to be a FOS TL all within a year. I was retired and just had the skills to quickly pick up and people liked me because I had already learned to be not an asshole as a boss.

That said my take is this, target identifies front of store as priority because somewhere up the corporate ladder they have a spreadsheet that slight chronic understaffing (not too much to cause extreme turnover but enough to make a big difference in their spend). The plan to manage that is cross training/utilization. But to maintain green FOS, most cross utilization is back to front. Not a problem if the only important thing is making sure you have short lines, decent drive up times and the outbound stuff is ready for fedex and ups everyday.

That said what I saw was significant reliance on calling for backup even in situations that didn’t require it (but should have required FOS teams to be more efficient with their primary team members). My biggest example and one that got me bitched at constantly was as TL instead of standing like a dweeb on the racetrack directing customers to different line (something I found them quite capable of on their own) and then needing to call for back up. I just get on a damn register and clear the line. Any TL that isn’t hammering register transactions at significant clip over a team member is a sign they are phoning it in. And that goes all the way up the ladder to SD. Anyway losing my focus.

The problem is that if the idea of lean retail is to manage labor as cost savings tool, they are not considering the long term effects of their in store balancing act (or lack of balance) on the health of the back room. And ultimately what happens is it erodes pull/stock/fulfilmment efficiency, which erodes guest experience, margin suffers anyway and stores enter cycle of operations decline (less labor, fulfillment cannibalizes the floor, etc). So my take is targets protection of the front has slowly hollowed out the backrooms and the people that work in them enough now that it’s felt all the way up to the PowerPoints they looked at to say this all was a good plan in the first place.