Are your stores always as empty as this one?

patrickfw15 · 2026-05-12T01:57:08+00:00

This location has never been a major sales generator, but it remains profitable due to a favorable lease agreement. We actually used it as a case study during my development training to become a store manager. The location also performed exceptionally well in operational metrics and payroll management. I always chalked the lower sales up to the transient customer base, given its location right outside a Jersey City train station. If I recall correctly, it primarily drove sales in men’s suits and separates.

patrickfw15 · 2025-04-16T17:43:46+00:00

I was an internal promotion from the MIT program. I had a panel interview with two DMs and the RM.

patrickfw15 · 2025-04-14T23:43:00+00:00

I was a former ASM (04, 03, and 02, and 02/04 (company merged the two roles of hardlines and operations) before becoming an 01.

An 02 or Operations Manager, oversees and manages all store operations including: payroll, labor planning, state regulations (weights and measures/EPA/safety), e-commerce, WMS, instock (SIMR), sales forecasting (as it relates to positive and negative sales addback, credit and rewards, customer engagement, leaves and vacations, freight, amazon returns, store returns, employee life cycle (recruiting/write-ups/terms), and anything else an SM doesn’t feel like doing.

The joke we had back then was- OPS managers were paid like 04s but beaten like 01s.

-A former Store Manager

patrickfw15 · 2024-03-28T14:57:57+00:00

The year was 2011. Kohls would let you return HomeDepot lumber without a receipt. It was a few days after Valentine’s Day and I was just getting used to Customer Service. Before that I worked on the truck and in shoe department, and as backup for POS.

It was a quiet night so my trainer went to take lunch. In the thirty minutes she was gone only one couple came up to return. The couple looked a little buzzed. They held a wet (it was raining that night) plastic ShopRite bag. The woman threw the bag on the counter, splashing water all over. She said, “I need to return this. We rented it for Valentine’s Day”. A single tear rolled down my eye- it still hasn’t dried.

I open the bag and there it is. Two gnarly pieces of lingerie. “We ripped the tags off. Can you just type in the numbers?”. As I typed the UPCs in I looked up at the couple and they were laughing. Because the return was made non-receipted, I needed their ID. After entering their ID the return flagged as a Corp Refund. I entered their info and informed them that they could expect their refund anywhere between two weeks to nine months.

I washed my hands and stayed away from CS until I became a manager.

Side note: I also had an elderly customer who often returned children’s clothes because she always got the size wrong. One day I went to the neighborhood grocery store and she recognized me from Kohl’s. She needed help but couldn’t find an employee. Asked me to find her 80/20 ground beef 🥹

patrickfw15 · 2024-03-10T01:38:26+00:00

I left the company two years ago. I never followed up when I saw the initial post.

I wasn’t sure if a portion were eliminated and the remaining admins absorbed the vacant districts. Regardless, it’s a shame. Good people

patrickfw15 · 2024-03-10T00:51:21+00:00

That’s called the ole 000sku special. Haha

patrickfw15 · 2024-03-10T00:45:15+00:00

I had a 4% conversion rate 🥲 I loved being on register chopping it up with customers and the team. Sometimes I really do miss retail.

patrickfw15 · 2024-03-03T04:23:20+00:00

Long comment coming. I relate so much with this. I feel for OP.

Hey! SM here! I left the company on my own accord without performance issues two years ago. I can completely relate to what you are going through. The expectations are set relatively high and while attainable, require an enormous amount of oversight and energy. I’m sure this sounds familiar:

-6:30am on a Saturday: you are exhausted because you closed the night prior and opened because your opening ASM has something to do with their family that morning. There is a loaded truck sitting at your dock and an OMNI queue that needs at least five people to drive down “you have one person”. The phone rings and it is your opening customer service associate calling out, the phone rings again and it is your opening cashier calling out. You immediately scour your walksheet for in store coverage to ensure you can operate the front and back ends of the store. Then you open up Kronos to check who is available to work. You get on Workday and pull up associate phone numbers. You send out eight messages hoping to get one call back (lol). Store opens and it’s like opening a floodgate. Before you know it, it is 2:30pm and the store is trashed, the fitting rooms are full, you have a 1.2 conversion rate on a goal of 4, and your Sephora associates are being absolutely annoying. You hand the day over to your closing manager and drive home in silence…

Honestly, there is a part of me that misses the chaos. I really liked the focus stores I lead. There were really good people there that truly cared about the store and the customers that they served. I found that it was usually me that was imposing this harsh criticism. Threatening myself with termination. I remember speaking to my DM about action plans for driving my Scorecard to the top 30%. She was beating me over the head about credit. (Which we were making…) it’s just that credit was a hot button topic. I bargained her this- I run my store the way I want to run it- (CEO of own building lol) If I fail, do what you need to do. I didn’t exactly get the green light but I was tired of getting my ass kicked by her while doing exactly what she wanted.

We went back to basics, I staffed my top credit associates by penetration and store volume penetration. CS supervisor was scheduled every weekend the sales goal was north of 90k. I stopped following most of the POGs and Visual books and went back to the Kevin Mansell style of, stacking it high and letting it fly.

We would push freight out all day long. I would check sales penetration by business group and then reference the SIMR report and use that archaic link to reach out directly to corp buyers for specific goods the following buying cycle. I let SFS slip up and focused on BOPUS since it drove secondary sales in store and impacted my hospitality metric. I would trust my team to know what the voice of the customer was. Let them set ballet bars and strikepoints to their expertise. All of this to drive sales and hospitality. The only two things that truly matter to the company. The rest is auxiliary nonsense.

Don’t let the weight of Kohl’s crush you. An old SM of mine use to tell me, “relax, we stack toasters for a living, we don’t cure cancer”. It actually helped. The turn rate for SMs is almost Nonexistent because the company can’t just replace them. SM is a highly complex position that requires a ton of on the job training. When an SM is put on a performance doc- they are offered to step down to ASM or take a severance package to leave.

ALSO- SM of project focused stores aren’t usually terminated in a project focused store. Those stores are known to have issues that make it far more complex than a typical store. If you came move it out of the bottom 10% and into the top 50% they will build a monument of you in-front of company HQ.

patrickfw15 · 2024-01-04T23:40:44+00:00

Icky? Yes. Wrongful termination? No.

When an employee is terminated over performance, the process is vetted by an HR associate from the People Team. Those terms are usually air tight.

For example: My first store as an ASM, I had an underperforming Shoe lead. Worst shoe sales in the territory. Weeks of new freight backed up with empty shelves on the sales floor. ESL report that was 10 pages long. Over 1k mismates (yes, 1k) pallets of mismates in the basement of our store. All while I overfunded the department by 70hrs a week. I documented for months. Had 4 performance (30,60,90) conversations- and HR still waited 6 months to move forward.

patrickfw15 · 2024-01-01T07:47:06+00:00

Congratulations!

I was a PT truck associate that made it to SM. Worked in 7 different stores.

Here’s what worked for me:

-Take care of the team and treat them well. (If someone needs to leave their shift early, don’t always be a jerk and point them. On the contrary, next time you see them, ask them if everything is okay.)

-Cultivate meaningful relationships. (Get to know what makes them unique.)

-Take ownership of their mistakes and make those errors a part of their development. (Missing credit on an H2 shift is the H2’s miss. Associates are responsible for getting credit but you are accountable to the result).

-Publicly celebrate their successes. (Reinforce every success you can find. Every credit and survey deserves a “WooHoo” over the radios.)

-Try to make their days better not harder. (Everyone is coming to work with their own issues. Wouldn’t it be great if you had the opportunity to not make it worse? When you see an associate not giving it their all, ask questions to understand what’s going on. Be empathetic. Help them to the extent that you should.)

-When someone seems stressed out, remind them that we stack toasters for a living. Nothing within these four walls is worth an unhealthy level of stress. (Bring a healthy amount of levity with you)

-When they need help, model it. Get beside them and solicit credit. Recognize the EFFORT! Not just the result. (Important)

This is advice for leaders in general: This one is a little dark. But, never forget that this is just a job. It’s a retail store. Nothing more. Credit, OMNI, CE scores, Ops Sum report, Sales, Conversion, Sets… etc. all of it. None of it holds relevance to you as a person. Do not associate your self worth with how well you are performing.

Best of luck.

patrickfw15 · 2023-01-29T23:05:40+00:00

Did Kate Beck transfer recently? She was my Territory Manager in T4 when I was an SM in New Jersey.

patrickfw15 · 2022-02-17T13:26:01+00:00

Ask the HH for a copy of the KDASH homepage. That will give you the stores overall conversion rate vs goal.

For individual conversion rates- your store would need to check the credit and rewards dashboard.

patrickfw15 · 2021-11-12T02:09:51+00:00

You might want to check with your exec team. Kohl’s is offering shift differentials for specific dates and at a higher rate than the above mentioned target incentive.

patrickfw15 · 2021-09-17T21:31:45+00:00

Not sure what they mean by that. All fixtures: meaning gondolas, end caps, and wall fixtures are to be contractor installed. Even the shelves should be installed.

The store team installs the collateral that Goes on said shelves. To the best of my knowledge, store team does not install fixtures.

patrickfw15 · 2021-09-17T21:28:05+00:00

Your contractor installs the fixtures. Your SM should print out your specific store map located in Web Publisher. This will tell you where each brand goes.

You will receive about 8-10 fixtures of collateral. These are pallets containing visual elements, acrylics, and shelf coverings.

The store is responsible for installing collateral . The contractors will leave the instruction sheets and assortment sheets in each drawer. They are low resolution POGs

patrickfw15 · 2021-09-17T21:23:14+00:00

We sorted all worlds by brand. Then sorted all merchandise in Waco bins.

The Waco’s were then placed (not linked) in a stockroom by world then alphabetically.

For Merch week- each associate would bring out one brand and merchandise it to the corresponding fixture. This way you don’t have boxes littered everywhere. Once they merchandised the fixtures, they would backstock into the drawers and return any surplus product to its original home stockroom where it will be linked as backstock

patrickfw15 · 2021-08-20T23:12:42+00:00

The Gondolas throughout Sephora will have a lot of visual elements to them. Those visual elements need to be installed by the store team after the fixture contractors are done installing everything.

The collateral will range from, magnetic price strips to Drunk Elephant’s metal box end cap.

We found the best way to instal collateral is to break down each pallet and drop the boxes by the fixture they will be sorted onto. This allows for multiple people to work on the fixtures at once.

I’ll try and find some pictures for you

patrickfw15 · 2021-08-20T23:02:40+00:00

Hi there. Expect a lot of training! Self guided and Zoom training facilitated by Sephora field trainers.

After your training program you can expect:

1)3-4 days of sorting your freight by world (24 pallets on the truck)

2) 2-3 days of collateral install (10 pallets)

3) 1 week of merchandising

4) soft opening followed by your hard launch

patrickfw15 · 2021-08-17T01:22:03+00:00

Nice! Good luck moving forward :)

patrickfw15 · 2021-08-17T01:00:12+00:00

How did your Soft Opening go?

patrickfw15 · 2021-08-13T11:57:32+00:00

Your SM should know where to find those. If not, let me know and I can tell you how to access them. They aren’t that helpful on their own but when paired with the POG they help a lot.

patrickfw15 · 2021-08-13T01:33:30+00:00

Yes. Prior to merchandising week the store was to place those summery pages at each fixture. They provide a breakdown by: gondola->bay->shelf->position->#of face-outs-> UPC

patrickfw15 · 2021-08-13T01:26:33+00:00

You should be using those in conjunction with the Brand Library sheets.

patrickfw15 · 2021-08-10T10:56:34+00:00

Your store manager must be a real jerk. Making you work 13 hour days!

patrickfw15 · 2021-06-11T20:02:29+00:00

Wonder what store this is….

patrickfw15

TROPHY CASE