I want to preface all of this by saying that I love my job. I work retail, but my coworkers, and even my managers feel like a fortress I can retreat into whenever the public grows too vicious. I am fairly compensated, and honestly enjoy the work I do, and I know that I am not alone in feeling this way.
I work in a chain, and I know for a fact that our store is currently the best performing one in our area. We make really good money, and have a very reliable customer base. That all being said we had our year end review by corporate who left our frazzled head manager with a laundry list of all of the things our store is doing wrong. Empty shelves, old merchandise, yada yada, etc.
The holiday period is predictably very busy for us, and we are still playing catch up with 3 of our regular staff out on leave for legitimate medical reasons. This has resulted in our main area of work becoming over burdened with merchandise that we have to label and put out on the floor.
But of all the things that corporate sees fit to command us to do, clearing up our backlog is not one of them. As a consequence I spent the morning doing busy work and tidying shelves rather than enabling me and my coworkers to do our jobs with greater ease, by trying to clear out some of our backlog. Our lead manager reiterated this point later in a meeting that the stores priority was not what would make our job easier, but in making the store “look” better rather than actually having it run better.
There are a million little issues with the things corporate passed down but it boils down to the usual.
People who have forgotten what it is like to work on the floor day by day deciding they can improve the numbers of an already overperforming store, by giving them more to do.
Our stores have had a recent history of unionizing and honestly after this needless meddling I can see the appeal where previously I was content.