I'm an overnight stocker at one of my local stores... here's my take.
The job is going to suck no matter if you have a good crew or not. Most stores have a shytty overnight crew because the turnover is high for the overnight shift(people wanna work days, or people calling in because they wanna go party). As soon as people get trained, they quit because they hate it or get fired for attendance issues. My advice to you is.... learn whatever they're willing to teach you, show up to work, so in 6-8 months, you can either move up to an IMS position, or ever better, get a daytime position as a department manager.
If your managers are shytty, then you'll immediately hate stocking. Hopefully, they'll give you proper training and a buddy for 2-3 weeks before leaving you alone, which almost certainly will happen because muthafukkas don't like to come to work. Being extremely shorthanded on ON will be a common occurrence.
There are two divisions to the store... the GM(general merchandise) side and the Grocery side, which is subdivided into general grocery, frozen foods and dairy. In a good store, you'll be permanently assigned to one of these areas and won't have to worry about working any of these other areas consistently(other than the occasional blue moon occurrence). The norm is generally you being moved around a lot within the first few months, working the shyttiest areas because those people call-in regularly. As a new stocker, I would suggest that general grocery would be the easiest because you have familiarity with the products and using that knowledge will help you to find the correct place for a individual item faster. There will be a learning curve, but nothing that can't be overcame with experience. Once you get the system down for the particular area/aisle that you'll be working regularly, then the rest will be cake. Hopefully, they'll stick you in the easiest aisles first if they aren't going to give you a buddy. In grocery, the coffee, cereal and paper goods are the easiest(some store make one person do chemicals and paper goods together.... In that case, that area will suck a little bit because you have to stock air fresheners... you'll see why if you do). The most difficult aisles are any aisles with cans (when zoning, they have to be stack.... pain in the ass), the hispanic aisle (which has all of the condiments on it as well, ketchup, mustard, mayo, salad dressing, hot sauce, BBQ, etc), frozen foods(freight amount and cold hands, late trucks), dairy(late trucks, 1000 different yogurts and the cheese wall... ugh), juice and pop & water(stupid amount of freight every night and heavy lifting, building bottle water features... all of this BY YOURSELF). Word of advice.... if you work Juice, Pop & Water or Pets(GM side), YOU NEED A GOOD PALLET JACK!!! GET ONE BEFORE THE SHIFT START EVERY NIGHT AND DON'T LET IT OUT OF YOU SIGHT! Half of the jacks are shytty and the store will never get them repaired, so the amount of good jacks that can lift and move heavy and tall pallets with ease are hard to come by. You'll end up fight over them and someone will always want to borrow your shyt, even when you're in one of the areas I mentioned that REQUIRES A JACK to complete your job every night.
You get paid base plus overnight differential(.50), then if you work in produce, frozen or dairy, there's a slight increase for those areas. If you work full time, you get two 15 minute breaks and then a whole hour for lunch (which you can leave, but you have to clock out).
Sorry for the long post, if you have any more questions, pm me. I'll give to you real.
back then anyways so who gives shyt?
women at the store.
