On Ordering Online For Same Day Pickup

Good evening friends!

It is 11pm as I sit down to start writing this blog.  I've got a cup of decaf in front of me, and Supernatural playing in a corner of my screen (Its my first time watching and I'm on season 8) and I'm thinking about my day at work today.

One of the things I spend most of my day doing is pulling the Buy Online, Pick-up in Store orders and I thought I'd share a little bit of information for those of you who shop this way.  This might not be true for every store that offers this shopping option but they are true for where I work at least.

First, these orders never stop coming in.  Never.  All day, from the time I come in until the time I leave lots and lots of orders.

I work for a big corporation, and like most big corporations we are almost always short staffed.  That means that there is not a team of people pulling these orders.  There is just one single person at any given time pulling these orders.  When I am there that person is just me.  And when I get there I don't get to start with a count of 0 orders.  For example, when I got to work today there were already 10 orders waiting to be pulled, with more coming in as fast as they can be pulled.

Back to being short staffed, I'm not just pulling orders.  I'm also helping the customers actually in the store, taking phone calls, running backup on the register and taking people's orders to their cars when they come for their curbside pickups.  I am a very busy person.

With these orders, most of them are not just 1 item.  6 items in the average number but I've pulled as many as 58 items for an order.  And these orders are not always from the same department.  They are scattered throughout the entire store so I'm running here and there and everywhere to pull these orders.

All of this is to say, sometimes your order isn't going to be ready in the short amount of time that the the people who make these promises in corporate office say they will.  There is literally a store that never has a customer in it that they base their times off of.

Today I had a customer call several times to check on the status of their order.  Their order was a large one, and about 5 or 6 down from the start of my pull list.  Every time they called I had to leave the floor to take the call. That would add even more time to being able to get it pulled (remember....I'm also the person who takes the phone calls).

Even better, after a couple of calls, they just show up and calls in for a curbside pickup.  So, I had to bump their order ahead of all the other orders which were placed before theirs.

Because that is fair, right?  In our society "Me First" is the strongest mentality. 

That was just a long way of saying, be patient when you order online for same day store pickups.  Lots of other people are doing the same thing and we're doing the best we can.

Now, writing this took me 41 minutes and it's almost midnight....

Good night friends, sleep well.