Let's Get Trained

So, you've been hired by Macy's. You get a tiny break, since they don't throw you directly onto the floor. First, they throw you into a room full of computers and POSs (seriously – it stands for Point of Sale, but it has to be one of the most unfortunate acronyms ever conceived) and they make you wait. I've already run through a number of synonyms for dreary and dingy in my last post, but I managed to find one that I like better – seamy. The room is seamy. In keeping with the best Macy's tradition, you are left waiting, along with your other confused new hires, before anyone bothers to sort out who belongs in which training room (sales gets a different room from support which gets a different room from the Santaland folk). When they finally decide that you belong in the room, you get to sit and wait again as a clutch of HR personnel hunt down paperwork and comb through lists making sure that they made the right decision on whether they let you into the right room. Their original decision is by no means final.

Most of the fuss was over the sign in sheet and what to do with the people who weren't on the sign in sheet. For the extremely unlucky, it might be scheduling another early day at least a week later. For others it meant signing the sheet by hand. That required them to pass out a new sign in sheet, so everybody had to sign in again. Then there was the time sheet (which they insisted you sign before you had every clocked out, which is always a no-no in the real world – it's like leaving a signed blank check lying around. Not that Macy's cared). It took about forty five minutes to sort out the dos and don'ts of the two sheets and the members of your training party finally settles into a discernible pattern.

In the meantime, no one has given you anything to do, so if you are fairly certain that you are in the right room, you have nothing to do but twiddle your thumbs and watch the inefficiency and bureaucratic machinations unfold in slow motion. Once the ponderous decision making process has settled down into a semblance of certainty and lent the affair some stability, you begin. You begin the process . . . of filling out your HR forms, various bits of information organized neatly for various government authorities interested in your income (or lack thereof). Most of these forms are online, which requires a silly process of logging in to the system with your employee number (remember that white form? Well, you need it now. You needed to present it to get into the room and you need every time an HR person is confused about your existence or any question that you have posed to them). There are two astonishing facts about the process of filling out all of these forms. The first is that you have to do it at all. I have no idea what regulatory or legal walls exist between macysjobs.com and the internal site, but you have to give up all of the information that these forms require when you apply. So when you log in with your unique employee number, it is apparently ridiculous to expect all of those forms to have been filled out in their entirety and they await only your approval. But that didn't happen. Instead, you have to type your name and your social and your address several times to satisfy the bureaucratic monster at the center of these machines.

The second astonishing fact is that there remains one or two forms that you have to fill out by hand for no obvious reason whatsoever. And one of these forms, a classic bit of tax form obfuscation designed to confound and trap the unwary into making inadvertently false statements about their tax status. On top of that, if you use a ball point pen and you make a mistake, the Macy's HR people make you fill out the form again. Because, and they say this with a straight face mind you, that unless it is perfect the first time, if you so much as double up on one letter or number in the interests of clarity, the New York bureaucrat responsible for processing the form will assume that someone has tampered with the form and reject it out of hand (presumably Macy's and without even the thinnest glimmer of insight into why someone would tamper with a form in a way that makes it more legible). So you have to get it exactly right and without any problems from your ballpoint pen. I dare you to attempt the experiment. Take out a clean sheet of paper, write out your address, your phone number, and your social security number and see how many times a used ball point pen causes legibility problems. I'll wait.

The mistakes you make on those forms will follow you into the next session, which is a bizarre mixture of lecture and interrogation, but we will get to that special torture in a moment. There are too many people in the room to completely let them off the hook. The first thing that will strike you when looking over the room is that holiday managers are in the same room as you. That makes some sense when all you are doing is filling out forms (something that took about two hours for about twenty people). But when they follow you into the lecture on how to sell the Macy's way (which isn't strictly speaking different than selling things any other way, but again, I'm getting ahead of myself). There is a wide range of socio-economic levels and levels of education in the room. There are several people who are clearly college students or recent graduates and who simply need some extra money over the holidays. They are generally betrayed by their age and their quality of their clothing. Then you have the people who are hoping to turn this temporary position into something permanent with Macy's after the holiday is over. They are a little bit older by and large. Then you have the prospective managers and executives (yes, I said executives). They are obvious by their age or their deportment. And then you have the people who probably shouldn't have been hired at all. I mentioned last time that the most important characteristic that Macy's is looking for is not being a thief and a stated willingness to report thieves. One of the most important documents we were to fill out was the direct deposit form. Direct deposit is generally desirable, but in Macy's case, it is doubly so, since the only other way to get your check is to wait in line at a place ominously called the Vault during regular business hours (heaven forbid that anyone in human resources be around to help employees after six pm), a wait that our hosts inform us could last at least an hour every Friday (one piece of mercy of the Macy's system is getting paid by the week). At hearing what it requires to get direct deposit, namely a bank account, the woman next to me talked to me about how little she trusts banks. Didn't trust them at all. She was shortly to be flummoxed almost completely by the cash register, but that's tomorrow (tomorrow's training, not tomorrow blog time). To help us wrap our heads around direct deposit and speed that path along, Macy's kindly hosted a group of Chase hawking their checking and savings accounts and offering to open one on the spot, with a $100 gift card as a sweetener (I'll be taking them up on that one shortly). I would have thought such a presentation much more crass and insulting if I weren't sitting next to a woman who was completely unbanked, in the graceless phrase of the industry. When you take that into consideration, Chase and Macy's are doing the often poor people that Macy's hires a huge solid. It is one of the few things that Macy's gets right, though the flagrant salesmanship of the Chase team made it apparent that even when good comes of Macy's actions, it is always tempered by incompetence and inefficiency.

When it came to filling out all of those forms, which took far too long and presaged the maddening inability of the trainers to, you know, train, this woman was constantly stymied and needed help. I seriously doubt that she filled any of the forms out herself. You'd think that some kind of skills test would be the final arbiter of hiring because this woman would be a major drag on the sales floor (just wait until she is ringing up someone who is in a hurry and finishing up a shopping day with something that isn't from her area – a nightmare of customer service). But no, this woman had been hired by Macy's and would shortly hit the floor to terrorize customers already harried by the pressures of the world's largest and most illogically laid out department store.

It got much worse for her when Macy's revealed it's associate discount policy: you have to have a Macy's credit card to get it and your discount shows up on your bill, not at the register. It is veering dangerously close to company money. If you want the discount, you have to have some kind of Macy's credit card, either the line of credit (which that unbanked woman was not going to get) or a pre-paid card, which they discourage you from using. Since your discount occurs “back of house” (a phrase so meaningless that I didn't know what it meant for a long time), meaning your discount is applied to your balance, not to your purchase. For example, if you buy a $100 item, your balance will be $80, but at the register, it will look like you have paid $100. This is awkward for the pre-paid card, since you actually have to have the $100 on the card in order to buy your item. You will just end up with a credit. It turns out there is a trick to treating the Macy's card like a pre-paid card since you can make a payment at any register, as soon as you make the purchase. It's better than the pre-paid because you don't have to waste value on the card (which from Macy's point of view isn't a waste – based on my experience with the Bon-Ton, I'd say that employees of department stores are some of the most dedicated customer's of those stores). Macy's Credit Card will be the subject of another blog post, don't worry.

The best part about filling out all those forms is where you digitally sign the code of conduct. Every company in the world has a code of conduct, as does every school, and they all generally go out of their way to construct the document so that you have to read it before you sign the document that says you read it and agree to abide by it. I have no idea how legally binding that document is frankly, but I know that you could get out of any lawsuit that results from violating the Macy's code because you will be told explicitly not to waste time reading it; just skip to the bottom and say that you have nothing to divulge regarding past violations (meaning things done in the past which would be considered violations even though you weren't an employee at the time) and that you had read it. It was the real physical equivalent of skipping the licensing terms on software. You know the annoying part of installing any program, the part where it makes you scroll all the way down before “Agree” is highlighted as an option. It was a stunning admission on the part of the Macy's trainers that their code of conduct was useless. We were encouraged to read the 50 page document at out leisure. It is only available online through the employee website (InSite – get it? Yeah, me neither).

After hours had been wasted filling out forms that we should have only needed to rubber stamp, rubber stamping forms that required our signature, and generally waiting around watching the trainers waste time, I mean work, you will be herded into another room down the hall. In the computer room, you were told explicitly that you would not be allowed to eat or drink in this or any other training room. That made sense in the computer room. It didn't make any sense in what was essentially a converted hallway. Perhaps it just meant that they could give up all pretense of cleaning the room. It would save them the money it would take for a janitor to do the work. There were clearly double doors on both sides of the room and you could hear the raucous cacophony of the employee break room next door. In my case, the most immediately striking thing about the room was how cold it was. It wasn't hard to spot the broken window that was letting all the cold air in. This was our home for the next couple of hours.

In this room you will learn several things, almost none of them the lessons that Macy's wants you to learn. They do have a sales philosophy articulated by the acronym MAGIC. Meet and make a connection, Ask questions and listen closely, Give options, give advice, Inspire to buy and sell more(!), and Celebrate the purchase. But that's all marketing speak for “Be nice, be knowledgeable, remember what your job is, and make people happy they bought something.” The fact that it took hours to drill this into the new recruits (including the executives and managers, I might add, a soul crushing blow at the beginning of employment that would almost be enough to make me quit on the spot since it shows such dedication and care on the part of Macy's corporate). Much worse is the incredible incompetence of the people presenting the information. We were familiar with them from the enervating experiencing of filling out all of those forms, mostly since nearly everyone had that New York tax from rejected for some arcane reason or another at least once (three times for me). Their crowd management skills did not exist or if they did exist, they were never on display. When it came to the actual lectures though, their disinterest was palpable. They tag-teamed the presentation, the one seemed engaged at least, she stood up, actively sought responses from the dulled minds of her audience. But she was hampered by the fact that she didn't actually know the material very well and she was hopeless at warming the room up. Like most bad teachers, she defaulted to angry frustration far too often, though the next trainer took that anger and snarkiness to another level. “No.” “Wrong.” She was so bored by her work that she didn't bother to stand and she picked mercilessly on the crowd, passing a binder and cards along to be read by people who have no desire or inclination to declaim, let alone have any idea how to do it well. That should be the trainer's job. She was at least entertaining when she went off script and told us about the outrageous ways the customers and employees would steal and her shopping habits as a stewardess based out of Singapore.

Finally, the agony of that silly training was over and it is time to be subjected to another presentation, this time from the hilarious Loss Prevention personnel. I know that some marketer or PR guy decided that store detective or something along those lines said the wrong thing, but Loss Prevention is a soulless euphemism full of all the coded cynicism and distrust that corporations can muster, especially since the vast majority of loss prevention measures are aimed at employees. On that high note, the day ended and we could finally leave the building on a day that started at eight in the morning (or six in the morning if you had to commute like I did). The next day will be worse. It will be shorter, but that just condenses the horror.

Register training is both a sad necessity and a ridiculous task. Modern point of sale software, especially at the high level that Macy's requires guide their users through each step of the process. All you really have to do is read the prompts and fill out the requested fields. Macy's current POS terminals are NCR's top of the line RealPOS 80XRT (remember what I said about unfortunate acronyms?). I have a hard time believing that anyone needs a quad-core cash register, but it's available if you need it. Within two hours you can have all of the basic functions of the terminal down and they can throw you out onto the sales floor confident that you can handle that aspect of customer service, the easiest part. There are lots of other parts, especially knowing the practical running conditions of the store (how long breaks will be during what shift, what to do when you open, what to do when you close, where the stock rooms are, how to get in touch with a manager, etc). They don't bother helping you out with that. But that's another story.

Instead, register training, as well as the odds and ends of proper maintenance, lasts for over five hours. There is no description for the tedium of being chained to a computer via headphones doing the same thing over and over again without even the validation that doing it all on the floor gives you. The training lacks all focus or thought too. You are given fake checks and told to use the terminals nearby but then no one checks to make sure you have run the transaction properly. About a third of the time, the computer wants you to run through the transaction on the computer and not the terminal. You would think that this would prove you can do it, but the computer doesn't give you options; there's no way to get it wrong. The room is full of terminals that you are supposed to use, but there is only one trainer whose sole job it appears to be to hold the incompetent new hires' hands. There is no way to be unhired just because you can't use a computer, a sad state of affairs for the nice customers just trying to finish up their holiday shopping.

That would be horror enough to complete this epic tale of woe and degradation, but in my case, there were two more ridiculous affronts to my reason and attention. The first thing that happens after you complete training is that they give you your schedule. Except for me. In my case, they couldn't find the sched. They asked for that white piece of paper again, the one with my requisition number. They didn't say that I should bring it, but after all the “Can I see your white paper?” action yesterday, I knew that I wasn't going to be without it. They asked for it. After twenty more minutes, it turns out that I would not be working the next week, but the week after that. So I had been trained, but wouldn't be working for another week and a half. And then there was the tour.

There is no way to do justice to a ten story department store on a whirlwind tour trying to explain both the store and where each of the twenty people following you around is going to work. It took far too long to complete the tour and when I got to my first day of work, a week and a half later, it turns out that my tour guide had told me to work on the wrong floor in the wrong area. It was a great introduction to the next three weeks.