Crabtree and Southpoint

Friday, June 15, 2012

Crabtree

     The second week has come and gone, and we are already making headway on the third. It is crazy how quickly everything has flown by and how much we have already learned. On Friday we began the day by going over numbers as we usually do, seeing what we needed to re-arrange or fix to gear up for Father’s Day. The main change we made was moving the tissue chino pants to the front table adjacent to dress shirts, along with moving the vests that were already there to a back table. Cynthia told us these changes were necessary due to the fact that they are more of a lightweight pant – so they should be gone after this season. After we did the pants Gina and I went to the seersucker shirts and made sure there was a size run of every color. For the ones that were lacking important sizes like large and extra large, we went to the back stockroom and found those sizes to bring them out to the floor.

     We spent the remainder of the day working in children’s wear, trying to consolidate all of the sale merchandise to its respectable area. That was a bit more difficult considering it is split into different age groups, starting with Layettes, then Toddlers, then finally sizes 8-20. There was a lot of merchandise that was not marked down yet, so we got the markdown guns and went to town on all of the items. It was pretty satisfying to leave the store knowing we had fixed up that whole area.

Saturday, June 16, 2012

Southpoint

      On Saturday morning Will and I got up bright and early to go to Southpoint for Father’s Day, while Cynthia and Gina held down the fort in Crabtree. There are already five specialists in Crabtree so Will and I went to help Welton as much as we could. Neither of us were aware that they handed out gift cards to the first 100 customers, so we were taken by surprise when there was a line outside the door at 8 a.m. When we went inside Belk, there were many customers perusing the Father’s Day sales – one was a $100 gift card winner. The first thing we decided to tackle was the children’s department, making sure all the price points and markdowns were correct. They all seemed to be in the right area, so we went over to the men’s shop to find Welton and get started with some recovery.

     Will and I “hashed” the Ethan pants for Welton, and then straightened up the Preston pants that were on a table in front. After we did some basic recovery in the men’s shop, we went down to Macy’s to make sure all the price points and sales were equivalent to those in Belk. There was only one group of shirts that had a price difference, and it was so small that Welton decided to leave them the way they were. There was not nearly as much traffic in Macy’s as there was in Belk, although Nordstrom seemed to be really picking up when we went through there. We went back to the shop and Welton quizzed us on certain products and their characteristics – to make sure we’ve been doing our homework, and we talked to him about his selling techniques and such. After we finished all of our tasks, we reported to Tammy Davis, the Sales Team Manager, and told her all about our day.

Monday, June 18, 2012

Crabtree

     On Monday we went to Crabtree to help recover after the big Father’s Day weekend. It really wasn’t in that bad of shape, so we didn’t have to do as much as we thought we would. We did have some new opportunities, however, such as hearing all about the Rock the Dock program with Larry (who seemed to be mostly in charge of it), and he went into the software program with us to show how things are received and processed. He also took us in a creepy elevator down to the loading/unloading dock areas, where we got to get a full look at what goes on behind-the-scenes. It was a lot to absorb, but all really interesting. 

     Another cool thing we got to do was sit in on a webinar, which was basically a meeting with all the Belk managers and Caesar Lamonaca (the store manager), telling about the new fall products in all of the departments. We only sat in for the men’s wear part, and we got to hear about new upcoming styles such as slimmer pants and knit ties. We felt pretty important to get to sit in on the meeting.

After all our big events, we re-dressed some mannequins to accentuate the BSR and full-priced items, since basically everything in the shop is on sale right now. We also re-stocked the swim area, doing some fill-ins so they could be well represented on the floor. Looking forward to the rest of week three!

-Laura

Here is a photo of a mesh wall we worked on, you can see the standards that RL keeps!

      

Before 

After