NORTON SHORES, MI – Best Buy General Manager Corry Young took a quick break on the side of the store about an hour before the national retailer opened its doors at 6 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28.
With a sugar-free Monster energy drink in hand, he spoke with the Muskegon Chronicle to describe what a typical Black Friday looks like for an employee at the national electronics retailer.
This year is Young's fourth Black Friday with Best Buy, but his first as general manager. Read his account below, as told to by a reporter. Young's interview was edited for brevity and clarity.
In my opinion, it's the best day to work. It's exciting. It's fun. The employees, myself – people are genuinely happy to be here. The customers are excited. I truly think it's the best work day in retail.
There's so much prep work that goes into Black Friday to really have it go successfully. We start preparing for Black Friday about two months in advance, just working through the plans, working through the products.
And then we have a pretty choreographed store layout so everybody knows where everybody's supposed to go. All of my associates know where they're working or where their specific zone is at and what's expected out of them.
As soon as those doors open, I've never had any bad experiences. It's pretty controlled. A lot of times people are just excited to be inside in the warmth and we haven't had any of the issues you hear about on the news or anything, (like) people going crazy or trampling people or anything. We've never had those issues and a lot of that is just due to the prep work and ... that we care about for our customers and our employees.
A lot of the prep work starts about two months in advance. We have a lot of meetings as a store and meetings as a district where we meet with other store leaders. We learn from things that didn't go well the previous year and we come up with some different plans.
A lot of the prep work starts around meetings and deciding "Hey this is what we're going to deliver this holiday season." It carries down to a store level where we say, "This is what we're going after, this is what we're doing, here's what our lines are going to be, where the product is going to be staged," and making sure that overall, this organization is top notch.
About two weeks in advance is when a lot of the product buildup starts, so we have a lot of trucks that come in. We find places for everything, making sure that it makes sense.
On Black Friday, most of my associates get here an hour before and we're just double checking last-minute things. You know, is everything priced correctly? Is everything that should be out on the sales floor out for customers to easily grab and go ring out?
And they start getting ready for what we call our line sales. We'll have a lot of associates actually working our outside line where a lot of my customers are currently standing. And we have a lot of items that are what we call ticketed so we only have a certain number of those items. So if we have say, 20 (items), the first 20 people in line receive a ticket that guarantees them that product, so there's a lot of that sales process that actually happens outside the store.
As far as a Black Friday ritual goes, I get a good night's sleep. As corny as this sounds, I just kind of try and kind of empty my mind and just know that hey we're going to have a great holiday season.
I get in a good night's sleep, I come in early. Myself and another assistant manager were here about 2:30 p.m. today to just really walk the store cells and just make sure that if there's any last-minute stuff that needs to be done, I want to make sure that I know where stuff is at. A lot of times, as a story manager, people come to you for questions and they want answers, whether they're an associate or a customer, and I want to make sure that I have the answers.
So far today, I've done everything from pricing stuff, getting product out of my warehouse, to shoveling and salting the sidewalks. In a lot of ways, I'm here to help take care of my associates, to make sure that they're knowledgeable, they're safe and that they know what's expected out of them. And I'm here for my customers.
By the time we're ready to open at every Black Friday, I essentially give my associates a speech and we talk about what we're going to focus on, we talk about the holiday season, and really this year, my core message is to say "Thank you."
No comments:
Post a Comment