I worked at a Target store for a couple years in the early 1990s. In that time we went through four store managers. The first one frequently walked the store. The second and third ones rarely left the office.storewanderer wrote: ↑November 15th, 2018, 11:00 pm
Better operators/better store directors frequently walk departments to monitor conditions but in the Target world I get the impression the store management is generally in the office.
One in particular would stand at the service desk and YELL over the PA for backup cashiers every ten minutes, and frequently threatened to write people working other areas of the store up who did not come running every time, this happened while they were lucky to have two cashiers total in the evenings. She NEVER would step in and use a register at any time. During that time, things occurred such as refusing to order ink ribbons for the IBM 4683 registers until ALL of them were used up, often ribbons would be used from less-used registers and would get to the point that the ink was barely legible. And the front end ran completely out of bags a couple times which was embarrassing to say the least.
The final manager was the best, he often walked the store and took care of things, and often would come down from the office and cashier as needed, and would sometimes even be seen bringing out a ladder to change light bulbs and doing other maintenance related tasks as he was the only one who truly seemed concerned about how the store looked overall. That manager also once told me that he did not care for how Target positioned the office upstairs behind mirrored glass to "look down" on the employees and would have preferred an office near the front end.
I will not pretend to know all manager duties, but a store works better when management mingles with employees and gains a better understanding of how the store works instead of staying in the office all the time.