Anderson Merchandisers reviews

Company places unrealistic goals on their merchandisers because of promises they've made to clients that activities will get done. Clients are short-changed all the time because there are way too many activities to get done in allotted time frame. They usually don't get the level of service they're paying for. Not acceptable! Books are a joke. Book distributor can't get their act together with shipments and traits, yet merchandisers are written up if book dept isn't set exactly like mods (which usually aren't updated on time and you're expected to go back & fix when they are) or a display isn't on the floor because the store mgr won't allow it. That's ridiculous! Not fair! There's not enough hours to get book dept in excellent shape and do the other hundreds of activities on the list. And the stores don't do their part zoning the books when you're not there. You get to clean up after customers who just leave things they don't want in the books and overnight store associates who just put things in books because they're too lazy to put them where they belong. Another fun thing is dealing with Walmart mgmt. Ninety-nine percent of the time they do what they want to do. Doesn't matter if you have a letter from their corp office saying you have authorization to do the activity. You're then expected to keep asking them to let you do it. One thing you don't want to do is upset a store mgr. They don't like vendors to begin with, and especially not a pushy one. Consider yourself lucky if you get a cooperative store mgr. And you're lucky if you have a part-time merchandiser to help you, but most times they're not given enough hours to get things done right. If you have a project that store associates are supposed to help with you're pretty much on your own. They'll tell you they don't have time.

Time allotted for each task is by all means unrealistic. You are only given enough time to quickly throw product out on display, so that you can take the picture. The task time allotted doesn't take into account the time you'll ultimately spend digging the product out of the messy store warehouses, finding/waiting for store management to unlock areas where product might be stored, cleaning up the messy display/shelves just so you can place product, etc. You have to be practically running all over the store just to complete all tasks, in different departments. Stores often expect you to do things that your management say are no longer in the job description. Very little communication from upper management to store level, about said former responsibilities. So, stores don't believe you when you say it's now a store responsibility. Even then, you are ultimately responsible for said tasks completion, when store doesn't do it, because you are the one who has to take the picture for the client/company who is paying for it to be audited. Also, it doesn't matter whether you are full time, you will at some point in the year get part time hours, possibly for many weeks in a row. But you'll still have about 50-60 hours of work to do, and it ALL has to be completed each week.