These retail associates make your holiday shopping possible

The holidays are a hectic time of year for everyone. But for those who work in retail and logistics, yes the busiest time. From selecting the Christmas carols to play in the store to identifying the most eye-catching places to display toys to getting those Amazon packages delivered to your door on time, there are thousands of people responsible for making shopping merry during the holidays. Here are a few of their stories.

Nordstrom starts setting the scene a year in advance

When shoppers across the country walk into a Nordstrom this week, they will encounter twinkling lights, streamers hanging around the store and Mariah Carey singing that all she wants is for Christmas youuuuu.

But the planning needed to create an experience that puts shoppers in the holiday spirit begins a year in advance, when department store executives select the overall theme, which sets the tone for the décor, says Paige Boggs, vice president -president of retail environment. at Nordstrom.

This year’s theme at Nordstrom is “Home for the Holidays,” a nod to nostalgia and the traditions surrounding Christmas. Late last year, the store’s in-house design team and a group of engineers began creating decor around this theme, including holiday villages and candles in windows. Those larger items will be manufactured and shipped to Nordstrom’s 93 stores in August, Ms. Boggs said.

However, the actual setting up of the stores does not begin until the Monday evening before Thanksgiving. Over the coming days, teams in stores will be working feverishly to set up 3,500 trees and hang 3,900 streamers, 4,350 wreaths and 95,000 twinkling strings of lights – all in preparation for Black Friday. For many retailers like Nordstrom, the day after Thanksgiving is the start of the biggest sales weeks of the year.

And contrary to popular belief, Nordstrom doesn’t pump fragrance into its stores during the holidays. “Our goal is the absence of odor,” Ms. Boggs said. “Fragrance is a very polarizing thing,” she continued, adding that the store even uses unscented cleaning products.

The day after Thanksgiving is also the day Nordstrom will play holiday music in its stores. But to keep store employees from going crazy with an endless loop of “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” the department store has 30,000 songs in rotation. On Black Friday, the retailer will play holiday-themed music 50 percent of the time, before scaling back to 20 percent the next day and slowly building back up to 50 percent by mid-December. “My goal,” Mrs. Boggs said, “is that you don’t hear the same song twice in one day.”

During the holidays, toys at Target are moved outside the designated aisle to other areas of the store. The category is big business for the retailer, and while the season’s popular toys are largely already known (hello Barbie and LEGO), executives are constantly discussing how much space to give toys this time of year. There are ways to “cheat space,” says Tara Russell, vice president of visual merchandising and styling.

Toys are placed at the ends of the aisles and in the main hallway. A large red bin in the shape of a train holds small stuffed animals and other trinkets to draw shoppers in. FAO Schwarz toys are also displayed throughout the store.

“I’m sure our toy team would like even more space,” Mrs. Russell said with a smile. “But they maximize what they have, and then we make sure that we help find a way to give them more and more space.”

Sometimes the team unpacks large items, such as a play truck, to give parents an idea of ​​how big it is. Children also immediately get the chance to play with the items. But shoppers have told Target they don’t like having too many toys out of the box. “Our guest doesn’t like distractions as much as he used to,” she said.

Instead, Target executives want customers to feel like they can easily walk through the store while checking off their wish lists. Signage plays a role in this.

“We know what the top 10 toys are, so we make sure you know where they are,” Ms Russell said. “We want you to be able to find the things that are probably on your list more easily, and the top 10 toys are much more likely to be on your list than, say, the 100th toy.”

Amazon drivers become Santa’s helpers

The week after Black Friday, Kraig Kuban, an Amazon driver, usually has a good idea of ​​what shoppers in and around St. Petersburg, Florida, bought for Christmas gifts. He is one of several hundred drivers at the e-commerce giant trained to deliver the heavy items, sometimes weighing as much as 300 pounds, to customers’ homes. It is his fifth holiday period in which he does this work.

Throughout the year, he delivers a steady stream of bed-in-the-boxes, Peloton exercise machines and equipment. He’ll still be delivering these in the run-up to Christmas, but he’ll also be loading more Power Wheels cars and kitchen playsets into his truck. Then there are the artificial Christmas trees.

Before Halloween, he packed the first Christmas tree into his truck. Now there are at least one or two trees on his truck every day. “We’ve delivered so many, and it’s just a little more monotonous,” said Mr. Kuban, 50. “Put it in the truck, let’s go deliver it.” (He’s thankful he hasn’t had to deliver a real, spiky tree yet.)

On average, Mr. Kuban and his partner deliver 15 to 30 packages a day, sometimes setting up the treadmill or air hockey table they deliver. This time of year, parents will meet him outside his truck and ask him to be discreet because the package is a gift for their child – so he will drag the item to the garage to help them put it away.

And despite jokingly calling himself a “Scrooge” when it comes to his own Christmas shopping, his job and his truck make it impossible to escape Christmas. “The antenna on our trucks broke, so as soon as we get a little bit out of the area the only station that comes on is the one that plays Christmas music,” Mr Kuban said. “So we listen to it.”

The racks of cozy knit sweaters and shiny sequined dresses now on display at local Macy’s arrived at the company’s distribution centers toward the end of the summer. Making sure those sweaters and all the other items at Macy’s stay in stock is part of the complex Tetris game that Sean Barbour, Macy’s senior vice president of supply chain, and his team are accustomed to.

It is Mr. Barbour’s fourth vacation with the company; During that time, he and his team survived the Covid pandemic, global supply chain bottlenecks, and last year’s intense winter storms.

“We are good at solving challenges, no matter what form those challenges take,” he said.

Behind the scenes, the company’s supply chain monitoring team determines which items – and how many of them – should be stocked in Macy’s more than 560 department stores in 43 states. The same goes for Bloomingdale’s stores, which are owned by Macy’s parent company.

The team spends the weeks leading up to Christmas using cutting-edge technology to monitor a wide range of real-time metrics that help predict how long it will take for a store to run out of a particular product. The goal is to get more of that merchandise into stores before that happens.

“We position stock and range in those regions, in those stores, ahead of the season,” Mr Barbour said. Macy’s maintains product reserves at nearby fulfillment centers so it can quickly deliver items to the stores that need them.

Delivering the same number of items to each store would cause some of that merchandise to languish. “It’s not really our intention to have a huge amount of Christmas sweaters in Hawaii,” Mr. Barbour said.

Despite the advanced modeling, a snowstorm can hit a region and delay delivery times, or an item can unexpectedly fly off the shelves. Mr. Barbour’s team must be agile in such situations.

“We will really go to whatever lengths necessary,” he said. “We will change delivery schedules. We send inventory from another location. We will literally do whatever it takes to support that store.”

Asked what time he wakes up on Black Friday, Mr Barbour said: “That assumes I went to sleep.”