In Blog #58 I talked about escaping the Loma Prieta Earthquake in 1989.  In this blog I want to talk about the First Half Yearly of Nordstrom Arden Fair.

The store in Arden Fair was really coming along, the team was getting along really well. We started doing things more frequently outside of work together for fun. Half Yearly was just around the corner next month and being my second time, I knew what to expect. We had way more shoes to process in this store though…

Hash Night

Steve got a team of people to do an “overnight hash run” and the rest of the team would work the floor the next day. So the week prior we “tagged” all the sale shoes with dots from the list Steve gave us. We would pull the shoes from the stockroom wall and run them out to the sales floor once the customers left. We arranged everything by size. We then placed size spots on the floor to place the shoes in the right size area.

In the meantime we had a team in the back that would shift the entire stockroom to make room for a giant hash area by size. We would later number them to make it easy to find the shoes. Once the stockroom was shifted and all the shoes were brought out, we formed a chain gang and started running the shoes into the empty space we made. It took all night to complete.

After Hash Night

The next few weeks we would label all the shoes numerically with a three part sticker.

1. One big number sticker for the box.
2. A second number sticker for the left shoe we would place on the shank area.
3. The third sticker would go into the right heel cup with the size, sale price and matching number.

Every salesperson was responsible for a number of sections of the hash and they had to label all the stickers, pull out all the paper and sticks and stuff so there wouldn’t be a mess on the floor. During the course of the sale you would be responsible for a neat hash section before you left too.

The First Half Yearly of Nordstrom Arden Fair was the task but a great “bonding time” for the team