Miscellaneous Discussions

I'm pretty sure it has more to do with the age of the stores' Servers.

The new evolv tool promotional animation was produced in a program called Flash 10.

Two stores in the area do not have the free viewer installed to run the new tool brandname promotional animation.

The servers' Operating Systems may not be up to handling the new free Flash upgrade.

Or, the CPU's lack the horsepower, to.

OMG  your store too then all are suffering,  this is insane &  a year since notified, I guess your store to web kiosk inquiries with customers onsite really suffers tremendously. as customer i just walked away id my own research at home, fortunately came back later to store. Voice a compliant onmy behalf & of your store folks but on deaf ears. that was several months ago.

Have you inquired to your district offices/ mgrs or anyone with top authority / IT people in Rolling Meadows, IL

what does your store manager say? Or a typical shrug of shoulders with

"some day my prince will come comment"...hang in there

your websites product specifications on items is real bad small type font when you desire to printed it out. When Sears IT  changed the website few months ago. the font is extrmely small you need a magnifying glass to read it.

Doesnt your corp IT folks know this when printing the document needed or am I missing something as your store folks have same issue when print stroe to web sales check recipts to customers or give spec sheets to clients.  I wish more research put into customer feedback which Sears is keen on but they really didnt do a good job in this area...forwrd this to whoever you wish..

thx

gridlock

Hi Gridlock - Thanks for your feedback. Our sites just recently underwent a major upgrade and should be much easier to read, including the printed version. Let us know what you think!

This is not a bash the company question. How can the company compete when we have old technology and equipment thats unrealiable at the best of times. Such as the snc's that dont communicate with the telzon, and access points all the time. And printers that do not connect up all the time causing valuable time to be lost . I am in my third store and there has been three different set ups in each store. Meaning store 1 still had gizmo's. store 2 had new snc's and new printers and new rf access points. Store 3 has the telzon and old access points and old snc's and printers. I realize that it costs money to upgrade technology but the cost of being left further and further behind will cost more in the long run wont it?

hdtech1e said…

This is not a bash the company question. How can the company compete when we have old technology and equipment thats unrealiable at the best of times. Such as the snc's that dont communicate with the telzon, and access points all the time. And printers that do not connect up all the time causing valuable time to be lost . I am in my third store and there has been three different set ups in each store. Meaning store 1 still had gizmo's. store 2 had new snc's and new printers and new rf access points. Store 3 has the telzon and old access points and old snc's and printers. I realize that it costs money to upgrade technology but the cost of being left further and further behind will cost more in the long run wont it?

---

yes but they havent quite grasped the concept of spending money to make money they continue to spend it in all the wrong places

meanwhile those who work on the floor at your stores are still suffering from outdated technology, java script errors, outdated IE, and your store to web sales suffer..

a reply post from someone in your IT Dept is appropriate

Thx

The website runs much smoother on kiosks and registers a lot better as of late. It has its peaks and valleys the past month especially it was horrible but within the last two weeks things have been smooth sailing.

Thanks for bringing this situation up. It gets pretty frustrating for myself, my associates and customers to wait patiently for this system to upload anything. Fortunately we have some and I say some customers that will wait patiently. When your on the sales floor and tring to get product info, comparisons or specs and there are multiple customers, it gets a little daunting. I get multiple calls from several stores a day in regards to this situation. When i try to get in SR intranet thru mykmart webpage it always gives me problems or server not found. Have called ARMS several times but to no avail. 80-90% of my work is generated thru this kiosk and have to leave the floor so as to get reports, OWB, product info. and so on either in the office or at the web cafe in front of the store. Please give this system a REDBULL so it can grow wings.

Interesting that they solved the problem out in IL, but created a problem in NJ in the process? I'm at K-Mart 3060 (Sears 5088) in south jersey and for the past few weeks we've been dirt slow, and the mykmart portal tends to go down every day for at least a few hours, sometimes the majority of the day. While a speedier kiosk would probably do wonders for looking up product info on the Sears page, the problems with the mykmart portal must be on the back end somewhere, and if they could be ironed out the sears page would probably be faster too. (I think the new design is one of the things holding our ancient kiosk back, to be honest.)

I seriously doubt that many of the stores have really gained any improvement to an acceptable level of performance as one store in IL has stated. Anyone out there , including them, are you still getting javascript errors?

My gosh, going to  Store to Web, it is truly a painstaking process on one of the slowest systems for a large corporation I have ever witnessed as a customer, it is really embarassing for an associate to wait several minutes to do a simple lookup for self or a client.

Hoffman IT staff recognize this and have a real plan of action or we all on this site just talking about the concern amongst ourselves? . Ok the website looks prettier still hard to get to from a store system but when you get on home desktop things really get much quicker, interesting isnt it....

again , the real issue is at store level- sales  unless the underlying goal is to go completely to ordering off of the internet, and the heck with Kiosk in the store.

No lip service please, those who are moderating this site, please get our requests to someone in Hoffman and perhaps they can explain and address this issue and not let in lay in limbo forever, and forever is a long time and the frustration level is growing day by day....help  no smoke and mirrors answer please..

thx

Our store received a bunch of kiosks within the past year, year and a half. They were hooked up and haven't been dealt with since. Our store doesn't have any IT, or anyone that can really deal with computers - hardware mainly. Our systems on the floor are constantly slow and we get error messages pretty consistently. I have to restart ours on a regular basis. Luckily, I haven't had a major problem doing a Store to Web sale with a customer because they tend to be fairly patient - hopefully it's due to my charm and appeal! But... probably not.

There have ALWAYS been Javascript errors on the store Kiosk, Training room, Office and HR locations.

The new 22 inch LCD screens have not "fixed" the problem.

Just joking - I know this is a "back-end" programming issue.

I haven't heard any of that new High-bandwidth promised sound coming out of the new displays yet, either.

We were all told, in a "Morning Meeting" that there IS a plan.

SHC is working on a "big picture", that we, the front-line folks, really don't know about.

But, everything is proceeding along...

I do most of my "research" at home, too.

They still, just hate seeing associates sitting down on the job.

But, you put the terminals out on the floor?

Don't you want us to become familiar with terminal/website use?

But, no matter how slow they are (assuming they're working), they're WAY FASTER than manually telephoning surrounding stores for inventory level electronic stock checks!

As long as the item in question is Internet Orderable AND store pickupable, you can check all the surrounding stores for stocking levels and THEN, call the one or two stores, showing inventory levels above zero, for PHYSICAL stock checks.

Now, that there is PRODUCTIVITY!

Nope, nope, nope, YES!

Hey what's that stores number?

The store lookup function is down?

Well, the Internet deal here has there telefonical number - sort of.

NEVER dial the 00 number!

It's a recording.

Tools - 09

Lawn and Garden - 71

Exercise - 06

Electronics - 57

Etc.

Etc.

We still run an old Optiplex, with a ****** Celeron D CPU, and a whopping 512MB of memory.

Our management still uses TAPE DRIVES in the back office for data storage.

It's like a bad joke.  I just had a customer today that laughed his a** off when he saw our kiosk, and it's speed.

We can hand the CEO over 2.5 million a year, create a 300% easy degree of disparity, but can't give the people dependable equipment to support these salaries with.

Is Sears-Kmart on a train ride to Doomsday, and only a few people know, or what?

AND we still have CRTs.  One flat screen in the whole store...

I have acually had people walk out of the store because of the slow terminals.  I Don't care how many tricks we have up our sleeves to "save the sale"  you cant very well when your talking to their behind.  A while ago, I believe it might be fixed now, but when they started the Craftsman "garage of knowledge"  half the computers in the store didn't have the appropriate version of Flash availbale to display it.  Kind of embarrasing when you have the TV on the Compressor encap yelling about it and we cant even show it to the customers.  Would it be nice if the Tech worked a bit better? Yes.  Am I holding my breath? No.

No, problem... We have that item over in the Parts and Service Department.

That would be searspartsdirect... wait for it... wait for it...

It's just "thinking" (LOL!).

See... The hand with the pointing finger has turned into an arrow!

So. Do you need anything else today, while we're waiting on the computer to finish thinking?

Sears could make a TON of money if they installed a coined coffee vending machine next to the Kiosks - from the employees alone.

:)

Thats a great Idea!  Any idea that involves coffee is a great idea.

Why are there no new kiosks? Isn't this cost beneficial for the customer experience (I know I know, hand waving wishy washy ***** but please, corporate, don't try to side step the fact that new technology is being restricted to the internet updates but nothing in store. 

Forgive me but the main business is still retail stores, correct? I actually don't even shop at either Sears and Kmart because after using that automatic credit card scanner thing at Target, who needs crummy registers and low quality receipt printers?

When the hardware can't back up the software, there should be NO argument.

Time for an upgrade.

We still run our network on Windows XP.

What are we up to now, Windows 7 come October?

Doesn't that need at least a full GB of memory to run proper?

An old Celeron D probably wouldn't do so well with it.

Who are some of these people with the corporate tool responses?

Obviously like michelina, they have NO idea, or care not to admit how things work out here in the "real world".

Yes.

Yes.

Yes!

Run the page - despite the "script error".

The people writing these "scripts" are aware of the store terminal configurations - aren't they?

Yes...

When you attempt to print out a manual off of the Internet for a Customer, should it take 1-1/2 to 2 minutes per page?

The terminal "got" the Acrobat 7 manual, the store network and office computer could just not "handle" the manual (in 3 languages).

Sears didn't own the manual organization, though.

That was Singer's little "all languages mixed together" little beauty!

TV Ad

I wonder if Brett Favre had thetime to wait for a price competitor check via the kiosk or maybe by theat time, he may have really retired..for good.

Honestly, your terminals are still as slow as ever, upgrading the sites is noteworthy but the long wait times are truly ridiculous and creates much frustration by your in store customers and associates.

This is a longstanding concern which appears no direct attention given by core manangment IT types within SHC, or it appears that way with no resolve coming soon. Llooking at an LCD monitor versus CRT does not improve the search time for data. A redirect toward resolving is a priority at your stores to improve the customers inquiries in store and by phone.

Actually, ours did get some attention.

They made it worse...

 

 

Most of the problem is the intranet browser.  It isn't capable of running the scripts that the site is based on.

IE6 will run circles around it.

If i get anymore script error message I'll explode. I'm bald so can't pull the hair out. Maybe we can raise carrier pigeons to fast track any info. Would be alot better than these systems.  Oops, another error message.  Gonna be a long day.

As a measure of precaution, always respond "No" when asked to continue running scripts on the page.

They will slow the computer down even more if you respond "Yes".

Try rebooting (hard reset), and always say "No".

are these scripts that we get these messages about spyware?? What are these scripts trying to do? I don't work for Sears; I get these messages at home, running IE8 on WinXP SP3