merchandiser

retail merchandiser

reset merchandiser

retail sales associate

inventory specialist

Strategic Retail Solutions (SRS)

I first heard of SRS from a person I trained for another company I worked for to take over an area an hour from home I wanted to give up. She informed me the lady who hired her with the other company who was our dm to replace me was with SRS now and recommend I apply. Someone who would later become my first dm with SRS called me trying to recruit me but at the time I declined. 

Six months or so later I applied to SRS to bring in extra money because my hours at my primary job were cut drastically after Christmas and my other merchandising job rarely has much work. Within a day the district manager who had my state and happened to be the same person who called me months earlier called me for an interview or something and I was hired. I was hired as an independent contractor so there wasn’t much on boarding paperwork and I was out doing projects that same week.
The first year we were in Lowe’s, Home Depot and Tractor Supply stores the most with there being a lot of work in Lowe’s so much work that I bought a tablet to have a bigger screen to go from one project to another (and as a result it cut down on the amount of printing I was doing).

There was some interesting projects, some boring ones and ones you wondered why a third party was doing something so simple. I had quite a large territory the first few months then an unusually busy week or two with my other merchandising job resulted in me losing my further away stores due to not getting some project done which I eventually became happy about. 

In two years I’ve had six different district managers with the second one hardly communicating. You rarely find out who a project manager is but I eventually found out four of them with two of them I had were wonderful and always helpful. One of them oversaw a project SRS was contracted by another broker company to do. Her phone training was thorough and every Friday she sent an email newsletter. 

You use an app for all project projects and you can either accept or decline work. Declining work isn’t supposed to decrease the opportunity for more work they just don’t like you accepting something then not doing it. When you do accept you choose a day and time during the campaign to schedule when you will complete. Most projects have a two week campaign and technically can be completed any time of day during the campaign but of course you’re limited to a store’s hours of operation and some managers might not like late evening vendors.

Each project has instructions loaded in notes with the visit in the app.

To no fault of SRS the amount of work in some of the retailers has drastically reduced to hardly ever a project but they seem to be trying to get more work even helping another company with resets. From what I was told a lot of companies have gone to using their own employees for merchandising work or changing the frequency of visits made.

Don’t come on board if you’re expecting a lot of work and benefits because it just won’t  happen. Occasionally you get a project where you learn a new skill like I learned and have since forgotten how to wire a light fixture in Lowe’s.
If you go out of your usual territory your dm can give you extra pay but it isn’t mileage. The company changed the app we use and the new app doesn’t show your completed work whereas the old one did.

I’ve liked five of the district managers I’ve had and two of four project managers I dealt with I really liked. Most projects have a hotline you can call if you run into issues or in some cases need more time. 

I’ve been in one store I previously never heard of and then stores I never thought I’d ever do a merchandising project in so my skills have increased. I have met some great people in some of the stores I was in regularly and enjoy seeing.
 My other merchandising job requires a sign off for every project but to the best of memory I have only ever had two projects with SRS that required a sign off so you hardly have to bother a manager. 

With the exception of the person who first told me about SRS I’ve never met any other reps and even then I met her working for another company so you work alone although I have had opportunities for projects where I would have been working with others but the locations available were too far from home to squeeze in with my full time job to even be tempted to do it. Unlike a previous review from someone I’ve never had nasty emails from a dm. Most of the time their emails have been about an upcoming project, open locations for a project, updated/changed information on a project or wondering why I was late on a project. Same with phone calls/texts.

I have worked for SRS for a little over a year now as a Merchandiser. This is a work on your own/work from home type of job. You are not told what exact hours you have to work, but there are deadlines that do have to be met. Its Monday thru Friday only and usually 8am to 5pm with no weekends. You are either paid a flat rate for the project you are servicing or you are paid by the hour for a certain number of hours. I have personally serviced suppliers at Lowe's, Tractor Supply, Walmart, Home Depot and Office Depot, etc. Ive seen a few others too. I go to Lowe's just about every other week. I go to Walmart about 4 times a year for a certain supplier. Tractor supply about every quarter or so. The supplier determines how often you service their products. You have to have transportation and at least a smart phone. They do ask you to print out things sometimes as well. You submit a survey w/photos after the servicing is done.

You are not normally paid for travel, but sometimes they will pay if it is way out of your area and they really need that product serviced. They dont normally pay for printing POG's, but there are times that they do. I print one out and keep it until it changes, which is usually six months to a year. Pay is every two weeks and goes directly to a debit card that I was set up with. I have had no issues so far with pay or not getting it on time.

So far the only set back is that our DM's keep changing. Ive been through at least three DM's with a new one coming in soon. The only set back is that each DM does things their own way. For example, my first DM would post the available jobs on the dashboard for our entire state. You were responsible for logging into the dashboard and choosing the locations you wanted to service. So it was basically who ever got to the dashboard and made their selections got that location. I never really had any issues in getting what I wanted. At first I only had one or two locations to service and it has grown since then. The last two DM's Ive had would work with us and if we had specific locations we wanted to be assigned to, they would assign it and only those locations appear on our dashboard. That way no one else could take them. If locations appeared that we didnt request, it was because there was no one to service that location and it was open to anyone. So the downside to getting a new DM is they dont know how the prev DM was doing things. I sometimes have to contact the new DM when I get their Introduction email and let them know my locations. Sometimes in their email it states thats the way they do it or request us to email back w/our preferred locations.

Over all I enjoy working for SRS. I do wish it paid more and paid mileage each time you service a client. Since this is just a part time extra money gig for me, I will be giving it up in the next year or so probably as I have other projects in mind.

Work culture is pleasent in that you are working by yourself in stores doing a job that you know well. The company culture has a manager that micromanages, and uses other people's email addresses to send emails.  She purposely and consistently makes it sound like it's coming from someone else when it's actually coming from, her, your manager. This is very deceitful. 

The other deceitful thing that this company does is promise you a certain rate of pay for a certain special project. But when your paycheck arrives the special project that you are supposed to receive special pay for doesn't show up. At least, well, you really don't know if it is there. Because compensation for that special project isn't broken down on your paycheck so you can verify the pay per the confirmation number.  They don't give you the option to look at the details of your paycheck.  There is basically nothing in the paycheck that even remotely identifies your confirmation number or project number or work order number! Nothing! Absolutely nothing is included in your paycheck for you to reference back to.  

You see, each project has a code. And each project has a certain amount of pay per project. You get the project by getting there first. When you complete your project you get a confirmation number. You also get a project number, and another code (that they use internally), and how much pay for that project. 

However, when the paycheck arrives, there wasn't any way to go back and verify that each project (with the saved confirmation number) has been compensated. I don't know the statue of limitations for filing suit but I do plan to do so because I know that they stole many many many dollars from me while I was working. They also underpaid me per hour of what I'm worth. And they knew that. Yet they still would not bring my pay up to my experience level. 

I finally just had it with that manager always sending me nasty nasty email over and over using somebody else's email. She never signed her name. It got to the point where my supervisor and I devised a way for me to know when emails were not sent by my supervisor. Whenever my supervisor would send me an email, she would put her initials somewhere in the email in lowercase so that I knew it was her. The manager, she did not know we had this code and therefore when she would send me emails as this other person (as my supervisor)  I knew it wasn't from my supervisor  because she didn't include the initials in lower case letters. 

If you are thinking of working for SRS - please think again. It is a very unpleasant, very VERY unpleasant place to work. The management micromanages.  Other managers fire other managers who are terrific managers for absolutely no reason! I mean, it's just not a good place to work. Not a good place. Unless, of course, you like a lot of drama and you like a lot of stress and you like to not get paid what you're worth. 

Other than that, go for it.

I won't do it again. ever.

I have done merchandising before, independently as a third party vendor. SRS does not work the way a merchandising company should. They are completely disorganized and haphazard in their management. 

They say they pay $11/hour or per assignment, but the actual pay will be lower. They will tell you when recruiting you that, as an Independent Contractor, you can feel free to assign yourself to certain jobs and feel free to turn others down. They will dock your performance rating for this. They will say an assignment will take X amount of time. It will take much longer than described.

The stores they send you into will look as though they have not been serviced in forever. You are sent in to refill certain displays, yet those displays have been removed from (or maybe never even installed in) those stores. Your rating will be docked if you are unable to complete a task because of this.

Some displays will be sent to your home. You will then take these materials to the store to build said displays and then planogram them. You will be told that a Letter of Authorization will come with these materials, letting the store personnel know why you are there. The Letter will not be included in your materials. Neither will the directions, the planogram, or anything else. You will then need to reach out to one of your managers and let them know that the materials are missing. At which time, you will receive some in an email for you to print. Some will still be missing. You will have to request those as well. This will likely cause you to have to reschedule your visit, possibly earning you a hit to your reliability score.

You will spend a lot of unpaid time tracking down materials that should've been included in your box. You will then spend time and money printing said materials.

After all that time and money, you will go to the store, do the best you can, take your photos, even call your manager to clarify, "What should I do now that the displays are gone?" only never to have that call answered. You will spend twice as long in the store as your assignment estimated, due to slow customer service, non-answering managers, missing displays, etc. 

You will notice that your directions don't even match the worksheet that you need to answer online.

Even after all of this, they will give you a mediocre rating on their website. Maybe to motivate you to accept another crummy assignment in hopes of appeasing whoever scored you poorly?

Run, don't walk, away from this "opportunity." I didn't heed the bad reviews and I regret it.

Be careful working with this company in the Indiana area. SRS only pays 11.00 per hour and doesn’t reimburse for gas or mileage. And, communication is required here. But, you don’t get paid for answering phone calls, answering texts, or responding to emails. Sometimes you will have 3 different people contacting you about a project. You don’t get paid for assigning projects on their website and you don’t get anything for using your own tablet or smart phone. SRS doesn’t take out taxes so you will owe that money when taxes are due. They do have continuity projects, but the main continuity projects are once every two weeks, once per month, or once every six weeks. So, if you want to make some money then you got to drive to several different places all over the state to do so. Once you have continuity projects, you aren’t guaranteed those projects every time they are available especially if you take time off or take a vacation. The projects will get assigned to someone else and you will lose the money. If you ask about anything, no one ever has an answer to anything. For example, if someone doesn’t assign you your continuity project location and you ask about it, you won’t get an answer about it. So, just be careful with this company. There are plenty of merchandising companies out there that pay 1.00 or 2.00 more per hour. The trick is to find the company that cares about their employees. SRS is not that company.

In 2019 so far, I have had a whopping 90 minutes of work, not joking! Very poor communication from DM. DM will contact you wanting you to do a far away job and if you say no, they get an attitude. Weeks later they will ask you again because that same job is now overdue because nobody wants it, might offer you a measly $10 bonus. You accept it then they forget to add it to your schedule, then they turn around asking you a week later why you never completed it. Very incompetent. They have no problem emailing, texting, or calling you when they need a job done but if you need to contact them about anything, good luck hearing back! Pay, $11 an hour is poor when you factor in that they do not pay for mileage. The projects have a set time they expect it to take and it's rarely enough time. This year there has barely been any work at all available. I do not see this company staying afloat much longer.

The upper management fired my prior manager and she was great to hire some new guy who didn't know his right from his left and who treated we field reps aka merchandisers like dirt. He complained about every little detail etc. Refused to pay if even on thing was out of place etc. It's no wonder this company can't hold onto people and soon very soon their contracts will go to the larger merchandising firms or back to the MET teams internally at Home Depot and other stores. Wish more stores, name brands and more would research the companies that they have merchandising for them and find ones with a better reputation. When they do that smaller companies like SRS will go under or be absorbed by larger companies i.e. the merchandising companies who actually treat their employees right.

This has got to be the worst company I have ever worked for. It is very poorly managed. I was never really sure who my supervisor was suppose to be. Less than 2 hours of work a week. Directions for projects were never very clear. Was told to go to a store and take photo of display.....well which display?? You have to pay your own taxes on what little bit you make because you are an "independent contractor". This can be expensive when the Self-Employment tax is $125 plus a portion of your pay. Then........they do not pay any Drive Time to go to the stores. It is all on you! Gas ain't cheap! They claim to pay $11 an hour but some projects only take minutes so you really don't even make enough to cover the cost of your gas and time to drive to the store.

The company posts sporadic 10 dollar one time projects to its website.  By a year, the work was very sporadic and too far, I performed merely two projects.  The company doesn't pay for downloading, printing and studying paperwork. And the company doesn't care about its workers's feelings.  The Seven Eleven project was a pain.
A masculine and aggressive sounding female contacted me about a one time project in Walmart. I wasn't able to perform the project and I declined. He, She answered in a frustrated tone.   " I can't assign anything to you."  Subsequently, I discovered I was locked out of the portal. Beware of this business.

What is the best part of working at the company?
The people I never met but worked with on the phone or via text were very helpful. My issue was staff at places I had to work mistreating me. Not SRS

What is the most stressful part about working at the company?
People who work in the store thinking your taking their job from them and trying to sabotage you.

What is the work environment and culture like at the company?
The people you never meet are very helpful.

What is a typical day like for you at the company?
You go into a store and get the fedex package then take before photos then set up the contents of the fed ex package according to enclosed plan o gram then take after photos.

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Merchandiser 8 salaries reported	$11.00 per hour
Retail merchandiser 1 salary reported	$15.50 per hour
Reset merchandiser 9 salaries reported	$12.00 per hour
Retail sales associate 7 salaries reported	$11.00 per hour
Inventory specialist 1 salary reported	$15.00 per hour

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