Grocery retailer Schnuck Markets, Inc. champions a better employee experience with Simbe

Brandon Carroll is an outlier: He’s worked his retail job at Schnuck Markets in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, for more than 20 years, working his way up from a front end teammate to Co-Manager of the store. In the U.S., the rate at which workers leave retail jobs is more than 70% higher than in other industries. This high turnover stems partly from excessive time spent on inventory and stock management.

Brandon says his long tenure with Schnucks is due to investments the company has made in his growth over the long term, giving him chances to learn new skills and take on new responsibilities. Since Schnucks first introduced Simbe’s autonomous robot Tally at his store in 2018, Brandon has had the opportunity to pay it forward. He’s helped fellow employees reclaim time previously spent on repetitive tasks, fostering an even more fulfilling work environment where store teammates can spend more time interacting with customers.

We spoke with Brandon about his journey, Tally's impact, and his commitment to providing others with opportunities for success. You can also view the full Schnucks customer video here.

When did you first begin working at Schnucks?

I started as a front end teammate at Schnucks 20 years ago, when I was a college student in the area. After about six months, the store offered me a 40-hour-a-week position working on overnight stocks. When the manager asked me if I was in school and I told him yes, he essentially ended the conversation, even though I really wanted the job. He said, ‘I don’t want you to sacrifice your future experience and knowledge if this is going to be too much for you.’ That was when I first realized that these people really care. This company cares about my well-being, not just the dollars I bring to the table. I made sure he knew that!

What types of growth opportunities did you find at Schnucks?

I took the overnight stocking job, and there were always opportunities and promotions available, so I always felt like I was growing. I became the manager of our frozen department, where I honed my inventory management skills, organizational skills, and supply chain knowledge.

My biggest stepping stone came when I was offered a customer service management position. I was used to working with people my age who all had the same attitude of putting your nose to the grindstone and working hard to get products on the shelf. Now, my role was to manage 50 to 60 employees, from high school kids to retirees – it was a drastic change, but also allowed me to grow more than ever before. I started as a college kid working to make ends meet, but I’ve been able to really expand my knowledge of grocery store management and operations, and in turn, grow my career

What was it like when your store first introduced Tally?

We started using Tally in 2018. Our store was curious how this was going to work. We already felt that we had pretty good inventory management, and thought, here comes a robot. How much labor is going to be cut? What’s it really going to help us do? What will shoppers think?

Despite our personal, initial concerns, Tally did not lead to fewer jobs for teammates. Tally would go down the aisles and read shelf and tag information. If the camera saw an empty spot and we had a positive inventory on it, the system flagged it to us saying, ‘Hey, where's this in the store? It should be here on the shelf.’ We quickly realized that Tally could gather so much useful information for us. Once we saw Tally in action, we kept thinking of new ways we could use the data to make work more manageable.

What new information did Tally provide that you put to practical use?

Our Store Support Center always wants to hear feedback from the teams in the field. When we were still using paper tags, for example, we said to our teammates at the Store Support Center: ‘We want Tally to identify a sale bib that's out of date. We want Tally to tell us that we no longer carry a certain item. We want Tally to identify a regular price tag that should be a sale tag.’

We started looking into all this shelf-level out-of-stock data from Tally and thought, why don't we have Tally tell us what could have been shorted from the warehouse? We call it O, S, and D – overs, shorts, and damages. It's our biggest way to control our shrink and inventory management, identifying what doesn’t come in from the warehouse or what goes out the front door that’s not paid for. Our human eyeballs aren’t able to catch everything, and Tally is a great failsafe. If you don’t catch that a case of 12 is down to two, Tally is the safety net that says, ‘There’s an issue here, come check it out.’

How has Tally helped make working at Schnucks more fulfilling for your employees?

I like to compare Tally to a slow cooker. You wake up in the morning, throw the ingredients in the pot, turn it on, and go about your day. Tally's just doing all the ‘cooking’ in the background for us, gathering data that helps us all be more efficient with our time. We used to spend tons of labor walking up and down the aisles doing manual checks. Now, we have more time to focus our labor elsewhere, whether it's with customers, merchandising, etc.

Really, Tally is a net positive. Tally is dependable, Tally doesn't need too long to charge its batteries. In-stock position is one of the most important things to us: customers come in, and you either have what they want or you don't. And Tally helps us make sure we have products in stock, which is crucial.

What have you found most rewarding about your time working at Schnucks?

This store operates like a family. There are customers who we know on a first-name basis who have watched employees like myself grow up.

I've had a lot of wonderful mentors supporting me here, and I’m grateful that I now have the opportunity to have a similar impact on so many of my teammates. We’re all about nourishing people’s lives, and I want to ensure that our people have what they want and need from their jobs, and that they’re finding meaning in their work. I can guide them and help them grow in their careers just as I did; it’s just such a great opportunity to give back.