\ Three shops, three weeks /
Stories
Three independent shops, three different weeks. The facts are the ones they run on: how many shops, how many staff, and who signs off the sheet.
1
Hollin Bakery
Hollin Bakery is 1 shop with 14 staff, and it opens at 06:30. Ines Duarte manages the floor. The weekend early shift used to be fixed on a Friday phone call, after the shop had closed and the sheet for Saturday was already pinned.
Someone would ring, someone would answer, and the name on the dawn start would change once more before morning. The call did the job, but it sat outside the week. The rest of the rota was on paper.
That one shift lived in a conversation. Staff now swap the early shift among themselves, and Ines approves once. A colleague offers the shift, another accepts, and the week does not change until Ines has said yes.
The 06:30 open stays covered by someone who already works the bakery. Ines still sees the offer and the acceptance together. The rest of the week is last week’s pattern copied forward, people moved into the gaps, then published to phones and still readable on the wall.
Ines Duarte, manager, Hollin Bakery
2
Fennick Flowers
Fennick Flowers is 1 shop with 6 staff. Oskar Lund is the manager. Wedding Saturdays need extra hands.
A Saturday wedding is not an ordinary weekend on the rota. The shop still has to open for people buying stems, and the back room is tying an order that cannot move to Monday. With six people, those Saturdays are the week that has to be decided first.
Availability for the season is collected in March, and the Saturdays are laid out first. Staff mark the days they can work. The Thursday reminder still goes out, and the answers land on the rota grid, but the question in March is the wedding season rather than a single week.
Once those Saturdays are filled, the ordinary weeks copy forward from the pattern around them. Oskar can see who is already committed to a wedding before he moves anyone into a weekday gap. Extra hands are people already on the staff who marked those Saturdays, not a separate list in a notebook.
Oskar Lund, manager, Fennick Flowers
3
Tessaly Books
Tessaly Books is 2 shops with 11 staff. Ruth Adeyemi manages both. Some staff work at both shops.
A bookseller might shelve in one shop in the morning and cover the other after lunch. When each shop had its own sheet, the same person could be written onto both without anyone noticing until the day itself. One week shows both shops, so nobody is booked twice.
The additional shop sits on the same grid as the first. Ruth can see a name in both places before she publishes. A gap in one shop is filled only by someone who is free in that hour, not simply by someone who works for Tessaly Books in general.
Swaps still run between colleagues, and Ruth approves once. A sick day asks people who are free and able to work that shop. The hours for both shops add up on the same week, and the export by Sunday night covers people who moved between the two shops as well as people who stayed in one.
Ruth Adeyemi, manager, Tessaly Books
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