JunkBossPro Blog — Property Managers & Commercial

Retail and Storefront Cleanouts: Fixtures, Shelving and Back-Room Junk

Stores collect junk in places customers never see. The back room fills with broken displays, old shelving, empty fixtures from last season and boxes of things nobody remembers ordering. When a store closes or remodels, all of it has to go at once, along with the fixtures on the sales floor. Retail work comes in two flavors: the big one-time cleanout and the steady back-room haul.

Stores Are Not Offices

Office cleanouts are covered in Office Cleanouts: Desks, Cubicles and Filing Cabinets on a Junk Removal Schedule. Retail has some of the same problems, like building rules and business hours, plus a few of its own: customers on the sales floor, fixtures bolted to walls, and a shopping center manager who cares a lot about where your truck parks.

Who You Are Working For

A store might be run by a local owner, a regional manager with several locations, or a landlord clearing out a space a tenant left behind. Find out who is paying.

• A single store owner is a normal client with one address.
• A regional manager or small chain is one client with each store as an address, and is a good fit for Monthly billing with each store on its own statement line.
• A shopping center or commercial landlord clearing out vacant spaces works a lot like a property manager, with each suite as an address under them.

Tag retail clients so you can find them together, and use a custom field for a store number if the chain uses them.

Store Closings and Remodels

A store closing is usually a big job on a fixed date. The lease ends, and the space has to be empty. Treat it like an office cleanout:

• Walk it with an on-site estimate visit. It goes on the schedule like any other job.
• List what goes and what stays. Some fixtures may belong to the landlord or be sold separately.
• Ask whether anything is bolted down and whether the client expects you to take it apart.
• Build the estimate from your service list, send it, and when it is approved online, it becomes the scheduled job.

Metal shelving and racks are heavy and often worth hauling to a metal recycler instead of the dump. Set the haul-to on that load to the recycler and the crew's Go button takes them there. A truck full of steel gondola shelving can also push past the included weight, so the dump fee overage section is there if the load goes to a scale.

Back-Room Hauls

Stores that are staying open still produce junk: broken fixtures, old signage, damaged displays, worn-out back-room furniture. Some store managers call every few weeks. Others would like you on a regular schedule. Recurring pickups are covered in Recurring Monthly Pickups for Commercial Junk Clients: Keeping the Regular Haul on the Schedule.

Back-room hauls are often small, a 1/4 or 1/2 truck load. They fit nicely on the single-item truck if it is passing by, which the Waiting List map makes easy to see.

Shopping Center Rules

Centers and strip malls have rules for vendors. Put them on the address:

• “Use the rear service lane only. No trucks in the front lot during business hours.”
• “Check in with the store manager at the back door, not the register.”
• “Do not use the center's dumpsters or compactor.”
• “Work before 10am or after 9pm only.”

The crew sees these notes on the job card every visit, and past notes from earlier visits show too. Breaking a center's rules once can get your company banned from the property, which costs you every store in it.

Working Around Customers

If the store is open, the crew should be invisible. Carry through the back, not the sales floor. Do the job before opening or after closing if you can. When the crew has to cross the floor, coordinate with the manager. A crew wheeling a broken display case past shoppers is not a good look for the store or for you.

Early-morning and late-night work needs planning on your side too, covered in After-Hours and Weekend Commercial Junk Jobs: Scheduling Around Business Hours.

Photos and Billing

Before-and-after photos show the store manager, and the landlord on a closing, that the space was cleared. Take them of the back room and the sales floor.

A single store can pay per job, with an invoice and card on file charged at completion. A chain set to Monthly gets one statement with each store labeled by address, which is exactly how their head office wants to see it.

For everything else JunkBossPro does for commercial accounts, visit the commercial junk removal software page.