Since I'm on the other side of this situation, I'll give my take on Behr. We've tried multiple solutions to try and appease D24's demands, but in my experience having been assigned the department, there simply is no pleasing a paint associate.
There's a difference between doing something fast and doing something right. I typically like to do things right, because I like to see the department I'm responsible for directly benefit from my job performance. But I mostly have to do things fast, under threat of performance write-ups. Managers who might touch a couple gallons of paint per year have their own internal standards for how fast they think stuff should be done, and they think that stuff should equally be done as fast as it is right.
Not just that, but I'm held accountable for other freight associates operating in my department, even if I don't know it happened. So we tried having a dedicated freight associate for Behr, but it ended poorly. Imagine working the same pallet every day, every week, and it's always Behr pallets. On the second hottest aisle. Then your supervisor might then say something like "What, you only did 4 pallets in 3 hours? Let's head back to the office". As you can imagine, at that point it becomes ONLY about how fast you do it, not if your doing it 100% right 100% of the time.
So then we had the full part-time team do it, first thing when we came in on the day it comes in. It got done faster, but now that pain was inflicted on 4 people instead of 1. You had 4 different standards of how the job should be done, and 4 different experience levels. There's a spectrum for freight, in terms of easiest freight at the top to hardest, most miserable freight at the bottom, and Behr is near the bottom on that spectrum. And I was still being held accountable for the quality of Behr packouts, even though I'm paid like any run of the mill freight associate, with no authority to tell anyone else on my team how to do their jobs. Then, when someone else does the job wrong, it can be frustrating because you have to subsequently fix it, meaning that in some cases having help is somehow worse than doing it entirely by yourself.
Lastly, we tried just having D24 do their own Behr pallets (the D24 DH even proposed the idea!). That's kind of our final solution to complainers who think they know how we ought to be doing our jobs. And as usual for every time we use it, they utterly failed to keep up with the workload or packout standards. The usual story of "we were busy with customers, even on storming days where one customer might enter the building in 2 hours" is given, and no one is satisfied or learns anything from the experience.
That's basically the three ways the job CAN get done. None of them are really satisfying by any standard. So you might understand why the Freight DS and ASMs are just happy that the product is GETTING to the shelf in any kind of timely fashion. So what can be done?
First, there is no set SOP for packing out 1 gallons. My own personal SOP is "fill bottom row with fulls, then top row, and the front top package contains any uneven amounts". If someone else did the job wrong, and we're good on time, I'll fix it, but only so many times that day before I give up. Not everyone follows my SOP, some people on Freight don't follow any SOP. I think either corporate or Behr needs to issue an official SOP for how THEY expect things to be done, otherwise they need to accept that its going to be a chaotic mess.
Second, the shelf continues to be an atrocious setup. There are no guiding rails for cans, or even the boxes, so if anything gets an angle back there it can stop its neighbor products from getting pushed back. The sides are still open for stuff to fall off into the ether, and there are no backstops. So as I always say, if there is no resistance to falling off and it spills, that loss is on the ASM who told me backrails were too costly. And if management really wanted me to be more productive, they would implement the basic measures that already exist for spray paint cans to 1 gallon cans.
Third, better communication needs to be set up. I don't mean a communication binder in receiving, that is frankly the dumbest and worst possible way of establishing a line of dialog on any issue. If you have the time, WORK Behr paint with Freight. Talk to them about the process of packing it out and twist it towards the process of pulling product off the shelf. Context of how product is worked with can help some freight guys do their job better. We get told ALL THE TIME about random, arbitrary product standards that only matter because the SM wants the shelf to look good for the upcoming walk. So when our Freight DS calls us into a meeting and says halfway through: "Oh, and the D24 DH says he wants the paint put onto the shelf straight, with full stacks on the bottom", we roll our eyes because that is just one more little detail that some DH is acting like its the end of the world over.
I'm aware, and you should be too, that unlike every other aisle in the store, the 1 gallon aisle is the aisle where the associate, not the customer, pulls product off the shelf. Problems attributed to bad packout by freight can equally be attributed to bad "pullout" by daycrew. Think back to when you were in a hurry, and you went to one of the 1 gallons on the top shelf and pulled one of them off the bottom stack. Then later you frontfaced that stack, so it looked like there was a full stack in that spot. Then freight worked it and put a full stack on top of the half stack, creating that danger situation you're complaining about. You're hectic situation dealing with customers, plus our hectic situation packing out the entire store, combines into a bad job being done.
IN SUMMATION: I've had this conversation at least 2 dozen times in the past year, every time I list the above points, and every time I have to tell the D24 associate this: we work the whole store, not just paint. Every department, save Lumber hates us for some reason, and they will never appreciate how much we're making happen with how little we've got.