Updates...
Life moves forward at an alarming pace. I cannot believe it's been nearly 4 months since my injury and that I've yet to be allowed back to work. I find out on Thursday what their decision is, and from my connections in the office tell me, my job is already being "farmed out" for someone who's paid far, far less than I am.
Is it a bad thing? For those of you who've been reading this for all these years, you'll know that there is no love lost with my job. Oh, I used to like it, and before the company kept being "acquired" by larger and larger concerns, it was very open and user friendly. The latest incarnation of it is hardly recognisable. The new Mother Ship has all but obliterated full time jobs, and with it, any middle-class incomes. All that remains are extremely low wage part time jobs, with so few scheduled hours that the employees don't qualify for medical insurance. Any shortage of hands to complete tasks are now passed on to the people in my position, or the department managers.
I was cleared to head back to work. The problem is that my job has substantially changed since I've been out. Couple it with my store manager using my absence to leverage an already skimpy pay roll budget (by putting someone who makes about 1/2 of what I do in a temporary capacity), and so kept blowing me off with excuses of how he needed more notes from my doctor, etc...so that now, almost 4 months later, I'm facing being laid off. Or, transferred to a store that is more than 90 minutes away, not including the traffic through Boston to get there.
At present, I sit in limbo, unable to apply for other jobs lest I get hired, which I'm not allowed to do while my case is still open (I need a full clean bill of health from my present job), and hope that Thursday they'll at least cut me loose. I don't want to be unemployed, but I'd rather that than them trying to make me quit by making my job impossible to get to.
In the midst of all the upheaval, the CEO at my company takes TAKES a 10.5 million dollar pay package for himself, compensates his executive team huge sums, and then continues to slash away at the staffing levels. It's a downward spiral: Low sales brings about a cut in pay roll to stay on budget. Customers come in expecting a certain level of service, but there's no employees to cut bologna, or to bag groceries, or clean the restrooms, so customers get upset and complain. Nothing is improved, so customers start shopping elsewhere, which brings about a decrease in sales, and then the subsequent decrease in employees hours, which means even less customer service available.
We are the third largest food retailer in the US at a time when people are not going to restaurants and yet still have to eat. Go to any of our competitors and you see fully staffed registers, a bagger at each lane, delis that are open as long as the store is (ours close 3 hours before the rest of the store), and a more upbeat attitude all around. The class action lawsuits are piling up, and now Wal-Mart and their developers are looking to sue the company for tens of millions because OUR company, is being accused of hiring a firm to start some phony grassroots activism to thwart Wal-Mart from coming into their market areas in the mid-West. Wal-Mart and the developers claim that Supervalu has cost them not only money, but huge amounts of time with delays to their projects.
In other words, we (the company) are in big dooky. Up to the proverbial elbows in it. And now to pay for this extremely expensive lawsuit, they're now saying we need to cut hours (again). Where are we going to cut? There is no where lower than the bottom, so they are now cutting back hours of business not only in service departments, but the stores themselves. Honestly, a third grader would know that if you limit your availability to people, don't give them what they come for, they'll stop coming altogether, which is what is happening. Same store sales, a health check used to see how the store compares with itself from year to year, is way down. In some stores, it's 30% lower than last year. That's quite a dip. An informal poll of my friends, neighbours, etc. shows that nobody actually shops at my company's stores anymore. They go in for specific sale items, but will do the bulk of their shopping at our competitors, which, in this area, isn't Wal-Mart.
But, for more happy things, I think I might have broken my dry spell for both furniture acquisition and selling. The other day, I bought a Plycraft chair and sold it within two days...
Is it a bad thing? For those of you who've been reading this for all these years, you'll know that there is no love lost with my job. Oh, I used to like it, and before the company kept being "acquired" by larger and larger concerns, it was very open and user friendly. The latest incarnation of it is hardly recognisable. The new Mother Ship has all but obliterated full time jobs, and with it, any middle-class incomes. All that remains are extremely low wage part time jobs, with so few scheduled hours that the employees don't qualify for medical insurance. Any shortage of hands to complete tasks are now passed on to the people in my position, or the department managers.
I was cleared to head back to work. The problem is that my job has substantially changed since I've been out. Couple it with my store manager using my absence to leverage an already skimpy pay roll budget (by putting someone who makes about 1/2 of what I do in a temporary capacity), and so kept blowing me off with excuses of how he needed more notes from my doctor, etc...so that now, almost 4 months later, I'm facing being laid off. Or, transferred to a store that is more than 90 minutes away, not including the traffic through Boston to get there.
At present, I sit in limbo, unable to apply for other jobs lest I get hired, which I'm not allowed to do while my case is still open (I need a full clean bill of health from my present job), and hope that Thursday they'll at least cut me loose. I don't want to be unemployed, but I'd rather that than them trying to make me quit by making my job impossible to get to.
In the midst of all the upheaval, the CEO at my company takes TAKES a 10.5 million dollar pay package for himself, compensates his executive team huge sums, and then continues to slash away at the staffing levels. It's a downward spiral: Low sales brings about a cut in pay roll to stay on budget. Customers come in expecting a certain level of service, but there's no employees to cut bologna, or to bag groceries, or clean the restrooms, so customers get upset and complain. Nothing is improved, so customers start shopping elsewhere, which brings about a decrease in sales, and then the subsequent decrease in employees hours, which means even less customer service available.
We are the third largest food retailer in the US at a time when people are not going to restaurants and yet still have to eat. Go to any of our competitors and you see fully staffed registers, a bagger at each lane, delis that are open as long as the store is (ours close 3 hours before the rest of the store), and a more upbeat attitude all around. The class action lawsuits are piling up, and now Wal-Mart and their developers are looking to sue the company for tens of millions because OUR company, is being accused of hiring a firm to start some phony grassroots activism to thwart Wal-Mart from coming into their market areas in the mid-West. Wal-Mart and the developers claim that Supervalu has cost them not only money, but huge amounts of time with delays to their projects.
In other words, we (the company) are in big dooky. Up to the proverbial elbows in it. And now to pay for this extremely expensive lawsuit, they're now saying we need to cut hours (again). Where are we going to cut? There is no where lower than the bottom, so they are now cutting back hours of business not only in service departments, but the stores themselves. Honestly, a third grader would know that if you limit your availability to people, don't give them what they come for, they'll stop coming altogether, which is what is happening. Same store sales, a health check used to see how the store compares with itself from year to year, is way down. In some stores, it's 30% lower than last year. That's quite a dip. An informal poll of my friends, neighbours, etc. shows that nobody actually shops at my company's stores anymore. They go in for specific sale items, but will do the bulk of their shopping at our competitors, which, in this area, isn't Wal-Mart.
But, for more happy things, I think I might have broken my dry spell for both furniture acquisition and selling. The other day, I bought a Plycraft chair and sold it within two days...
