Motley Moose – Archive

Since 2008 – Progress Through Politics

Confessions of a Retail Worker: Clopen

Tags:

Hello everyone,

Long time no chat. I saw Melanie’s diary today, and thought I would try harder to be better Moose member. 🙂

Confessions of a Retail Worker is a series about the worklife of low-paid, non-managerial staff in the retail industry.

The reality is that life in retail is getting harder for many. Hours are being cut, and last-minute scheduling is now the norm throughout the industry. Even though Big Retail has systems in place preventing “over scheduling” of staff, those systems can be (and frequently are)overridden by management on the ground.

The worst though, is the uptick in clopening.

If you check the hashtag #clopen on twitter, you’ll see a fair number of employees from retail and food service lamenting the clopen. So what is it?

It’s when you’re scheduled for the closing shift as well as the opening shift the next day. In my case, this has meant working until midnight and then coming in by 5AM the next day. For others, it might be a 12 hour shift ending at 10pm and coming in a 4am. It varies, but it’s tough, no matter what.

The best way to identify bad management in the industry (besides poverty wages), is to see how often they require clopening.


Categories: Uncategorized.

/ 13 Comments

13 comments

  2. Melanie in IA

    I did a very wonderful thing!

    THanks. Yes, clopening would be soul-killing as well as a health risk, I’d think. I’d love to see research on incidence of work-place accidents where this is done. Also incidence of depression in employees… Social cost must be too high.  

  3. slksfca

    …this “clopening” thing reminds me of a boss I once had. I was performing in a Christmas vaudeville show and the producer decided we needed to do more shows in order to improve the ledger balance. So he devised a schedule where we performed the show four times a day: noon, 3PM, 6PM and 9PM. For the performers and crew, this meant not getting to bed until 2 or 3AM and having to get up at 6 or 7AM, on top of being dead tired from performing our hearts out for two hours four times a day.

    We put up with that insane schedule for about two days, then we threatened to go on strike. The producer then backed down to three shows a day, which was still grueling, but not sadistically so.

  4. nchristine

    management’s minds when they pull this kind of crap on employees.  If you treat your employees with courtesy, reasonable respect, and pay a decent wage, employees will generally bend over backwards for the company.  Yet, they’re treating employees with such contempt and still expecting them to bend over backwards for them…. doesn’t make any sense at all.

Comments are closed.