Motley Moose – Archive

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.

A couple of people had asked me to post about schedules in retail.

This piece is something I wrote about on another website in the past. Unfortunately, retail hasn’t changed much.

So here it is…

Vice President – you met him in Diary One – doesn’t like to be at the door to let people in very early on a Sunday morning (Yes, I’m sure you’re shocked by that.)

Therefore, “Bob” who is a non-manager, is given the responsibility of letting in overnight and early staffers. It’s very common for us to work without any managers or “assistant managers” in the facility. Bob is the go-to guy.

Bob also has the responsibility of printing everyone’s work orders based on a just-in-time schedule. He’s not in charge of creating the work orders, that’s done out of state. He just prints them.

We never know what the work plan is for the day until we physically see our work order. The work order might “authorize” overtime, so you need to be available. If you’re not available when overtime is asked, your hours are reduced as punishment.

The work orders can run hundreds of pages. This is harder than it ought to be for Bob to print because none of us, including Bob, are allowed a desk or computers of any kind. He usually asks a sympathetic back office person to leave a computer on for him, and then carries his paperwork around in cardboard boxes.

The work orders change every 24 hours. For example, members of the inventory control team might find out on Tuesday that they are working overnight that night. Or they might find out they need to show up on Wednesday at 2:30am to unload trucks.

Or a combination of both.

(One of the few changes for the better is that Corporate’s insurance company no longer allows the facility to schedule work shifts less than X hours apart. It used to be pretty common).

Otherwise, the expectation is that all workers will be available at all times.

We have no full-timers amongst our number except Bob.

As scheduling is so fluid, the paychecks are variable. It’s not unusual for me to have a difference of more than $150 in my weekly earnings from one week to another, or to have a few weeks at less than $100. On the best weeks, I’m scheduled to work a full 8 hours on a federal holiday, plus 32 hours of straight time: that can be nice money. On the other hand, for the weeks where I’m only scheduled for 8 hours split over two or three days, it’s hardly worth the transportation cost to come in.

Even that wouldn’t be so bad if we only knew ahead of time. Bob can sometimes guess: “Oh, for the last few years we have a sale on the Monday after Have a Solar System Day, so they’ll probably schedule you for 6am to 10am to stock Suns, then you’ll have off Tuesday. But the Other Team will probably have to work Tuesday night and you should be prepared to restock the entire Solar System on Wednesday. We’ll probably be scheduled for eight hours of that beginning at 8am.”

But those are only guesses at best. Bob is often right, but management likes to keep things “flexible” for “just-in-time inventory control”, and therefore won’t allow work orders to be issued more than 24 hours in advance.  

It’s all subject to change at any time; therefore, we don’t know what our paycheck size will be either.

It’s very hard to manage a budget when your hours are varied and your pay fluctuates. It’s also hard to look for a second job, take a class, or socialize.

Hi everyone! Great place you have here. Love the coffee. Let me tell you a bit about my life and work. The best way to do that might be to utilize the intro piece I had at a different place. 🙂 So here it is.

Let me tell you a bit about my workplace.

I do manual labor in retail. (Note: Some details here are deliberately changed to obfuscate my workplace. Because the last thing I want to do is be unemployed right now, but all of these things about the workplace have actually happened  either to my coworkers or myself.)

Our work day is challenging. One of my coworkers cries and hides in a stockroom for the entire break period. Another had a nervous breakdown and is in therapy because the stress of the work got to him. A third co-worker who is now switched to On-Call, has lost their home and moved in with the newly married adult child. Another was out on official leave, because OSHA compliance is a joke and he was injured very severely. Our stock rooms and our dock areas have never been painted, much less heated or air conditioned and all environmental controls, including lights are controlled by computers out of state. You don’t know fun until you’re trying to unload stock and the lights go out mid-lift. The fire department actually came out once and made Retail Store hire an electrician so that our emergency lights would work. Yay for fire departments!

There’s no middle class workers here at my Retail Store. Well, there might be, but I’ve never met them. There’s us, some salespeople who are fired if they don’t make quota (lots of turnover there), and Senior Management of Retail Store. If we have a work problem we can’t resolve, we go to someone with the title of Vice President. We’ve never met anyone from Human Resources, because Human Resources is run out of another state. Our performance review is based on a computer generated set of statistics that have absolutely no relation to how effective we are. For example, one of my coworkers (I’ll call him “Dude”) had a performance review a couple years back that commended him for his highly productive work in spring of 2008, but criticized him for his lack of efficiency during the holiday season of 2008.

Difficulty: Dude wasn’t hired until 2009.

It’s a fireable offense to share our performance reviews and raises, if any, with each other but Dude thought this particular one was so hysterically funny that he did share it. Even the VP had a laugh and said “I don’t control how the performance reviews are done.”

Every morning Vice President stands by the employee entrance to let us peons in the store. We usually share fun stories about how many rodents we saw the previous day and or how many dead rodents we stepped on by accident when the Fire Drill was called.

Ah, yes. The Fire Drill. This is Senior Management’s way of telling us They Care About Us and Do Not Want Us to Die in A Fire.

Our fire drill requires us to meet at Popular Coffee Shop in the neighborhood when we evacuate. Senior Management take attendance, and also take turns popping in for Fancy Coffee Drinks that cost more than we earn in an hour. Usually a few of us Peons will go in to buy a large coffee with two espresso shots. Any of us Peons buying  “One Large Coffee” when we’re there as a part of Fire Drill is served exceptionally well by the owner. The Peon purchaser ordering a simple iced coffee will receive: A very large iced coffee usually used for sodas, four empty cups, a cup of milk “for creamer”, enough sugar to excite a class of children, and a zillion napkins. The coffee shop owner will ultimately charge Peon only for “One Large Coffee”. That way, it can be shared among us at a price we can manage. Senior Management  gets a glare from this owner, and a Fancy Coffee. Senior Management doesn’t notice because they don’t pay attention to service people. But I tell you, we notice it.

…..

So that was my introductory post about retail. Hasn’t changed much, unfortunately.