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ToxicSlurpee posted:Plus the skeleton crews of underpaid teenagers give garbage customer service that is driving people elsewhere if options exist. People who financially have the option to do so can. More and more people don't. Wal-Mart has a captive audience.
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Jun 8, 2017 19:28
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ToxicSlurpee posted:It does actually. Training costs and there is no such thing as unskilled work. Somebody that spends 20 years unloading trucks is going to do it way more quickly than a new guy. People who know they will be taken good care of are loyal productive employees who give a crap. Look at Walmart now. Their employees just don't give a poo poo. Plus the skeleton crews of underpaid teenagers give garbage customer service that is driving people elsewhere if options exist. Wal-Mart is one of the very few retailers that is expanding and increasing market share during a time when almost everyone else (including their closest competitors like K-Mart and Target) are going down in flames. So, this is just fundamentally not true. Wal-Mart's biggest expansion areas are actually in places where they have the most competition. Washington, D.C., the West Coast, and Exurbs are the biggest growth areas for Wal-Mart.
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Jun 8, 2017 19:32
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NihilismNow posted:Trying to compete on price in Germany, land of the discount supermarket. Yeah you're totally going to win a price battle with Lidl and Aldi. Aldi a chain so miserly that they didn't have a telephone line in their stores and made their employees memorize all article codes rather than buy a barcode scanner. I applied to an Aldi here in America and they didn't have a phone and I was like what the gently caress
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Jun 8, 2017 19:34
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Xae posted:Someone who has spent 20 years unloading trucks is going to cost twice as much as a guy with 20 days unloading trucks, but not perform twice as much work. The Distribution centers build the pallets and the trucks in such a way to minimize the skills and knowledge required to unload them correctly. Not necessarily. One of the anti-worker things that companies do is to prevent discussion of wages. It's against company policy to discuss your wage with a coworker. That plays in a for a number of reasons, here's one that affected me. I had been with the company for 7 years, and was reaching 5 in my current position. I had received numerous high annual reviews and was a great worker. We had a new hire that was a total flake, she ended up getting fired within a couple weeks. Before she did, she had left a paycheck in the back and the resident gossip found it. The new hire was getting paid more than me, and I was furious. I was easily worth as much as a new person, etc. Couldn't really do anything about it and it motivated me to change my position. So, no. That new hire can easily be more expensive, productivity and training aside.
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Jun 8, 2017 20:30
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Xae posted:Someone who has spent 20 years unloading trucks is going to cost twice as much as a guy with 20 days unloading trucks, but not perform twice as much work. The Distribution centers build the pallets and the trucks in such a way to minimize the skills and knowledge required to unload them correctly. Until you do something new or the business changes. Let's you have workers loading containers instead of unloading. Suddenly you get a hazardous booking. That 20 day employee is about to cost you a great deal of money. Or you get a shipper that wants a heavy piece of machinery broken down loaded inside and open top. 20 day employee is about to cost you a lot of money. Alternatively you don't take those jobs, which happen to be the higher margin ones. They instead goto the warehouse with the 20 year employees. For really touchy cargoes (eg explosives etc) shippers will use warehouses states away to get employees with experience doing the work. Now that 20 year employee can't unload a container twice as fast. .. but there are a hell of a lot of things they can do that 20 day one can't. Having one simplified ( poo poo ) metric does not capture the whole situation . Managers gently caress over the business in the long term by thinking in this way. It's lean but not agile.
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Jun 8, 2017 21:16
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BrandorKP posted:Until you do something new or the business changes. Or you just take the gamble that the 20 day employee will work out all right. If you're a smart manager, you're going to shuffle off to a new position after 2-3 years anyway and leave the mess for someone else to clean up.
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Jun 8, 2017 22:52
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Xae posted:Someone who has spent 20 years unloading trucks is going to cost twice as much as a guy with 20 days unloading trucks, but not perform twice as much work. The Distribution centers build the pallets and the trucks in such a way to minimize the skills and knowledge required to unload them correctly. See, you'd think that, but you're wrong. As someone that takes pallets apart, I see them built in the dumbest ways every fuckin' day. The process might be designed to be easy, but that doesn't matter when the person being paid seven dollars an hour to build the thing is overworked, underpaid, and pissed off. They'll slap that son of a bitch together as fast as they can, and the customer ends up with poorly constructed pallets that cost time and money. I know a couple of truckers that work for package distribution companies, and you'd be surprised how often they miss the sort or get dispatched hours late because the people on the dock are paid garbage, and are treated as such. Terminals that treat their employees as such get a reputation, and the locals absolutely avoid working for them if they can. The people that are stuck working there absolutely do not give a poo poo and their productivity is about what you'd expect. It's worth noting that when managers use up and throw away their employees, they're not just throwing away hundreds of hours of training. They're also losing hours and hours of potential productivity they could draw from a sufficiently motivated employee. Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Wal-Mart is one of the very few retailers that is expanding and increasing market share during a time when almost everyone else (including their closest competitors like K-Mart and Target) are going down in flames. So, this is just fundamentally not true. Wal-Mart has also started raising their wages. They no longer pay the absolute minimum amount they can. Compared to the Wal-Mart of a decade ago, Wal-Mart today isn't the worst store to work for. Retail workers no longer hiss and recoil at the name. People with experience actually consider working there as a first or second choice, instead of anywhere else- and that's somewhat significant, especially as they continue their Neighborhood Market campaign.
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Jun 8, 2017 23:45
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NerdyMcNerdNerd posted:See, you'd think that, but you're wrong. Whose pallets are we talking about? I know Wal-Mart had pallets packed certain ways way back in the late 90s. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if others were not bothering though.
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Jun 9, 2017 00:45
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ChipNDip posted:Or you just take the gamble that the 20 day employee will work out all right. If you're a smart manager, you're going to shuffle off to a new position after 2-3 years anyway and leave the mess for someone else to clean up. Both also terrible for firms and the employees under these managers.
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Jun 9, 2017 01:07
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Xae posted:Whose pallets are we talking about? Supermarket pallets. It creates more problems than you'd think. My retail buddies have similar headaches at other stores of other types.
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Jun 9, 2017 01:27
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Super dumb question - when you say "building pallets" do you mean stacking the stuff on top of them or building the wooden part?
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Jun 9, 2017 02:04
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:Super dumb question - when you say "building pallets" do you mean stacking the stuff on top of them or building the wooden part? I don't think anyone really makes them anymore. A company named CHEP fabricates all the lovely pallets in the world, paints them blue, and sends them off into the ether to make money. When folks are talking about building a pallet, they mean stacking all the boxes together. It's like playing Lego Tetris.
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Jun 9, 2017 02:13
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It's then easier to properly stuff (load) a container (or trailer) with well built pallets and quicker. Well stuffed and properly secured containers will then reduce losses during shipping. The scope of those losses will vary wildly with whatever is in the container.
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Jun 9, 2017 03:40
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Yeah I've had some... loving bizzare pallets come in. The worst part is when they decide to take the stuff out of the secured packaging it comes in from the supplier and then either leave it loose in a cage, or drape it all over a random pallet and then try to pallet wrap the whole thing down  I have to spend hours picking all the loose stuff up and putting it back together and fixing the breakages. Improper pallet construction is a loving nightmare. There's a reason it comes in those boxes, it's because we've been shipping this stuff for a long time and that's the way that results in fewest breakages. No you can't just take it out and shove it wherever.
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Jun 9, 2017 03:58
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OwlFancier posted:Yeah I've had some... loving bizzare pallets come in. The worst part is when they decide to take the stuff out of the secured packaging it comes in from the supplier and then either leave it loose in a cage, or drape it all over a random pallet and then try to pallet wrap the whole thing down No you see shrink comes from unions.
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Jun 9, 2017 04:17
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When I was at Walmart the food pallets were generally decently sorted for a certain aisle and well shrink wrapped - so you could unload them with a pallet jack and bring them out to near where they needed to broken down. The General Merchandise side though the trucks had literally the entire interior volume filled with loose boxes. This wasn't something that happened sometimes, they were always like that - the GM unloading area had a sort of rolling assembly line, just a bunch of castor your could slide the boxes out of the truck on - I swear to god it must be what mining is like, you'd carve out the truck and extend the rolling line further and further into the truck. A young, light, and flexible guy would literally hop up onto the box stack and toss the boxes down onto the conveyor built, where a man with both enough strength and stamina would sling the boxes down the line out of the truck. Then people standing alongside the line would look for boxes that go in their assigned area and snatch off those boxes/give a boost to the ones that had to continue past them. Whenever I hear about the Chinese doing poo poo the hard way because the want to employ more people, that's what I think of. Anyway, I worked at walmart for about 4 years and while I think experience helps, it's gotta be more like a 1 year learning curve than 20+ years. Also, being young, fit, and having a work ethic meant more than anything else, and those are all traits that 1) you're either going to bring to the job or not, 2) it's going to be obvious in the first week or two if you're like that 3) lol you could lose all of that over time. Walmart/other bix box stores probably need a core of old people that know everything, and then a lot of young warm bodies to give all the poo poo jobs and toss out when they don't want to do it anymore. In practice that feels like how it worked anyway; the older men got to drive fork lifts or electric power jacks and the endless supply of early 20's men got to wade into those horrific GM trucks. Jack B Nimble fucked around with this message at 04:29 on Jun 9, 2017 |
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Jun 9, 2017 04:23
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The single dumbest thing I saw in the years I worked at Walmart came off of a dairy truck. There was a single layer of eggs with 3,000 pounds of orange juice put on top of it. Literally all of the eggs were crushed but management made us sort through and see if any cartons weren't crushed. Then we got yelled at because the truck took too long. Turns out going through that many damaged eggs to find any good ones then cleaning up the mess afterwards isn't a quick process.
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Jun 9, 2017 04:26
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An interesting discussion on why a landlord might decide to keep a property vacant for a 1-2 year period rather than re-leasing it out immediately (from last year): https://commercialobserver.com/2016/09/soaring-retail-rents-keep-vacancies-high-so-prices-should-come-down-right-maybe-not/ quote:The alternative to not having a tenant is taking a loss on federal taxes. This is a perverse incentive but one that reduces the tax burden for the landlord. This will not make an immediate difference, but if the landlord has a tenant in the space the next year, it only has to pay taxes for the difference between the net income and the loss, according to Daniel Shapiro, the co-chair of the tax department at Berdon. But if the landlord has another profitable property that has rent-paying tenants, he can offset the loss from the income and pay tax on the difference, which is a benefit. quote:Suppose a landlord owns a property that costs $10,000 a year to maintain and he can charge $12,000 in rent. But let’s say he knows that he can charge $20,000 in two years; he might not want to be locked into a 10-year lease this year and thus not get that higher rent later. I think all of these factors lead to a landlord's understanding that in a somewhat declining rent environment, things are going to get better in a couple years and it's better to wait it out rather than settle on a crappy or lower paying tenant. Indeed I'm guessing landlords that have been around for a while have past experiences that have proven this to be true over the past 30-50 years. Should they be completely recalculating their strategy now that Amazon is around? Or just ignoring retail entirely and waiting for a hip restaurant tenant to move in? I'm guessing that mindset might only apply to urban walking streets where the right kind of retail could still stand a chance anyways?
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Jun 9, 2017 05:04
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BrandorKP posted:It's then easier to properly stuff (load) a container (or trailer) with well built pallets and quicker. Well stuffed and properly secured containers will then reduce losses during shipping. The scope of those losses will vary wildly with whatever is in the container. Whenever my warehouse manager goes on vacation I have to take over and load I'm always super grateful he exists. he gets almost twice as much done as me with more care to details, he's also a 10 year warehouse guy and knows all the logistical tricks to get 100k in material packed and insured so I don't have to worry about a loss. Losses aren't just product disappearing, it loosing sales and customers. As a manager I wish I had union support. If he were to get crushed by a rock out climbing where am I going to find that kind of experience.
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Jun 9, 2017 05:19
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NerdyMcNerdNerd posted:I don't think anyone really makes them anymore. A company named CHEP fabricates all the lovely pallets in the world, paints them blue, and sends them off into the ether to make money. When folks are talking about building a pallet, they mean stacking all the boxes together. It's like playing Lego Tetris. blue pallets are awful they weight a thousand pounds. I've seen some hosed up pallets at goodwill let me tell you. The worst is the weirdo one with little legs basically, so hard to get the jack under it.
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Jun 9, 2017 05:21
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SHY NUDIST GRRL posted:blue pallets are awful they weight a thousand pounds. I've seen some hosed up pallets at goodwill let me tell you. The worst is the weirdo one with little legs basically, so hard to get the jack under it. I started getting donations from a large company and the biggest catch is dealing with all these loving blue pallets. They are massive and heavy and even living in a hipster population no one wants a bright blue pallet for their reclaimed wood project or whatever.
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Jun 9, 2017 05:37
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DrNutt posted:I started getting donations from a large company and the biggest catch is dealing with all these loving blue pallets. They are massive and heavy and even living in a hipster population no one wants a bright blue pallet for their reclaimed wood project or whatever. You should be able to find a pallet distributor. Those things get reused a billion times
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Jun 9, 2017 05:48
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Those CHEP and PECO(the red painted ones) pallets are worth a significant amount of money when you take them back to a pallet distributor, I used to haul loaded 53" trailers full to the brim with pallets to avoid deadheading.
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Jun 9, 2017 13:15
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Literally all of the eggs were crushed but management made us sort through and see if any cartons weren't crushed. Then we got yelled at because the truck took too long. Turns out going through that many damaged eggs to find any good ones then cleaning up the mess afterwards isn't a quick process. Walmart, IKEA, etc are on the quick side for this stuff. They want to get it unloaded and gone before insurers or lines get a surveyor involved. Jack B Nimble posted:those horrific GM trucks. Freight forwarders love to do this. Eventually they put haz in the container and it gets inspected and they have a very bad day. BlueBlazer posted:Losses aren't just product disappearing, it loosing sales and customers. There are only a limited number of high end customers too. I was shocked to find that as I moved around the country I was still talking to the same people. For those that want to know what the blue pallets are: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...1WK7SyRuOhfBOWA
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Jun 9, 2017 16:27
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You could always do the Northern Irish thing and pile them all up and set fire to them while trying to make the heap fall on the nearest Catholic/Protestant neighbour you have.
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Jun 9, 2017 16:29
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ToxicSlurpee posted:The single dumbest thing I saw in the years I worked at Walmart came off of a dairy truck. There was a single layer of eggs with 3,000 pounds of orange juice put on top of it. I'm surprised you actually looked instead of just confirming there were no survivors with something heavy.
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Jun 10, 2017 02:02
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I like to do squats while holding up a blue board above me, good workout.
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Jun 10, 2017 02:09
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duz posted:I'm surprised you actually looked instead of just confirming there were no survivors with something heavy. Normally we would have but the manager in question stood there the entire time. Didn't actually help or do, well...anything at all. Just stood there.
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Jun 10, 2017 02:16
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Didn't actually help or do, well...anything at all. Just stood there. They might have been required by an insurer to do exactly that. I get paid to do that from time to time. Just stand there do nothing and ocassionally take pictures, count, and note as the damaged whatever is unloaded. But they shouldn't have a manager doing it, it really should be an independent third party.
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Jun 10, 2017 03:13
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OwlFancier posted:You could always do the Northern Irish thing and pile them all up and set fire to them while trying to make the heap fall on the nearest Catholic/Protestant neighbour you have. I guess I could try that, and replace Catholic/Protestant neighbor with "inconsiderate rear end in a top hat neighbor who thinks 1 am is the time to start blaring loud obnoxious music out of his Range Rover for the whole block to enjoy."
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Jun 10, 2017 04:09
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I used to take pictures of the worst loads I saw when I unloaded trucks and stocked shelves, the best was like 12 pallets worth of dairy and meat that was stacked up... but wasn't on pallets at all. The single worst experience there was when the meat department threw away about 50lbs of expired product in the cardboard baler instead of the garage chute, in August
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Jun 10, 2017 13:40
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My constant bane is front end day crew throwing perishable go backs in the go back cart instead of taking them back, so that when I close I have to throw them out as damaged, because they've been baking in the Sun all day.
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Jun 10, 2017 13:48
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I have a lot of pallet stories to tell, but back to our other story: http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/10/news/companies/ascena-ann-taylor-dress-barn-loft-stores-closing/index.html Another line of semi-specialty apparel shops are closing, and the usual suspects are brought up. Interesting note: 250 stores will be closed for certain, but 400 will be closed unless they can renegotiate a cheaper rent. I wonder how much of this is going to be a way for retail stores to bargain with malls and other landlords: because along with the lost rent, malls know that once they lose a certain threshhold of stores, less people come to shop and it is a vicious cycle. Even a store that isn't particularly burdened by rent might be compelled to bring it up as an issue.
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Jun 11, 2017 01:43
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Pretty certain Ann Taylor/Loft were on one of those "Most likely to default" lists that were posted recently.
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Jun 11, 2017 02:17
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glowing-fish posted:I have a lot of pallet stories to tell, but back to our other story: I'm curious what the "typical" mall rents are. I'd imagine there is quite a lot of expenses in HVAC, maintenance, cleaning, and security, and if you start losing stores I wonder if they could even afford to charge less?
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Jun 11, 2017 02:41
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Xaris posted:I'm curious what the "typical" mall rents are. I'd imagine there is quite a lot of expenses in HVAC, maintenance, cleaning, and security, and if you start losing stores I wonder if they could even afford to charge less? There is definitely malls that decide they don't need as much cleaning, maintenance, security or hvac as they were originally designed to have
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Jun 11, 2017 04:38
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Malls tend to have pretty high tax values as well. If the value of retail space starts plummeting I wonder how it will effect the municipal tax base.
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Jun 11, 2017 06:12
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Xae posted:Malls tend to have pretty high tax values as well. Most of the time they end up getting pretty decent property tax deals during construction under the assumption that a large commercial space is going to bring in more than enough sales tax revenue for the city to make it a net positive. This, imho, is one of the reasons newer malls can end up failing so quickly. Towns/suburbs without large populations get the idea that if they give the developer's a sweetheart deal they will be able to get people from as far as 20-50 miles away to come visit and it will effectively increase the tax base to the point where they can balance the budget just on the sales tax instead of raising taxes on their own through property taxes. This ends up leading to commercial districts getting built where the population can't support them, which inevitably leads to failure.
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Jun 11, 2017 15:13
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Anubis posted:Most of the time they end up getting pretty decent property tax deals during construction under the assumption that a large commercial space is going to bring in more than enough sales tax revenue for the city to make it a net positive. This, imho, is one of the reasons newer malls can end up failing so quickly. Towns/suburbs without large populations get the idea that if they give the developer's a sweetheart deal they will be able to get people from as far as 20-50 miles away to come visit and it will effectively increase the tax base to the point where they can balance the budget just on the sales tax instead of raising taxes on their own through property taxes. This ends up leading to commercial districts getting built where the population can't support them, which inevitably leads to failure. There actually aren't new malls at this point, there has been no malls built in the US in the last 11 years.
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Jun 11, 2017 15:17
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Anubis posted:Most of the time they end up getting pretty decent property tax deals during construction under the assumption that a large commercial space is going to bring in more than enough sales tax revenue for the city to make it a net positive. What is the actual loss to the city if they charged ZERO property tax (just for example) if the mall pays for all the utility tie ins and other things like paying for extra cops and firefighters and the city pays no money at all. All the sales and income tax would still be 'free' revenue, right, or am I lost?
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Jun 11, 2017 15:48
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