|
Killer-of-Lawyers posted:I'd say its already broken down. Customer experince is tanking, but it doesn't cut into the bottom line so they do it. Its so weird too, there's no coordination, if marketing is wayching hours or a meeting is comming then overtime gets agressivly cut. Then the store is understaffed, nothing gets done and the next week starts out a mess, requiring more overtime! Yep, this. Our customer service surveys used to be something they harped about all the time and even factored our survey score into bonuses, but now they've pretty much stopped caring because our #1 complaint from customers is "not enough floor staff." And of course rather than do something about it they just tell us we're not engaging with customers enough. It's loving bonkers and it makes it so very clear how everything this company does is short term gains vs long term brand building.
|
#
?
Aug 30, 2019 15:48
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 26, 2024 01:50 |
|
|
Short term gain hurting long term profitability is future me's problem, and future me will be staffed by someone else so why should I care? --Every Executive Ever.
|
|
#
?
Aug 30, 2019 15:55
|
|
|
Blut posted:No, I'm advocating for the poor and working class instead of the overpaid white collar professional. If pharmacists insist on getting paid $125k a year then its not the pharmacy owner whos going to pay the extra salary costs out of their own profit, its the customers who have to pay higher drug prices to cover it. Sounds like the issue isn't pay, but rather the structural issues of the costs medical education and implicit debt (as well as the fact that medical and tech jobs are the last well-paying jobs in America). This whole argument also ignores the fact that profit drives up the cost of medical services at least as much as the cost of professional labor. Advocating for lower pay (and *reduced hours*, mind you), without first getting rid of college debt and removing the profit motive from medicine is really doing it the wrong way around.
|
|
#
?
Aug 30, 2019 16:22
|
|
|
DrNutt posted:Yep, this. Our customer service surveys used to be something they harped about all the time and even factored our survey score into bonuses, but now they've pretty much stopped caring because our #1 compliment from customers is "not enough floor staff." And of course rather than do something about it they just tell us we're not engaging with customers enough. It's loving bonkers and it makes it so very clear how everything this company does is short term gains vs long term brand building. If you have fewer customers, the average amount of time staff will be able to attend to them increases, and given diminishing marginal returns, will ALSO have more time to find ways of cutting staffing. This will lead to infinite customer engagement over time!
|
|
#
?
Aug 30, 2019 18:21
|
|
|
Dameius posted:Short term gain hurting long term profitability is future me's problem, and future me will be staffed by someone else so why should I care? So, Amazon is evil yes, but they're growing because they don't do this. Amazon is the second company to achieve a trillion dollars in market value and there are still investors who complain about this. They are far and away #1 in cloud and U.S. retail, still, not enough! Make number bigger!
|
|
#
?
Aug 30, 2019 19:58
|
|
|
DrNutt posted:Yep, this. Our customer service surveys used to be something they harped about all the time and even factored our survey score into bonuses, but now they've pretty much stopped caring because our #1 complaint from customers is "not enough floor staff." And of course rather than do something about it they just tell us we're not engaging with customers enough. It's loving bonkers and it makes it so very clear how everything this company does is short term gains vs long term brand building. Literally every problem at my store is a result of ~lovely staffing~. We don't pay enough money, so we can't retain lower level employees or new management. Our turn-over is insane and it results in a lot of time wasted on training and interviews. When we do get new people, guess what? They gently caress around and don't care because the job doesn't pay enough for them to care. We "save" on labor, but the majority of the labor we attract with low wages is of a lower quality. So because we either have low manpower, no manpower, or slow manpower, we've always problems. Problems getting product to the floor. Problems with inventory. Problems with reducing things on time to minimize shrink. Problems with customer service. We're short-staffed so when something goes wrong, we have to either pay overtime on labor, or we lose money on lost work. And it goes beyond the store itself. Our warehouse pays poorly. We get pallet after pallet that's badly stacked, broken apart. We lose money on things broken in transit. We lose time having to pick up fallen-over pallets. We flat-out do not get things we order and the only way to tell is by checking inventory or invoices. Why should the poor bastards at the warehouse care? And we don't have enough truck drivers. Our dispatchers suck. Every shipment arrives late. Every dollar saved on labor has vast hidden costs. It's like chalking tile with toothpaste to save money and acting surprised when the bathroom floor rots through.
|
|
#
?
Aug 30, 2019 20:17
|
|
|
Yeah but those costs are hidden so shareholders don't care about them
|
|
#
?
Aug 30, 2019 20:40
|
|
I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
|
The company I work for isn't even publicly traded so I'm not even sure who is to blame for such stupid loving management except that it's just the norm for retail at this point.
|
|
#
?
Aug 30, 2019 22:06
|
|
|
I worked for a now-defunct chain of game and (then) software shops when it went public, and the change was drat near overnight. Don't get me wrong, the wages were shite before, but as soon as the company went public it became ridiculous goals, slashed hours, and huge pressure to push things that people didn't want. I didn't find this out until later, but apparently the district manager became *very* angry with me once because I refused to hard-sell a customer on a product that she wasn't interested in. Apparently, she told the assistant manager to fire me and he refused because I was too good of an employee and they needed me because the other senior people had left for better jobs. That was the day I promised myself that I would never own stock in anything. I'm already a bad person for participating in the capitalist system, but I refuse to compound the crime. On a similar note, a few years ago I went through a *brutal* interview process for a job in the private sector. I've worked in the public/non-profit sector for years now partly for ethical reasons, but I needed the lolly. Unfortunately, I came to the very end of this gauntlet but didn't get the job, but one of the things that attracted me to this job, apart from the work being genuinely interesting, was that the company was 100% owned by one woman. The pay seemed very good but it turned out that it was in a very high cost-of-living area, which basically ruined it. Nevertheless, I talked to a bunch of employees and they couldn't say enough about the perks, the work-life balance and so on; some of them even directly said that it was due to the company not being publicly traded. I'm starting to see a pattern. Edit: Fixed typo JustJeff88 fucked around with this message at 23:37 on Aug 30, 2019 |
|
#
?
Aug 30, 2019 23:19
|
|
|
Blut posted:Moving from getting paid $60 an hour to $40 an hour is not a race to the bottom. The latter is still an extremely livable wage - its moving from the 97th income percentile to the the 90th income percentile in the US for someone in their late 20s, like the person being quoted. When pharmacies are paying pharmacists such high wages the costs are passed onto people who can afford them even less: the working class, retired, or unemployed people who need prescription drugs. just lol if you think that cutting pharmacist wages in half would have any measurable effect on US consumer drug prices
|
|
#
?
Aug 30, 2019 23:26
|
|
|
Yeah I've seen quite a few small companies go public and they always swear up and down it won't change them but they usually get real fucky within a year, tops. It's baked into the system, you can't avoid it regardless of your intentions.
|
|
#
?
Aug 30, 2019 23:26
|
|
|
Don’t forget that once you have stock, you can issue one time dividends and stock buybacks rather than paying that out in wages or research and development. Can’t think of any major manufacturing firms this policy has bit in the rear end this year...
|
|
#
?
Aug 30, 2019 23:31
|
|
|
JustJeff88 posted:That was the day I promised myself that I would never own stock in anything. I get the sentiment but I have to ask: what exactly is your plan for retirement?
|
|
#
?
Aug 30, 2019 23:55
|
|
|
Motronic posted:I get the sentiment but I have to ask: what exactly is your plan for retirement? I am looking forward to the sweet embrace of death in the riot line myself.
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2019 00:11
|
|
|
Motronic posted:I get the sentiment but I have to ask: what exactly is your plan for retirement? He said he's had to cash out his 401k entirely for three years running just for relocation costs, so I'd bet it's not really on the radar.
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2019 00:34
|
|
|
Motronic posted:I get the sentiment but I have to ask: what exactly is your plan for retirement? The world will be dead in 30 years, things go mad max in 10 -15
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2019 00:46
|
|
|
Motronic posted:I get the sentiment but I have to ask: what exactly is your plan for retirement? I realise that this is an honest, good-faith question so I will answer in good faith as well: basically what everyone said before me, but I will not live long enough to retire even if they don't raise the pension age, like they did in my native Britain, or outright do away with social security to give it all to trillionaires. I have a retirement account with my employer, but only because they force me to put in 6% (they match 21%, but it's a long vesting period). Between a jacked up cost of living (especially housing), terrible wages, crippling debt, the ludicrous cost of US health care and no job security, I will never be able to retire and I'm not stupid enough to believe otherwise. Also, my health has gone downhill so quickly in the past year (I turned 40 in July) that I know that I will not live to see 55, maybe in 50. Right now, my goal is to survive until my mother and my beloved pets pass on, then I can die with a clear conscience. I'll still be in tons of debt, but the dead don't give a gently caress. To be fair, I actually stand to inherit a small but lovingly maintained house when my mother (71) passes, but it's in an area where I would never be able to make a living because I have a career that requires a graduate level of education and she lives in a totally blue-collar area. While free housing would be a huge load off of my financial burden, I would never find work there as I am not a long-haul trucker, nurse, or person who can work in a factory for 12 hours per day. I know that this is really grim, but it's true: I fell into the classic late-capitalism Millennial trap, and I'm just one of the millions who is totally and utterly hosed. I am thankful that I never married or had children, as I would just be a burden on them. Again, I know that this is really depressing, but you asked honestly and I responded in kind.
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2019 01:03
|
|
|
Motronic posted:I get the sentiment but I have to ask: what exactly is your plan for retirement? i'm buying lots of
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2019 01:26
|
|
|
JustJeff88 posted:Again, I know that this is really depressing, but you asked honestly and I responded in kind. No, no......I appreciate it because it was a real question. And I realize that retirement isn't really an option for a lot of people. I'm not suggesting it fixes your situation, and I actually forgot that you were the poster that had to keep chasing out their 401(k), but ignoring the opportunity to invest if it become possible for you is not healthy. This is a "don't hate the player, hate the game" scenario. It's not like responsible investing at a small scale includes thing like picking individual companies.......it's more like buying into a total stock market mutual fund (not a complete picture, just an example). QuarkJets posted:i'm buying lots of By my deeds I honour him, V8.
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2019 01:30
|
|
|
Its gonna be really grim in 30-40 years when Millenials hit retirement age and have nothing to live on
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2019 01:33
|
|
|
Mellinials are killing the coffin industry! (By selling their bodies for compost)
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2019 01:35
|
|
|
Hate to break it to you most old people NOW don’t have enough to retire on.
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2019 01:38
|
|
|
Motronic posted:I get the sentiment but I have to ask: what exactly is your plan for retirement? Come join us in the climate change thread friend 
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2019 02:02
|
|
|
Unoriginal Name posted:Its gonna be really grim in 30-40 years when Millenials hit retirement age and have nothing to live on Hopefully the boomer curse dies with them, then we have a chance of saving ourselves
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2019 02:43
|
|
|
How are u posted:Come join us in the climate change thread friend So you think that climate change will make it impossible to retire (plausible) or cheaper (implausible). I'm somewhere in the middle and would like to prepare.
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2019 04:05
|
|
|
Motronic posted:So you think that climate change will make it impossible to retire (plausible) or cheaper (implausible). The Global Financial System will no longer exist at the time at which we (millenials) are "supposed" to be able to retire. The state of the world will be as such as that "retirement", i.e. older people being able to step back and live a comfortable non-working life supported by the youth, will be a fantasy. This is a bit of derail for the Retail Collapse thread so I do genuinely encourage you to jump into the climate thread if you have questions about how the world is going to be in 30 years.
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2019 04:34
|
|
|
QuarkJets posted:i'm buying lots of Pffft look at this poseur. You don't add already rusty spikes to your war wagon, you're never going to get a good weld that way. Weld those spikes on clean and shiny, and let them develop a nice patina of rust and the blood of your enemies over time. That patina means something; you don't just start off with it.
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2019 14:11
|
|
|
Unoriginal Name posted:Its gonna be really grim in 30-40 years when Millenials hit retirement age and have nothing to live on Mate, America's got loads of boomers who are in that situation. Yes, there are a bunch of wealthy oval office boomers who vote down local .005 cent sales taxes to fund schools, but there are also many poor boomers toiling away at Starbucks and the grocery stores. If you just ignore all the shiny black Escalades, you see a country already full of this grim reality.
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2019 14:17
|
|
|
Pharohman777 posted:Wal-mart and costco are 'soulless expressions of consumerisum', sure, but they are cheap, and they are places where a small amount of money buys a lot more food than at a more local socially concious place. Costco is actually a pretty nice place to work, if you can suffer through the months-long waiting list to get hired at all. They pay fair wages, and their products maybe aren't the best but they aren't the worst, they do limit the products available to stuff people are willing to buy. All this will change instantly though, once the current CEO or whatever is out. It will rapidly become large boxes of stuff you could buy at walmart for more than reciprocal prices.
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2019 14:42
|
|
|
i am harry posted:Mate, America's got loads of boomers who are in that situation. Yes, there are a bunch of wealthy oval office boomers who vote down local .005 cent sales taxes to fund schools, but there are also many poor boomers toiling away at Starbucks and the grocery stores. If you just ignore all the shiny black Escalades, you see a country already full of this grim reality. There's a woman who comes to my store every other day. She's fifty or sixty, silver-haired but able, sweet. Nice. She has some kind of mobility issue that prevents her from walking; she powers around in her manual wheelchair, reluctant always to ask for help. When I see her cruising through my part of the store, I stop what I'm doing, and quietly tail her, waiting for the moment that she needs help. Often she wants or needs a bottle of beer, sometimes a case, and she can't reach them on her own. I follow her to spare her the awkwardness of having to go find a stranger, or so she doesn't feel like she's interrupting my work. A few days ago, I saw her, followed her, waited patiently for her to make her choice. Helped her get it, a big drat bottle of Miller Highlife. After I gave it to her, she told me she wanted a case, but she'd have to wait until tomorrow. The paycheck from her first job was late. First job? Yes. She worked two jobs. Two jobs. And she had seven dollars in her bank account. And she laughed about it. I've had people at my job, fifty, sixty year-olds, salivate over full-time retail positions opening up at the store because, in the words of one, "I'm over sixty years old and I've never had health insurance in my whole drat life." But it would be a large expense, the premiums-- she said she'd have to have a long talk with her husband about it. It's really disorienting and strange to work with people who openly joke about how they barely get by, how the butcher laughs and jokes he can only afford things in his department when they go on clearance-- and then those same people turn around and yell when they catch folk picking scraps out of the dumpsters.
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2019 15:28
|
|
|
Motronic posted:So you think that climate change will make it impossible to retire (plausible) or cheaper (implausible). I've usually been the guy in the climate thread telling people that the best way to prepare is to cut expenses and save because, really, what else can you do? I'm starting to wonder how meaningful that is lately, though. It's not just being cynical about our chances, it's that we've waited so long that we're now locked into either drastic societal change or catastrophic climate change. Either way, it's hard to imagine what the world will even look like in 30 years. I wouldn't tell anyone to stop saving for retirement, but I understand why some people who can afford to aren't really bothering.
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2019 15:40
|
|
|
The climate thread is full of underinformed people with despair brainworms. It's not a healthy place to spend any time, and I now get info about related issues elsewhere since most of the informed users were driven off by people who can't stop seeing skulls and blood whenever they blink.
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2019 15:56
|
|
|
There's something in the primal part of the human brain which draws us to stories about apocalyptic scenarios. This is why Christianity has the book of Revelations, and this is what compels people to write and read those bogus articles about how running out of resource X is going to doom industry Y. It is also is what compels D&D posters to exaggerate the effects of and to obsess over global warming. It is almost like they get a perverse thrill from the prospect of global warming.
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2019 16:14
|
|
|
silence_kit posted:There's something in the primal part of the human brain which draws us to stories about apocalyptic scenarios. This is why Christianity has the book of Revelations, and this is what compels people to write and read those bogus articles about how running out of resource X is going to doom industry Y. It also happens in the economy threads where people cheer on the Dow collapsing - the internet is a strange and silly place.
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2019 16:36
|
|
|
silence_kit posted:and this is what compels people to write and read those bogus articles about how running out of resource X is going to doom industry Y. That has happened before. For example we've fought wars over islands of bird poo poo because we were running out.. It is not a given that we will figure out a response to a particular crisis. Each (climate and capital) is an existential threat, apocalyptic in a real sense, until we pass through them. If we pass through them nbd. Until that happens they will color the interpretation of everything. There won't be any getting away from it Discendo. It's tearing down the center splitting towards the sides
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2019 16:53
|
|
|
The climate change thread is filled with misanthropes and apocalypse fetishists. It's also entirely true that sticking to even +2C warming, which was basically viewed as apocalyptically bad and unlikely a few decades ago, is going to require us to fully decarbonize in about two decades. If you disagree with some pretty mainstream stuff like the conclusions of the IPCC then I'd love to hear it, but I won't keep derailing this thread with it.
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2019 17:01
|
|
|
Discendo Vox posted:The climate thread is full of underinformed people with despair brainworms. It's not a healthy place to spend any time, and I now get info about related issues elsewhere since most of the informed users were driven off by people who can't stop seeing skulls and blood whenever they blink. So... I think one part of the issues that you're probably missing the fact that many of our social support structures are incredibly fragile and will fall over when pushed even relatively gently by nature. Case in point, how easily and quickly hospitals and the medical system were overwhelmed during Hurricane Katrina. With waters rising, evacuation plans basically non-existent and no hope in sight, doctors began euthanizing immobile patients rather than let them drown... and that was one Category 5 Hurricane in 2005. Catastrophizing is certainly bad in the sense that can cause hopelessness, but we have a number of sobering data points indicating that our society is more or less a house of cards waiting to be blown over. silence_kit posted:There's something in the primal part of the human brain which draws us to stories about apocalyptic scenarios. This is why Christianity has the book of Revelations, and this is what compels people to write and read those bogus articles about how running out of resource X is going to doom industry Y. Almost all political revolutions (including the Russian Revolution of 1917) have millinerian/end-of-the-world imagery and thought associated with them (https://tif.ssrc.org/2018/11/23/millenarianism-in-the-soviet-union-and-maoist-china/). That said, most of those revolutions occurred when supposedly ageless and infinitely stable old orders seemed to be or actually were collapsing in monumental and irrevocable ways. The collapse of feudalism in Russia did seem like the end of the world, both to the Tsarists and the Revolutionaries. There is no indication that the social collapse and revolutions which will emerge out of the collapse of say various food webs, will be or should be any less millinarian in nature. We are absolutely going to relieve the Exodus to the Promised Land, albeit in different terminology.
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2019 17:24
|
|
|
QuarkJets posted:just lol if you think that cutting pharmacist wages in half would have any measurable effect on US consumer drug prices Just switch out a few of the words and that's exactly what people have been arguing about teacher's unions and high wages being the biggest albatross around the neck of the education systems in America. It's amazing how people continue to blame workers for all the ills of the world while the folks at the top laugh all the way to the bank.
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2019 17:45
|
|
|
Pembroke Fuse posted:So... I think one part of the issues that you're probably missing the fact that many of our social support structures are incredibly fragile and will fall over when pushed even relatively gently by nature. Case in point, how easily and quickly hospitals and the medical system were overwhelmed during Hurricane Katrina. With waters rising, evacuation plans basically non-existent and no hope in sight, doctors began euthanizing immobile patients rather than let them drown... and that was one Category 5 Hurricane in 2005. Catastrophizing is certainly bad in the sense that can cause hopelessness, but we have a number of sobering data points indicating that our society is more or less a house of cards waiting to be blown over. Discendo Vox is a well-known denier who believes that 1) climate change isn't going to be so bad and 2) things will get better because technology will solve it! Don't even bother, he's been run out of climate threads for a reason. e: yeah, no joke vvvvvv (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2019 17:50
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 26, 2024 01:50 |
|
|
How are u posted:Discendo Vox is a well-known denier who believes that 1) climate change isn't going to be so bad and 2) things will get better because technology will solve it! Don't even bother, he's been run out of climate threads for a reason. We have the technology to solve climate change, we've had it for years. Nobody in charge wants to use it because it means number not go up.
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2019 18:06
|
|
