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OneEightHundred posted:B&N is planning to close a third of their stores, so they're not doing well regardless, and this is despite the fact that their biggest brick-and-mortar competitor (Borders) closed. Brick and mortar stores for a hell of a lot of goods are just dying. This is especially true of media; instead of storing it on some physical medium now you can just download it. Way easier and the thing never wears out. There are always people who will want the physical media (records are still produced for hardcore audiophiles, for example and I'm definitely one of those weirdos that would prefer a physical book to an e-reader) but even then the internet has been taking over certain things. Why buy a huge, bulky encyclopedia set when you can just look it up on Wikipedia? Literally everybody's cell phone has the entirety of Wikipedia on ready access. While there will always be a store somewhere at least moderately nearby for poo poo you need right loving now for whatever reason most goods you can wait a few days or a week for. You don't even need to physically handle the good. Plus online reviews makes it harder to peddle badly made garbage that will break too quickly. At the same time no physical store can sell everything. Amazon can. I can order a toaster, a camera, three tripods, a set of screwdrivers, an entire pallet of pickled beets, a 55 gallon drum of lube, and 87 coffee cups with a few clicks so long as I have the money. I can even do it at 3 a.m. while sitting in my apartment drunk in my underwear. I'd have to visit multiple physical stores to get those things and will have trouble finding some of them. You can buy pretty much anything on the internet no matter how ridiculous it seems. Rather than being limited to whatever the store chooses to stock you can get whatever odd thing from somebody, somewhere.
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Dec 5, 2016 04:38
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Death Bot posted:I've linked it every time this convo comes up, but there was a paper written that concluded that if Wal-Mart increased their internal minwage to 12/hr, the annual cost passed on to the average shopper was under $100. So each full time worker would make more extra in a week than the average shopper would spend extra in a year. Walmart actively avoids paying anybody at all. I worked for them a few years ago and when the recession hit they did their best to cut hours to the bone and get rid of anybody making more than ten an hour. Benefits also instantaneously became prohibitively expensive. Now they absolutely will not start new people full time. This is entirely geared toward making the Walton kids rich. They won't raise wages like that unless they're forced to. Walmart is an evil, evil company.
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Dec 5, 2016 19:49
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Does anyone remember service merchandise? I guess it existed in some form till the early 2000s but does anyone remember it in the old days? That only really did any good for large appliances people don't buy very often. That model works great for refrigerators and ovens but not much else. Sears still does that; there's one like a mile from where I live. Granted it's obviously a pillaged husk of what it used to be; the building is in poor condition, there are zero shelves or platforms to put the merchandise on, and the fixtures look like they've been there since the 60's. There's also a single row of overpriced "wholesale" clothes that was out of fashion a decade ago.
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Dec 10, 2016 19:15
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Jarmak posted:Guys you realize pretty much every furniture store ever works on this model right? It's not some sort of unique business model. That and they make easily assembled, really cheap modular furniture that's of a quality best described as "good enough."
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Dec 10, 2016 19:46
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PT6A posted:The provincial liquor stores in Alberta used to work like that before the liquor retail was privatized, I'm told. But if they organize the store badly and make you search for things you might find something else to buy. Incidentally this is why I prefer to buy stuff online as much as I can; none of that bullshit. None of the stupid psychological tricks that malls and stores use to manipulate you. Just "dear Amazon: I want these things, send them to this address kthxbai" then wait a few days for a box.
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Dec 10, 2016 20:46
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PT6A posted:And yet Amazon still does that, in a sense, by showing you items that were frequently bought with, or by the same people as, the item you're already planning on buying. And they e-mail me all the time suggesting things I might also like to buy (and indeed I do buy them sometimes). I don't object to stores wanting to sell me extra things, I object to them doing that by actively designing the shopping experience to be as long and frustrating as possible. My guess is that Amazon's product suggestions have a much higher take rate than just forcing people to wander by things they might want in a vain search to locate the thing they actually want. Kind of my point, really; like I also don't complain when Steam makes me recommendations for games I might like to play. Instead of forcing me to look at a pile of stupid bullshit I don't want it looks at the games I own and says "hey here's a similar one you might like." Then I can either buy it or not. Amazon's recommendations aren't much different. Another nice difference is that Amazon has that search bar. A brick and mortar store does not. If all I want is one specific thing I can just type it in and Amazon will be like "yup, right here, nine people are selling that thing, have some prices." There will be that line of "people who bought that also bought these" but I can just ignore it. I don't need to scour the site and go out of my way to find what I want. Brick and mortar stores are also generally run on skeleton crews these days. Finding somebody to ask about where something is can take an unreasonable amount of time. A search bar on a website knows where everything is.
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Dec 10, 2016 21:31
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Main Paineframe posted:I've heard that Wal-Mart started bumping wages up again a year or two - as it turned out, cutting labor to the bone resulted in a seriously degraded experience at stores, which was hurting their sales. We're talking "shelves bare because the store is running on a skeleton crew and the one person stocking the shelves is doing three other things and also dragging their feet because they're tired from their second job" type poo poo. I worked at a Walmart for four years and was there right around when the Great Recession hit. Yes that's basically the problem but only part of it. When I started the department I worked for was a department manager, two full time employees (I was one of them), a part time employee, and three or four people overnight. Even that wasn't quite enough so there was pretty much always an offer of overtime on the table. If I wanted or needed some extra cash I could seriously just go say "yo boss, can I have extra time?" and they'd find me poo poo to do. Benefits at the time weren't prohibitively expensive and actually decent. Yeah the pay wasn't great and retail work always sucks but it wasn't awful. Then 2008 happened. Hours were cut to the bone; anybody that made more than $10 an hour was either fired or abused into leaving. A few dozen department manager positions were condensed into like five. The department I worked for was cut to the department manager, who was heaped with other departments, me who worked 35 hours a week and absolutely no more, and two part timers overnight. There would be multiple day stretches where literally nobody was in the department. Yet management was demanding things be kept up to the same standards as before. People were constantly getting written up for not being able to do the impossible things. When I left I was a part time person that was expected to do the work of like 20 full time people. Probably more, really. The other side of it was that the people working there were absolutely demoralized. They were overworked, their pay declined every year, benefits got obscenely expensive, and they constantly got negativity from management. You'd constantly hear complaints about customers whining that nobody answers their questions, the shelves are all bare, and the store was filthy. Instead of hiring more people they just cracked the whip harder. Thankfully I was in college at the time so I could just go "don't need this loving job" and left. It just wasn't worth it anymore; I would literally have lost money by keeping my job thanks to the commuting costs and how much insurance ended up being. Insurance was the only reason I stayed. And like you said it hurt their bottom line but instead of doing the obvious thing and increasing the budget for employees and employee pay they just yelled more. I actively avoid shopping at Walmart because every single thing they've done to supposedly increase pay or treat employees better hasn't done that. They don't give you a starting wage bump for previous experience and start people as part time, $9 an hour. If you're lucky and work hard enough you might get full time after a few years. Now they're dealing with the same issues they had before. Upper management absolutely will not budge on headcounts; there are never enough people to run the store properly. The employees they do get hate their jobs, turnover is huge, and everybody has an attitude of "you don't pay me enough to care." They're making a big deal out of something they aren't actually doing. They absolutely do not want to pay decent wages. What they want is two things that are mutually exclusive. You can't run a store well on a skeleton crew paid starvation wages and also have employees that are happy to be there who take good care of customers. It's killing Walmart. Good loving riddance. The real interesting thing is that one reason Walmart was so successful was because Mr. Sam made it a point to motivate his employees by actually taking decent care of them. Some of the older people I worked with were making like $16 an hour with good benefits to do stuff on the level of cleaning the bathrooms. They obviously weren't getting wealthy off of their jobs but made enough to live comfortably. They were actually quite motivated and made it a point to do good work. There were a lot of programs put in place before the Walton children took over that new employees weren't allowed to have. You know, stuff like Christmas bonuses, short term disability, that sort of thing. The bennies have just been declining for the entire time the Walton children have been owning the company. You can really see this in the stuff that Mr. Sam said. "There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else." "The way management treats associates is exactly how the associates will treat the customers." Now Walmart's management is being tremendously lovely to their employees, who aren't being good to the customers. ToxicSlurpee fucked around with this message at 00:32 on Dec 11, 2016 |
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Dec 10, 2016 22:42
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:The more product catagories a store sells the less possible it is for the employees to have meaningful knowlage about a meaningful number of them. Even if Walmart wanted employees that knew their products as experts it wouldn't be possible. Every day too many new tvs, shirts, toys, foods would be complete coming in to even learn the names of each, let alone details or testimonies. You can do that with individual departments and Walmart used to. Then again they also used to pay decent enough wages that they could get a *thing* nerd to stick in any given department. Then again that's another complaint that I've heard from people. "Nobody at Walmart knows anything about what they sell!" well yeah Walmart doesn't want to pay for that skill so they don't get it.
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Dec 11, 2016 07:35
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It's almost as if...wait for it.. It's possible to be rural in Ohio as well as rural in Montana. I know this might sound crazy but there is no clear definition between "rural" and "not rural" while some rural locations are more remote than other rural locations. I'm from rural PA. The state has rural areas. So does Ohio. While not deep forested wilderness where the nearest gas station is 37 miles away the are still, in fact, rural. I used to live next to a cow farm.
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Dec 18, 2016 03:28
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I'm going to figure out how to move to Mars, live there alone, and be the most rural person ever.
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Dec 18, 2016 06:27
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CommieGIR posted:Didn't see it posted, but Sears is lopping off Craftsman and selling them to Black and Decker. Which is baffling because that's pretty much the only reason a hell of a lot of people ever went to Sears. Craftsman tools were really good and they'd replace them for basically ever if they broke. When Sears said "lifetime unlimited warranty" they loving meant it. Granted they were also high enough quality that you'd probably not even need that. They were the tools you bought if you wanted good tools. A few years back they axed parts of that and have been getting increasingly lovely about it. Which can't be helping their bottom line at all. That was one of their big flagship things. You ended up paying more for a Craftsman tool but it was absolutely, totally worth it. You could take that hammer back to Sears 20 years later and they'd just give you a new one. Didn't even need the receipt. Of course a vulture capitalist would look at that and go "lol, nah" only to find out that people were shopping at Sears specifically to get good tools with that warranty. Take away the quality and the warranty and...welp.
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Jan 7, 2017 17:41
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A White Guy posted:On the topic of dying retail chains, I discovered (To my utter fascination) that my rural country town has a Kmart in it. I went in out of a sense of morbid curiosity. It's like more expensive Walmart, too expensive to actually be Walmart, too lovely to be a Target. All the staff were wearing purple shirts with various cringe-inducing and canned slogans on it. I live real close to a KMart. I only really shop there because of a combination of "gently caress Walmart" (which is like 20 minutes away) and the fact that the only Target nearby is like 15 minutes away and like 50% more expensive than the KMart. I only go there for limited things; the store is dirty, the staff is indifferent and obviously an underpaid skeleton crew, and some things you buy there just aren't good quality. It's fine if I need a new mop, soap, or some Drano or something but other than that? Nope. The Target is much nicer but it's just so far out of the way and way more expensive. Busier but a lot of its business is I assume suburbanites shopping there because those people go to Walmart or KMart. It is however very amazing that KMart still exists at all. That company has been sinking for like 25 years.
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Jan 8, 2017 06:15
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Nonsense posted:Another factor, albeit circumstantial at best, killing retail is people going into stores and getting very very angry about anything made in China. Craftsman being pawned off the Sears wreck isn't that surprising, their tools haven't been worth a drat in a long time. The main thing killing retail is retail. A major move in retail as a whole was to care about the numbers this quarter above all else. Retail stores are increasingly run by badly paid skeleton crews. It made the numbers spectacular in the short term but demoralized, overburdened employees not paid enough to care just aren't motivated to help customers. If you have a question it can be impossible to find somebody who knows anything about it. Retail places used to make a point of ensuring that there was somebody somewhere who knew stuff about what was being sold. The hardware department was preferably stocked with people who knew about hardware. Somebody decided that costed too much, ditched those people, and replaced them with less experienced, less knowledgeable people who would work for less. Same went for automotive departments; you wanted to pay for a car nerd so he could actually answer peoples' questions. It's supremely frustrating to customers when you have to search for an employee for 20 minutes before finding anybody, find that nobody on that day knows anything about what you want to buy, and then stand in line for half an hour because upper management decided you needed three fewer cashiers that shift to make his numbers better. Then you find out that the stuff is frequently not in stock because the transportation chain is understaffed, it's buried in a pile of freight somewhere because there aren't enough people to unload trucks and sort freight quickly anymore, or the computer system hasn't ordered any of that for a month and nobody knows why but nobody is allowed to order it manually. Meanwhile the internet knows everything and you don't have to wait in line to buy from Amazon. No loving wonder people's shopping is increasingly Google the information -> buy from Amazon. Buying anything from an actual retail store is just a painful experience now. The interesting thing here is that Walmart has been doing this despite Sam Walton specifically saying that this isn't how you run a store if you want customers to buy things from you.
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Jan 8, 2017 06:40
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OhFunny posted:http://www.businessinsider.com/sears-failing-stores-closing-edward-lampert-bankruptcy-chances-2017-1 Guys like Lampert are fantastic for making the numbers immediately better but god awful at actually understanding how to run a good store.
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Jan 8, 2017 22:19
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Badger of Basra posted:I love this quote: Tech stocks are hot as gently caress right now and there isn't really much else that hasn't had all the blood sucked out of it. Everybody wants to buy the next Microsoft or Google which will see exponential returns. Problem is when those companies had cheap stocks they were quaint little upstarts that a lot of people never thought would get as big as they are. Microsoft especially.
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Jan 9, 2017 07:11
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OneEightHundred posted:I don't really understand what the appeal of Kmart is even supposed to be, it's like someone decided to just make a Wal-Mart clone except with prices higher than Target. It used to be you could go to K-Mart and basically it would be a discount department store. Actual department stores would have designer stuff and fancy stuff but would be a lot more expensive but not much higher in quality. Prettier, of course, as were the stores. K-Mart was the place that didn't sink lots of money into fancy decorations and making the place look and feel fancy. The stuff would generally be of non-awful quality. Some stuff was hit or miss but it wasn't cheap bargain bin garbage either. You could find name brand stuff and often the same stuff as the department stores for less. If you cared about price K-Mart was alright. You knew you weren't getting top of the line stuff and there were a ton of people who refused to shop they because they thought they were too good for K-Mart. Now a hell of a lot of what they sell is utter garbage, the stores are poorly maintained, and like you said they're basically Walmart but shittier.
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Jan 11, 2017 22:59
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OneEightHundred posted:TBF that's kind of meaningless as far as Kmart is concerned, when a store goes out of business they hire a liquidator and the liquidators just set all of the item prices to whatever they feel like, which can and very frequently does include jacking them up. There was a big kerfluffle where I'm originally from...I want to say around 2003 or so when a big liquidator company like that got slapped hard for fraud. What some companies like that would do was mark the stock up then put adverts out that said "BIG CLOSING SALE! EVERYTHING MUST GO! EVERYTHING ON SALE! BUY BUY BUY!!!" It was apparently a pretty common practice already but they got greedy and people noticed. It was stuff like something that was $10 at the Walmart literally in the next building over being $18 at the closeout "sale."
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Jan 12, 2017 04:15
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glowing-fish posted:The last few times I've been in a K-Mart it was...well, mediocre, but not terrible? Like, they had cheap stuff, it was a little disorganized, but they had at least a little bit of what I needed. I would only go to K-Mart every three months because I needed a pair of shoes, or some sweat pants or socks. Once I bought a 20 dollar digital camera there. And then while I was there I bought myself some granola bars and goldfish crackers or something. It was a perfectly mediocre retail experience, but nothing that made me feel despair. That depends on the K-Mart. Some of them are just a decaying wreck. The one near me has a parking lot that has neither been patched nor paved in what has to be 20 years and it never has more than like ten cars in it. The building it's in has a couple other storefronts in it but they're empty and abandoned. Then again it's also near a mall that used to be a big deal but now its parking lot is never more than 10% full.
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Jan 16, 2017 23:59
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:Is retail as a concept really threatened or are we just undergoing a generational shift in which stores succeed? Because I look at that list and all those stores sold shoddy, ugly garbage that people can't really be expected to want to buy anymore. They're mostly mall stores, and malls were a bad idea that's rightly fading away. Wet Seal, BCBG, and Bebe all sell teen girl clothing at an awkward price point where middle-class kids can't really afford to buy it without parental help, but it's not nice or stylish enough to attract wealthy shoppers. Forever 21 and Brandy Melville are much cheaper and trendier, and the staple clothing people used to buy at Sears and Macy's people now just by at Walmart and Target, where again it's much cheaper. The only thing that will totally kill retail is when we get Star Trek replicators that can just magic anything you want into existence. Internet shopping is hammering retail in the dick pretty hard right now but internet shopping still has its limits. Some things you generally want to touch before you buy it. Clothes come to mind; you want to make sure it fits right and doesn't look terrible so ordering it online is questionable. Chances are if you break a tool you want one right now not in 2 to 12 days so you head for the hardware store. For a lot of things (again, hardware comes to mind) it's very useful to have a bunch of people in the store that know about what you're selling and can answer you questions in person. The internet is muscling in to that territory of course.
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Feb 12, 2017 18:42
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OneEightHundred posted:Inventory optimization isn't necessarily an issue of where decisions are made, Wal-Mart has a very strong emphasis on it despite central decisionmaking. There's actually no such thing as "unskilled labor." Granted one of the biggest issues Walmart is facing is that their employees just aren't motivated. Sam Walton even said "the way you treat your employees is the way they'll treat your customers." Walmart has been becoming increasingly lovely since he died as has retail as a whole. Fast food as well. That's been a big problem in basically any industry that hires low-wage employees in America; they make so little they just plain don't care. Customer service is suffering as is that consistent shopping experience.
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Feb 21, 2017 14:17
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OneEightHundred posted:You can call the term a misnomer if you want, but the point is to drive wages and churn costs to the floor by making the positions as replaceable as possible. Sam Walton may have been too idealistic since Wal-Mart has been driving other department stores under for a while by undercutting the poo poo out of them. The model of treating employees like raw material might be immoral, but it certainly works, and I don't see it improving when the Internet is driving things even more towards self-service. That's also just a problem of increased industrialization and automation as well. Unless you have a particular set of specialized skills these days your labor just isn't nearly worth as much as machines have been doing at least part of the job for ages. The biggest pressure is that it just plain takes fewer people to run a store. It used to be inventory and ordering stock was done by hand on paper. You had a bunch of people who just counted things and wrote that poo poo down. Now a computer does it all and one person just fixes the errors.
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Feb 22, 2017 03:27
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Great Metal Jesus posted:Jesus Christ that should be illegal on a national level. What the gently caress?  is what the gently caress.We might not have worker protection but at least we have super ultra freedom.
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Feb 25, 2017 18:15
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OwlFancier posted:Well that's sort of what I mean, the EPOS corrects regularly and that enables less counting, but you still do a lot of counting. It means a lot less manual counting and a lot more automated ordering. It's a massive overall reduction in the manpower needed for bookkeeping. Instead of weekly counts and filling out order forms you just let the computer do 95% of the work and have humans fix the mistakes and shrinkage.
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Feb 27, 2017 19:11
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Enigma89 posted:Managers at Wal-Mart have more authority than corporate does when it comes to this. In the case of Walmart they find whatever price it is on the shelf right now and give you that, basically. If you have the receipt then they know how much you paid for it but if not then they have to punt. Yes this means that you have people buying something on sale, "losing" the receipt, and then returning it. In the end though the volume of returns and the money lost on the policy of "just let them return everything who even loving cares" is negligible compared to everything else. They're obviously not going to let you return a TV that you drop kicked and there are things they won't let you return but for the most part they just say "yes." It's less so now but for a long time there was a popular thing among retail to make a policy of "just say 'yes'" to drat near everything the customers wanted. Most people just want to buy their poo poo and leave so it isn't a huge deal. Aside from that their was a customer service arms race before the recession.
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Mar 24, 2017 17:35
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OhFunny posted:Gamestop will close 150 stores. Given how much everybody absolutely loathes Gamestop I'm shocked they still exist. It's like they're financially coasting entirely on midnight releases and pre-release bullshit at this point. I haven't bought a game at Gamestop in over a decade and a lot of that is because they're a tremendously lovely company to deal with. Oh you have $700 of games to trade in, including a first edition that isn't common? We'll give you $10 of store credit.
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Mar 24, 2017 23:17
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glowing-fish posted:I'm not sure why they do it that way, but I'd imagine that there's a reason that the pharmacy is in the back of the store. It's really because they want you to walk past everything else. Some people will find something they want or might think "well, while I'm here..." It's why there are clothing stores that always have jeans on sale at "barely above cost" prices but put them at the farthest end of the store. A lot of people will find something else to buy while they're there but they don't lose anything if people just buy the sale jeans.
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Mar 25, 2017 17:29
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PT6A posted:Because you don't want your brand to be associated with anything but thin, attractive people, so you just make it impossible for anyone else to wear, of course! If memory serves part of that is because the easiest body type to design clothes for is "very thin." Models tend to be very petite so everything is designed around them. Of course most women aren't model thin. Very few are. Women come in a wider variety of builds then men do and men's fashion tends to be all the same no matter what shape the man is. It's far more homogeneous; every guy probably owns about the same style of suit no matter if he's a rail thin 5'0" guy or a 7'0" tall guy who weighs 500 pounds. Same with like everything else. Jeans, t-shirts, sweaters, whatever...just make it in a size the guy can put on and he's good to go. Women's clothing is a bit more complicated. What looks good on a thin woman probably won't look good on a large woman.
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Apr 11, 2017 02:52
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Doesn't chapter 11 bankruptcy also have a history of being abused?
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Apr 23, 2017 21:20
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OneEightHundred posted:Converting a mall into residential isn't really practical, converting it into office space probably is though. Warehouses and self-storage. Where I'm originally from a place that was a small strip mall-ish thing (it was like 6 stores so I don't know if it really counts) is just storage now. Companies rent it intermittently if they need to temporarily store a K-Mart worth of poo poo for whatever reason.
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Apr 28, 2017 01:23
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It's also possible (probable, even) that he has a golden parachute that will award him an absurd amount of money if he leaves/gets fired for literally any reason before a particular date. People intent on plundering a company like that do what they can to set it up in such a way that they can't be stopped from doing it.
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May 15, 2017 09:53
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hakimashou posted:Good, he's prob losing a shitload of money as its stock tanks. If that were the only way he was profiting off the situation he wouldn't be doing it. It's easier to pillage and burn a company for a quick buck than it is to actually run a company properly.
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May 16, 2017 00:19
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Crabtree posted:How can he possibly profit from SEARS being burned into the ground? Get a dollar for every empty warehouse from Amazon? Wouldn't he get more money by keeping it as stable and effective as it can so he can just sell it for a higher price to Amazon now instead of in a begging fire-sale a few months from now? Selling assets, brands owned by Sears, etc. Selling real-estate. Sears is a pretty old company that owns a lot of things. Or did, anyway; if memory serves a lot of that stuff has been sold. He also has a holding company that controls K-Mart and Sears. The big thing to look at here is that those companies actually own a ton of exclusive things. Lampert also controls a hedge fund and those things get up to all sorts of financial fuckery and shenanigans where tanking and pillaging a company can turn a profit. Granted it's also possible that he's just plain lost his damned mind.
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May 16, 2017 01:07
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And hear I thought he was just another vulture capitalist wrecking a company to feast on the corpse.
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May 16, 2017 04:23
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Cicero posted:This is a good article, the main thing I disagree with is that I think it would be very difficult for retail incumbents to catch up, tech-wise. Yeah on the surface it sounds simple enough, Walmart has enough money so surely they can just buy/acquihire whatever they need right? But I think being competent in consumer-facing technology to the extent that Amazon/Google/Facebook/etc. are would require a massive cultural change for a company like Walmart, and even if that culture exists in, say, a startup they acquire (like Jet), usually that kind of culture gets obliterated in short order after the acquisition. Walmart is also stingy as gently caress. They'll look for a way to do tech cheaply while the most successful companies (yes I know they also have a history of trying to underpay but really to the extent of Walmart) get that you have to shower the best devs in cash or somebody else will. Walmart wants to do everything the Walmart way which doesn't work well for tech.
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May 16, 2017 07:46
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Proud Christian Mom posted:Large companies love to poo poo all over small vendors/suppliers because they can. If theyre your largest customer, and they know it, you really can't say no if they decide to start paying you 180 days out. That one is probably because even the worst manager understands that you never, ever under any circumstances come between a worker and coffee.
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May 25, 2017 19:55
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blowfish posted:Of course. THE PROCESS got developed (ie approved and taken credit for) by someone much higher ranking and better paid than you. Duh. Ironclad PROCESSES that you can never, ever violate mostly just create a lose/lose scenario for employees often. If you violate THE PROCESS then you defied a DIRECT ORDER from your superiors. You are insubordinate and you are fired. If you anger a customer while following THE PROCESS then you angered a customer and are a lovely employee because you're supposed to make the customers happy. You lost the company money and are fired. It isn't a matter of IF you violate company policy but WHEN. Granted I also worked at Walmart for too many years. You'd constantly get conflicting instructions between your immediate managers, their managers, and written company policy. Meanwhile you weren't payed enough to care. No matter what you did you were wrong so you just picked whichever option was easiest at the moment and accepted that you'd eventually get written up for some totally unrelated, bullshit reason anyway just coincidentally near review time when you got your raise. It was literally impossible to be a good enough employee to get the biggest raise which was like 50 cents an hour.
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May 26, 2017 00:35
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BrandorKP posted:The historical average rate of change per year for productivity has been about 3 percent. Since the financial crises it has been stuck at around 1.5 percent. There doesn't seem to be a consensus as to why and it has a bunch of harmful repercussions. This is normally seen a a seperate problem from the decoupling of producivity growth from wage growth, which is also a big problem. What if the latter is contributing to the former? It is a contributing factor, actually. One of the major issues is that companies don't want to expand productivity as much because the demand just isn't there to justify it. This is why you see so many companies desperately scrambling to figure out how to sell things to millenials but millenials are just going  "I'd love to buy your stuff but I'm loving broke. Sorry."
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May 27, 2017 01:37
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It also relies heavily on people being able to afford $300 pants in the first place. With the middle class evaporating and anybody entering it having a high likelihood of crippling student debt that will be a problem.
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May 30, 2017 18:48
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:Aaaaaaaaaaaaa I'm going to guess by existing. Spam mail has just gotten ridiculous in the past few years. I've been occasionally getting spam about horrendously overpriced makeup and jewelry for bored upper middle class white women. I am not a woman, do not live with a woman, and do not have a girlfriend or wife.
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May 31, 2017 23:58
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Bird in a Blender posted:Article says that Wal-Mart will pay for the delivery, including OT if necessary. Of course it's "voluntary", but I'm sure it will be not seen as voluntary by store managers. Walmart won't pay overtime. They used to before the Great Recession but afterwards they cut hours to the bone and would seriously fire people for being a few minutes over their scheduled hours. Overtime was absolutely verboten.
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Jun 2, 2017 18:04
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