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hobbesmaster posted:If you do something on the job it's the employer's problem. Because  companies find ways to weasel out of it.
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Jun 2, 2017 19:59
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ReidRansom posted:I don't see them providing portable terminals to the employees doing deliveries on their way home, though. I suppose you could ask they use some sort of app on their phones, provided they have one that is capable of such a thing and should that app be developed, but in that case would they be subsidizing those employees' phone bills? And of course what if the customer isn't home to sign for the package? You can't expect they'll always be there. It just sounds like something that isn't very well thought through. There are a whole mess of issues there that postal services and other parcel delivery services have been through and sorted out and honed, and the only way Walmart is going to be able to do it themselves at a lower cost id probably by cutting those corners and ignoring the regulations and responsibilities that those industries deal with. Walmart is a disgusting company and I really wouldn't be surprised if they did everything in their power to get around that sort of thing.
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Jun 2, 2017 21:28
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It's interesting because it turns out to be counterproductive. American employees in a lot of industries are miserable and not as productive as they could be. Burnout and a lack of motivation are real problems. Unhappy people just plain don't work as hard. Not enough rest does awful things to people and the stress of making less than a living wage wrecks people. Unhealthy employees who can't see a doctor also don't exactly produce good work.
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Jun 8, 2017 17:55
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Xae posted:Churn and Burn. 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.
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Jun 8, 2017 19:14
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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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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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Baronjutter posted:This is why I like shopping in a proper "actual city" because it becomes a relaxing social experience. The walk between the stores is the fun part, being outdoors, running into people I know, interacting with other humans, looking at pretty buildings, looking at pretty views, just generally seeing things and my senses being stimulated. In a fully enclosed mall everything looks the same, everything is tightly controlled, no windows, everyone is there just to shop. It feels like a stifling oppressive environment and all I want to do is run and escape. In fact when I know my mall shopping is done and I'm trying to get out I almost have a feeling of panic as I try to find the way out because it all looks the same, all the shops are the same, there's no landmarks, no sun or mountains or sea to orient yourself. Then we you do get out you're greeted by a new hell, the mall parking lot. In the city, shopping is just incidental to enjoying your time walking around. It's a place I want to be that also happens to have shops I can buy things at but I'm quite happy to be there even if shopping is not on the agenda. Malls are specifically designed to make hours melt away and have the exits be as low key as possible. Obviously they require exit signs by law but any way out of the mall is meant to be far less attention grabbing than the stores. Of course they're unnerving and make you feel trapped; they're designed to trap you psychologically. That's why there are no ways to see outside in a lot of (most, I think?) malls and no clocks. You aren't meant to know what time it is. You aren't meant to do anything other than look at the stuff. They're built to get you to spend as much as possible while you're there. This is also why there's long stretches of stores between actual exits and why the exits can be a pain to find; you're meant to see a bunch of other poo poo you might want when you're going absolutely anywhere. Malls use a lot of horrifying psychological tricks to gently caress with your brain. There are people whose job is literally "figure out how to get people to spend more at the mall" and they don't care about how terrible the tactics actually are. There is money to be made and they must have it. Malls are overwhelming as well simply because there's just so much marketing noise. If one store has the brightest sign in the mall then suddenly another store has to have a brighter one. Each store is trying to get your attention more than the others so they'll all be visually shouting over each other. This is another reason why they can be unnerving; they're just plain overwhelming with the amount of information and visual noise being plastered everywhere. So there you are, stuck in this cage, not entirely sure exactly which way is the right way out while a thousand marketing experts are screaming at you "BUY! BUY OUR STUFF! YOU CAN'T BE HAPPY WITHOUT OUR STUFF! BUY IT NOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWW!!!!" Meanwhile the advertisements have awful content as well. You're too fat so buy this pill to make you thinner. You're too ugly so buy this makeup to make you prettier. Your breath is too stinky so buy this toothpaste to make it smell nicer. Your clothes are too out of fashion and everybody thinks you're a tool. Buy our clothes so you can be fashionable and likeable. Nobody will want to gently caress you if your shoes are too old so buy new ones. Nobody will know if you're a member of the right sports tribe so buy this $300 jersey to let people know you're in the tribe. If you don't own a $1,000 handbag people will think you're poor and shun you. Lucky for you we have racks and racks of them. You can't be cool unless you have a guitar and $500 shades. Luckily we have both! But you're never good enough. You can't be good enough to an advertisement. There's always somebody prettier than you or somebody that has something more expensive. They are better than you so come to our store and one-up them. It's everything wrong with America surrounded with steel and concrete. ToxicSlurpee fucked around with this message at 00:14 on Jun 14, 2017 |
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Jun 14, 2017 00:12
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Peachfart posted:Saying that TB is angry all the time doesn't mean she is a bad poster. She is a good poster(imo), but she does get really really mad for almost no reason. TB posts more good than bad but holy hell does she need to learn that sometimes you just need to let go and stop posting about a thing.
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Jun 14, 2017 05:20
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dont even fink about it posted:1-2 days, even. They rarely even have more than one or two pairs of any size like 12 or so. I'm a 6' tall guy with long legs, big feet, and a slender frame. It's so god damned hard for me to buy clothes. But yeah I can go on the interblag and say "dear Amazon; I want some Dickies pants of this exact size tia" and they'll have like however many I want delivered right to my front door so long as I can afford them. 5,000 pairs of pants in some bizarre size? The internet will hook me right the gently caress up. A traditional clothing store will just plain have zero pants my size about half the time I go to one and it's just gotten worse over the years. 10 years ago sometimes they'd be out but I could usually get a pair or two. Now? Total crapshoot.
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Jun 14, 2017 22:47
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Cicero posted:I've read these stats before too, but IIRC Japanese bigcorps have people working a LOT of hours off the books. I can only speak for larger companies but it's well-known that salarymen work like crazy. If memory serves a lot of those "working" hours aren't actually working in Japan which is I think where the fewer hours comes in. Salarymen are expected to be seen at the office for some crazy hours but don't always have things to do. It's bad manners to leave before your boss but if you have nothing needing doing you can just like sit at your desk and play Quake for all anybody cares. I could be horribly wrong about that.
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Jun 14, 2017 23:25
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Baronjutter posted:Good staff make all the difference for me. There's a department store I go to for most of my clothes shopping because the head of the men's department is this very, well, he's an extremely fussy grumpy middle aged dude with strong opinions on clothing (and everything) and he makes shopping a treat and I know I can trust his advice, both on how things fit and if they are good deals and when sales are coming up. He knows his poo poo so it makes shopping easy and fun. If he isn't working that day or is busy helping other people, I just keep walking and try again another day. Experts cost more money than Random Teenager Making $7.50 an Hour #912,602 and that's all certain people high up on the chain see. Stores used to actually do just that for exactly that reason; there are certain stores that still do but overall the response has been "we can get the job done cheaper." But then you get somebody who knows little about hardware going to the hardware store and not being sure what they need because nobody there knows anything. It's a frustrating experience but even that is being wrecked by the internet as you can just get on Forum about *Thing*, get your question about *Thing* answered, then order what you need on Amazon without going anywhere.
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Jun 15, 2017 00:00
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wateroverfire posted:In some cases they overlook it because expats are a separate and exotic species whose ways are not like those of civilized folk and in other cases they make them get in line or get fired, I imagine. I'm pretty sure that having an American on staff is a status symbol so you just let the American do his thing and brag about having one at all.
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Jun 15, 2017 22:12
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:I was a Lens Crafters consumer between 2002 and 2014 and I can tell you they suck. I don't hate you, I don't necessarily want you to lose your specific job, but there's no reason my poor eyesight should cause me to be gouged. If instead of not seeing well, I was constantly spewing feces out of my eyes, I wouldn't want some assholes giving me disingenuous arguments about how amazing their eye poo poo funnels were and how nobody would notice my constantly spewing eyes if only I bought their brand. There's one company that controls like 75% or so of glasses business in the entire world. Yes that includes sunglasses. It looks like different companies but they own like all of them.
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Jun 16, 2017 05:31
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NerdyMcNerdNerd posted:I"m a boring shut-in and even I think that a good waitress or clerk or whatever is part of the experience. The future sucks. Automation isn't what's killing off having a good waitress. Being a good server is pretty drat hard work and takes a hard worker to actually do it and chances are you do it because of the tips. You can make decent money in the right place if you're good at the job. All the restaurant world sees is that the minimum wage is $2.83/hour so they've been heaping more and more side work on the waitstaff. They're required to make up the difference if you end up at less than minimum wage but that'd doesn't really matter; if you make any tips at all they're paying you less than the actual minimum wage for anybody else. Which points to the core of the problem; it isn't automation killing the well being of bottom rung workers by eliminating their jobs. That'll be happening no matter what because humanity is ultimately lazy and wants easier ways to do things; hence machines. The problem is that the decisions on what to do with automation generally lie in the hands of people with lots and lots of money. All they can see is "make our expenses smaller" without regard to any human suffering that can cause.
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Jun 19, 2017 00:15
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Xaris posted:I don't disagree, but I think it's worth pointing that in states here like California you are required to be paid minimum wage no matter how much you make tips, this can range from $10 - $15 in the bay area (then theres a whole shitshow discussion to be had about CoL here of course which is insane but that's a tangential issue). And I think most people here tip pretty decently from my experience so you can pull some pretty decent money and if you're splitting an apartment with other people or living at home you can do decently well, still will have no retirement prolly working till you die and won't make huge savings but that's most of america already including myself. Most people are average tippers more or less wherever you go. Making money serving is really about quantity rather than quality; being able to skillfully handle more tables at once means more money. If you give good service to them all you'll get the same percentage of lovely/average/good tips but a bigger volume. More volume is more money. Plus the very good at the job can go beyond working at cheaper places and up to classier joints which means more cash. Bar tending is similar; actually a difficult job but you can do way better than minimum wage if you're good at it. The problem isn't letting places pay tipped workers less than a regular minimum wage; it's places forcing those employees to do poo poo that non-tipped employees should be doing. Well that and minimum wages in America being absolute garbage overall. People that excel at those jobs are generally people who work very hard and aren't satisfied with lovely wages; they're leaving those jobs for other careers. Which is a shame; some people actually just love the havoc of food service and hate getting up before noon.
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Jun 19, 2017 01:45
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DC Murderverse posted:You're not entirely wrong about this particular aspect, but "The Industry" is definitely responsible for you not being paid enough and the general lack of respect for retail/service workers because if no one respects them, then they don't have to be paid very much. lovely people are going to be lovely but they'll be shittier to people who they don't respect, and to whom they feel they can be lovely, and the company has a vested interest in keeping respect level low so you have idiots out there against a minimum wage increase because "people who work at McDonalds don't deserve more money". If we treated working in the service industry as a normal goddamn job like a plumber or a miner or a factory worker, there would be less assholes in general (though definitely not none, and because of the customer facing nature of the service industry there would still be plenty of assholes, like you said). It also doesn't help that we've trained American consumers to act like horrible jerks because it gets them free stuff. If you complain enough you'll get a discount, something free, or whatever. I can't tell you the number of times back when I worked in a restaurant that people would come in, eat every bite of food, tell the people at the table how good it was, then complain at the register to get it comped or get sent home with a free pie. Granted a lot of it is just the societal stuff mentioned; retail folks are beneath everybody else. Of course the bottom rung people are also the "face" of the store, as it were; if anything at all goes wrong the rank-and-file folks are the first to hear about it. Retail stores themselves have been increasingly lovely to the customers and as the saying goes...poo poo rolls downhill. It isn't the cashiers' fault that Walmart is running on a skeleton crew. It isn't an individual cashier's fault if Walmart has 16 lanes, two of them are open, and there are 2,000 customers in the store but guess who hears about it?
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Jun 19, 2017 06:10
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Raldikuk posted:I find that politely informing them that it is wrong usually does the trick and is the key to a lot of things. Just don't be an rear end. Depending on the severity of the screw-up they'll probably comp something too without asking. You're far more likely to get something free from the manager if you throw a tantrum. My experience was that upper middle class white people were the absolute worst demographic for that; they were very frequently whiny, entitled babies. If the slightest thing was wrong (they'd invent something if they had to) they'd complain to high heaven until they got something/everything free. Cranky people of any other demographic were just that; cranky. Give them their dinner and leave them in peace; that's all they wanted. Broke people were far more often the nicest and most patient. Either that or they were rabid white trash who would try to convince you that they can totally order two tiny adult dinners then get a poo poo load of kids' meals free. Yes, all 8 of them are totally under age 5 and it's reasonable to expect 10 meals for $15.
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Jun 20, 2017 00:25
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Just be born rich then you can just steal the whole loving company and what can they do to you then?
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Jun 20, 2017 01:04
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:Yeah, I'm certainly not immune to marketing or consumerism, but I think I'm pretty typical for my generation in wanting a small amount of expensive poo poo over a large amount of cheap poo poo. 20 years ago my bathroom cabinet might have been full of Bath & Bodyworks' whole range of cloyingly scented and luridly colored goops, but as a millennial I instead have about half a dozen grooming products, each exhaustively researched online. It's about having The Very Best thing, which might be a three-dollar tube of drugstore moisturizer or a forty-dollar hair styling cream from Sephora. There's a lot of poo poo coming together and that's part of it; advertising and marketing run on "you need more stuff. Always. No amount of stuff is ever enough" but now that people are seeing the problems that come with affluenza and stuffitis they're going "...but WHY?" With wages stagnating, credit being harder to get, and things like student debt or old boomer debt looming over everything people are getting more frugal. Somebody making $25,000 a year while paying of student debts has a real drat hard time engaging in conspicuous consumption. Even people that are making decent money aren't bothering with it. People are also jumping jobs and moving around the country far more. You generally can't just get the job, buy the house, and maybe move once more in your 40 year career then leave the house to your kids and retire. Now you'll probably change jobs at least twice a decade, especially if you're in tech. Loans are harder to get so fewer people are buying. More and more people also don't even want to get nailed down like that and having more stuff means moving more stuff. Advertising and marketing have also become absolutely loving obnoxious. The strategy of "make a garbage product -> wrap it up pretty -> aggressive marketing -> profit" doesn't work anymore thanks to the internet. American capitalism isn't sustainable and we're seeing it all fall apart right now. This idea of "higher prices, cheaper costs, more consumption, and bigger margins than last quarter, every quarter" absolutely can't last forever. Retail is seeing that; it turns out when you deliberately impoverish your employees and the people that make your stuff they can't go buy it and they're the ones you need to be buying. Americans are increasingly loving broke. Even people who normally would go out and buy 500 varieties of soap just plain can't afford it. Plus what you're saying there; people are wising up to the bullshit and you can find out if a product is garbage or not through your phone while you're standing in the store looking at it. Coupled with online shopping making it so you can safely order your soap at 2 a.m. in your underwear while so drunk you can't stand up retail stores are hosed. The whole system, top to bottom, is falling apart while the shareholders are asking the wrong questions.
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Jun 22, 2017 00:08
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:Yeah a good example of that is with movies - first capitalism's usual bullshit turned opening weekend box office into the be-all-end-all of a movie's success, and then whoops, smartphones came out and people started posting reviews of lovely movies before they even left the theater, so you couldn't even guarantee a decent Friday night take for a bad film if it got a midnight Thursday release. Instead of learning the lesson "maybe we should stop making lovely movies," studios instead shifted to targeting consumers they think they can still fool, in the foreign markets. What the entertainment industry has been doing is focusing on anything safe. They're avoiding making as much garbage but they're not taking the kinds of risks that need to be taken to make truly great things either. They have some formulas and are sticking to them; this is also why so many garbage nostalgia cash ins or comic book movies are coming out. An action movie with a whole lot of explosions and some favorite comic book characters getting in fights is basically guaranteed to make money so expect to see a thousand of them come out every year. It's fine that that gets made and a lot of people obviously like that but they're ignoring everybody that doesn't. They're wondering why another Citizen Kane hasn't happened when it's really their own damned fault. This is also a major component in why mainstream music is failing to evolve. Every decade up until the 90's had its defining genres. Now it's primarily stuff that all sounds about the same; simple, catchy, sugary pop music. Now, I'm not going to say that it's wrong to enjoy that; people can listen to what they want. The thing of it is that catchy, simple pop music isn't the only thing that exists but it's the safe thing so it gets the focus. Nobody is going to take a risk on a Pink Floyd, a Tool, or a Primus these days. Xae posted:I'm really hesitant to blame everything on advertising because it just absolve the populace at large. There is plenty of failed products that had huge advertising behind them. And it isn't like ads are mind control. People still took time out of their busy lives to plop down their hard earned cash to buy something. They wanted it. I'm not blaming advertising. Not by itself; it's just part of a whole. I'm not blaming any one, singular thing either. It's a great many things coming together. The whole system was just plain unsustainable. Now it's imploding. Meanwhile the shareholders are demanding value and putting enormous pressure on adverts and marketing to SELL SELL SELL!!!!! Millenials aren't buy figure out what they want! Find marketing that works on them! loving none of it does because millenials are broke. ToxicSlurpee fucked around with this message at 01:20 on Jun 22, 2017 |
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Jun 22, 2017 01:16
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Craptacular! posted:As far as Coca-Cola and fast food, those brands are already in some insular foreign cultures. Japan's KFCs are widely known for their ridiculous statues of Colonel Sanders. Foreigners probably don't consume as much as we do, but they aren't supremely more health-conscious than we are. Part of the reason we're so fat compared to people of many advanced cultures is that a lot of them are still smoking like it's the 80s. Over the past few generations many people in the US have quit, and as any woman who quit smoking can tell you it's difficult to do so in part because you're going to get fatter when you stop. A relative of mine basically thought the risk of lung cancer was worth keeping pounds off. There's a bunch of major differences between how America eats and how the rest of the world eats. Americans are just loving gluttonous and sedentary. A KFC existing in Tokyo doesn't necessarily mean that people are eating there multiple times a day or even per week. In America we just shovel more and more calories in our fat, corn-fed faces all day. The super heavy corn subsidies do a lot of that; corn has a lot of calories but not much else while our food just gets stuffed with more and more corn derivatives. America just plain being a culture of absurd gluttony is also a major issue. Craptacular! posted:You're attributing too much to smartphones here. Roger Ebert used to exist with reviews of movies the morning they opened, because he saw it a couple days before you could. I have to put forth effort to leaf through a newspaper and find the review. I might even just plain gloss over it. I might check the paper for that column; I might not. That column also didn't appear in every newspaper and not every movie was reviewed. I'm sure as hell not guaranteed to read the whole paper every day and I don't have my paper with me at all times. When Charlie texts me and says "Hey bruh, I just saw [that new movie] and it was total poo poo. Don't bother." that gets my attention immediately. I have my phone with me at all times. If everybody I know says "movie bad" I'm not going to go out to see it. Hell most people I knew that got newspapers didn't even open them every day. Cell phones are a whoooooooooole different ballgame. Plus chances are every movie that got released by a major studio had at least some good reviews. The other thing the internet created was review aggregation; when half the critics and 90% of the moviegoers rated a movie as absolute garbage you can be pretty assured it's probably bad. Rotten Tomatoes didn't exist in the 80's. Chances are, by the time I go to see a movie, I might have forgotten the review I read in the paper. If ten people tell me a movie is poo poo, well...
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Jun 22, 2017 01:39
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axeil posted:I can't explain it, but these videos are possibly one of the saddest things I've ever seen on YouTube. Because of all the broken, shattered hopes and dreams piled on top of the wasted effort. Building a mall takes a poo poo load of effort and the skills of a lot of people. Somebody, somewhere lovingly designed the building and somebody else put great care into the decorations. Then it turned out to be a horrendous waste of money and effort. That mall has ended careers and ruined lives, guaranteed. It's a huge, empty building in a nation with massive homelessness problems. That one in particular is near Pittsburgh; instead of building something productive somebody decided "hey let's build a huge loving mall in the middle of the rust belt!!!" It's seriously exactly the opposite of "helping." It's a shining beacon of everything wrong with America. $200,000,000 could probably have ended homelessness in Pittsburgh and/or put a big, fat dent in the unemployment. It could have cleaned up a gently caress load of problems but nah that's not useful, let's build a mall. I doubt people will be fetishizing retail work like coal gets. Like was already mentioned there are a poo poo load of coal families that have been doing it for centuries but the other side of it is that retail as we know it just doesn't have as long of a tradition. American culture also fetishizes manly work done by manly men; retail is not that. Coal however is CONQUERING THE EARTH! We are DIGGING OUT ITS RESOURCES!!!! YEEEAAAAAAHHHHHH! That is done by manly men with beards and huge arms and pickaxes!!! ...except that it isn't anymore. Machines do it now.
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Jun 24, 2017 04:49
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DC Murderverse posted:Researching the (shamefully true) story of Hobby Lobby's barcode hatred, I foundthis story about the magical $90 throw pillows that live in clearance sections of Hobby Lobbies across the country. Stores have been doing shenanigans like that for as long as stores have existed, really. As terrible as Hobby Lobby is that isn't unique to them. There are entire chains of stores that do things like sell their jeans at cost but put them aaaaaaaall the way in the back so you have to walk past literally everything else to get there. That or "EVERYTHING MUST GO!!!! UP TO 90% OFF!!!!!" but they only have one thing that was 90% off and they just happened to not have it in stock and oh you'll get an average of 5% off on everything else in the store and we just happened to raise all our prices the day before the sale went on. It's all just a total amazing coincidence!!!
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Jul 6, 2017 03:58
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OneEightHundred posted:Eh, a lot of places will gently caress up orders pretty regularly if it's a repetitive chain-type place that keeps making the same thing over and over and you throw them a curveball. Food service employees are generally probably not paid enough to care. I can't really blame them for not caring; food service can really suck and the pay is dreadful. They're also probably understaffed because proper staffing makes the profit margin smaller and why bother hiring ten people when you can force seven to do the job in full panic mode all day every day? That being said there was a Wendy's I just plain quit going to in college because apparently "no tomatoes, no mayonnaise" was too complicated. I can just pull the tomatoes off but you can't do that with mayonnaise and I hate mayo. They had like a 50% success rate of getting that order right. Now I live near one that has yet to gently caress it up. Really a lot of it is just more typical American cost-cutting; if you pay absolute beans then good employees probably won't stick around long. You'll also get a lot of shithead teenagers just working for cigarette, car, and/or beer money who aren't quite properly equipped in the brain to handle the consequences of their actions. When most of the people saying "I have a food allergy" actually don't it makes it extra lovely because then they're assuming everybody that says that is lying.
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Dec 31, 2017 08:27
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SpaceCadetBob posted:As someone whose wife is actually celiac I can say we never go to restaurants that are cuisine specific like pizza or pasta shops even if they do have gluten free marked on like one or two items. We know that if prepping gluten free food isn’t an every day thing then its going to be a pita for the cooks and probably risky for my wife. Food allergies in general just suck. Well I guess celiac isn't really an allergy but still...an old gaming buddy of mine had celiac and it's a horrible pain finding places he can eat. I have a severe shellfish allergy that can make me die and cross contamination is a thing. All seafood gives me issues. But yeah...I know what my allergies are and avoid places that serve lots of the things I'm allergic to. It can be difficult to impossible for the kitchen to accommodate extreme food issues if they specialize in what the thing is so I just don't go to those places. I've never seen the inside of a Red Lobster and never will because hey it's right in the drat name. Places that specialize in seafood or serve lots of it I just avoid. One of the other snags is that the kitchen in a restaurant is pretty fast-paced and it's just plain difficult to handle too special of a set of instructions. Because food is constantly splashing around it's extremely difficult to promise a total lack of contamination and for those of us that small levels of contamination can harm it's best to just avoid it. Kind of like how a good way to avoid being mauled by a bear is never being close enough to a bear in the first place. I worked in a restaurant for five years and it really is baffling how often people would claim fake food allergies. I saw at least a dozen times somebody come in and order spaghetti or chicken parm only to say they didn't want the garlic toast "because they were celiac" so could they substitute something else? People claiming fake allergies is terrible because it can really become a boy who cried wolf scenario. Eventually the kitchen starts saying "yeah whatever they're probably lying." It's fine if people want to have gluten-free options if they have no real problem with gluten but could they at least be honest about it? It's perfectly fine to say "I don't have celiac but don't want gluten."
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Dec 31, 2017 23:46
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Neon Noodle posted:Because of merger activity and a total lack of antitrust enforcement, the global market is a winner-take-all game now. If you pick the right player, you stand to gain not only some of the market but all of it. That and the Republican tax plan has a huge reduction in corporate taxes so basically every company that isn't currently a cindered husk of its former, burning down self (i.e., Sears) is probably doing well on the stock market. Walmart is also an enormous company with a lot of inertia that probably won't go away any time soon. With Republicans in power expect something somewhere between "nothing" and "gently caress all" to happen about all the stupid bullshit corporations get up to. The stock market has been blasting upward ever since Trump won. Plus with all of the buyouts and whatever if you buy a stock, it goes up, then another company buys the company to gobble it up that can be a decent payout. Of course that won't do much good if Amazon and pals successfully eat all of the retail sales or the economy getting increasingly lovely for the non-right makes the pitchforks and torches come out. We shall see.
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Jan 4, 2018 02:11
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xrunner posted:Some dead guy who was really rich. Sadly wasn't able to figure out how to take it with him so we're stuck dealing with the assholes he left it to. From what I've heard Sam Walton was actually a pretty good guy that treated his employees well, which was part of what led to the success of Walmart in the first place. His children are the greedy assholes that only care about Walmart as a faucet that dispenses money. Sam died in 1992 so his children have had a LOT of time to gently caress things up. I worked at Walmart for a while and basically everybody there that had worked for Walmart when he was still alive just oozed respect for the guy. It was very possible to end up where you'd be getting good benefits and like $16 an hour just to mop floors and clean toilets. There were ways employee could earn free shares of stock and such if they did good work. His children were the ones that said "lol gently caress that let's pay slavery wages." This of course led to the employees giving fewer shits. Turns out, surprise surprise, people aren't motivated to do good work when they're stressed about keeping their rent paid and going hungry sometimes.
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Jan 12, 2018 00:40
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Donald J Trump posted:legit thanks for the earnest responses to my shitpost, i know nothing about big american chains and turns out sam walton is surprisingly interesting Definitely read about Mr. Sam and the stuff he wrote; he insisted that Walmart employees - all of them - top to bottom - call him "Sam." No title, no last name; just Sam. There are a bunch of stories about him visiting a store, the call going out that a truck came in so people should go help unload it, and him grabbing a jack to help out. He said things like "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." and "The way management treats associates is exactly how the associates will treat the customers." When I worked there there were posters with Sam Walton quotes just kind of everywhere in the back. Very mysteriously that second one vanished off the wall during my time there.
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Jan 12, 2018 02:16
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Baronjutter posted:If he was such a good dude he should have given the company to the workers who made him rich to run as a huge co-op or something rather than his horrible poo poo head kids. I never said he was a perfect saint, now did I? As far as rich, corporate capitalists go he was alright but he still was a rich, corporate capitalist.
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Jan 12, 2018 03:29
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BrandorKP posted:It also illustrates how loving wrong they are! All the investment class knows is "I want more right now." All that matters is this quarter's profits and this quarter's dividends. Playing the long game has become utterly meaningless in the face of MBA graduates that can squeeze the numbers, cut the benefits, and make the profit margin bigger this quarter. In the long run it does horrible things but who cares? By then I can pass the blame onto the employees! We cut benefits 25% and made a lot of profit, that's awesome! Oh, the employees are now less productive and our best people quit? It isn't my fault; I'm not doing their job. It's their fault for being a bunch of lazy ingrates that don't kiss my feet enough. I'm eliminating the budget for raises this year, that'll lead to more profit this quarter.
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Jan 12, 2018 23:31
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there wolf posted:The shipping side of Walmart has always been a pretty good gig. When my uncle drove trucks that was his dream job the way retail people dream of Costco. Walmart's dominance was in how good their supply chain was, how quickly and efficiently they could keep the shelves stocked; paying their drivers and warehouse workers well to make sure shipments were correct and on time was a big part of it. They then used that dominance to start bleeding their suppliers and actual stores dry. The only reason Walmart treats truckers well is because they need to. Last I heard there's just always a shortage of truckers across America and bad truck drivers ultimately cost you money when they inevitably crash. If you pay well to get the non-crashy drivers then they cost you less. I remember we'd always be reading about how awesome it was that they had drivers with over a million accident-free miles. Trust me, soon as Walmart finds a way to cut that cost your uncle is turbo hosed. They cut every single thing they possibly can as soon as they can.
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Jan 23, 2018 00:06
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dont even fink about it posted:I have an Amazon Basics surge protector, mouse, office chair, cat carrier, ethernet cable, backpack, and HDMI cable, accumulated over about two years. They are all fine-to-great--stuff in the "it doesn't need to be expensive, it just needs to work every time" range. It's stuff like this that cut into those lovely practices of selling HDMI cables to old people at a 600% markup. All of these things cost half or less of what they would cost anywhere else. The first Amazon Basics thing I bought was the mouse I'm using right now. It's a simple, black mouse with no frills. It's just a mouse. It has two buttons and a scroll wheel. Nothing fancy. I'm liking it a lot. It's one of the more comfortable mice I've had and it isn't trying to be flashy. It works very well and was cheap as gently caress. The main reason I bought it was I got sick of wading through all the ones that tried to be super amazing awesome mice but also cost way more than I wanted to spend on a mouse. That description really fits. It won't win awards and doesn't have a pro gamer promoting it but I don't care. I want a sturdy mouse that works. That's it. Amazon delivered that and I didn't even have to put on pants to buy it. One of the biggest issues with retail is that they're trying to pass off cheap, flashy garbage that breaks quickly as fancy top of the line stuff. Everything has to be luxury this and celebrity preferred that. They focus on the marketing and the package instead of the product while cutting the costs of the product to the bone. It's easy to find pretty but shoddily made garbage but difficult to find things that will last. Guess I'm an odd duck in America in that I don't want flashy things with 500 buttons. My toaster doesn't need to be a $500 thing with 40 buttons and precise temperature control. It doesn't need electronics at all. It needs a plug, the thing you push down, the dial, and heating coils. I put bread in it and it toasts it. That's it. That's all it needs to do. My coffee maker has a switch and nothing else. Not even a clock. I put the coffee grounds and some water in, I flip the switch, and coffee comes out. That's all that needs to happen. ToxicSlurpee fucked around with this message at 09:24 on Jan 23, 2018 |
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Jan 23, 2018 09:20
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Crow Jane posted:In my experience (I only worked at independent places, can't speak for corporate or chain joints), restaurant and bar owners, whether in a cynical way or not, tend to really push the "we're a family here!" thing. Which... some families are better than others. I ended up getting guilted into doing a lot of poo poo that was absolutely not worth doing for $2.75/hr+tips, either because I really liked, or was really afraid of, the boss that was asking. Chains can do that pretty heavily too. Food service in general runs on paying as little as possible so you bet your rear end every restaurant ever is trying to push as much work onto the servers as possible. You can hire three servers for the price of somebody else and only need to make up the difference if they end up with less than regular with their tips. If they make any tips at all the restaurant still ends up paying less than minimum. This is also why they tend to have an expectation that salaried management types will work insane hours and have no life outside the store. McDonald's in particular was notorious for this as they'd make everybody an assistant manager, salary them at $25,000 a year, and then expect 80 hour weeks. Outside of that I met people that loved working for restaurants but left the industry because once they made management they'd do the math and realize their hourly was under minimum because of how many hours they had to pull. From what I've heard swankier places that want the best people working there aren't as bad but that isn't the majority of food service.
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Jan 27, 2018 05:11
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RandomPauI posted:For a moment I got this mixed up with the coldwar thread which talked about a different form of tracking. The Strata Fitbit stuff. A lot of this is uncharted territory and there's an entire profession dedicated to exploring it and deciding "OK we have all this data now what the gently caress do we do with it?" Hilariously one of the questions they're trying to get an answer to is "how do we get millenials to buy things?" The answer is "you don't because they're broke."
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Jan 30, 2018 02:28
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A3th3r posted:Yes, Amazon is good at what they do. Incidentally, European health care systems vary widely from region to region & they are very racist over there over who they do & don't accept into their hospitals. So it's not like it's any better in Europe than in America. In the states there is some consistency so that's good. American healthcare is pretty drat good if you can afford it. The problem is the "if you can afford it" part. Insurance helps but even people with insurance can't always afford the care they need. Obamacare took some steps in the right direction but our system still has problems.
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Jan 31, 2018 00:17
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boner confessor posted:i dont have a problem with making a gamelet to prove a point, but dont make it long and difficult to play via wonky controls just to end with "haha, there's no way to win" That is malls dying, though. As soon as a mall gets turned into something other than a mall it's not a mall anymore. That's reusing the building sure and it's great but it's not a mall if you turn it into like apartments or office space or something. America is ridiculously oversaturated with malls and malls are becoming increasingly unprofitable. They're just being abandoned and dying left and right; same with retail space in general. We just built too drat much of it. Often the buildings are still good but if nobody in it is selling anything then it's no longer retail space or a mall.
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Feb 8, 2018 01:35
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Halloween Jack posted:The purpose of Silicon Valley is to reinvent stupid poo poo that's already tried and failed, or reinvent commonplace industries but in such a way that you avoid taxes and any other responsibility to the communities from which you extract profit. I'm pretty sure the main purpose of Silicon Valley right now is scamming investors. How many startups just plain plan on not being profitable, getting venture capital, then selling to another company? So many of them seem to just not care about making actual traditional profit.
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Feb 10, 2018 00:51
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Haifisch posted:And it still doesn't necessarily make sense. Business is rife with people measuring stupid metrics thinking it'll improve things, and 99% of the time those metrics are mysteriously the only thing that improves, while the business as a whole performs the same(or worse) as before. The biggest problem is that cutting IT, training, and employee wages to the bone leads to a jump in profits right now. It causes massive damage in the long term but by that point the person who made the decision will be off to pillage another company or in a position to pass the blame onto somebody else. Same goes for making the product smaller or shittier; it leads to increased profits this quarter. It makes for better numbers and fat executive bonuses in the short term. The various stakeholders, shareholders, and investors want numbers right god damned now rather than a decade from now. It's all about making this quarter's numbers better than last quarter's numbers at all costs even if that cost is that the company burns down in two years.
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Feb 10, 2018 01:54
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PT6A posted:How do you gently caress up selling a product that absolutely every human who's ever lived needs to obtain on a regular basis? The demand for food isn't infinite. Despite America's gluttony we can still only consume so much food. America is just plain oversaturated in stores in general; food is no exception. Aside from that with stagnating wages and related shenanigans going on the majority of people are getting more frugal by pure necessity. Yeah, everybody needs to eat but most Americans are low enough on the income scale to be considered "poor." Winn-Dixie's parent company is also Bi-Lo which has been having trouble for a while. They also have a history of gobbling up smaller chains (they ate all of the small chains where I'm originally from, for example) and have filed for bankruptcy in the past. They're one of those lumbering behemoth companies that mostly exists to funnel money from not rich people to rich people at this point.
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Feb 18, 2018 00:44
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RandomPauI posted:There was a blog post in this thread about B&N executives intentionally sabotaging the companies long-term profitability. Firing all full-time employees at the stores, make individual stores fulfill online orders with the stores own stock and without compensation, etc. The company is failing so pillage it for all you can before it sinks.
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Mar 10, 2018 22:10
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