What an awful company. Seems they've gotten worse after Amazon bought them.
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Whole Foods Cuts Paid Breaks From 15 to 10 Minutes for Thousands of Workers
- Thread starter entremet
- Start date
What an awful company. Seems they've gotten worse after Amazon bought them.
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Jeff sucks, but this is on the CEO, the notorious John Mackey. He hates unions. He is a dumb AF libertarian as well.
Despite his garbage views, I believe Whole Foods had pretty good benefits back in the day (someone correct me if I'm wrong). Things started turning for the worse pretty quickly after Bezos bought them.
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I think it's the delivery service? Those are stocked by Whole Foods Team Members. So they're personal shoppers, in a sense.
Used to work for Whole Foods. An awful place that overworks its staff just like Amazon.
I quit a month into work lol
They actually wanted me to work after I got into a car crash. I had to tell them I had back pain lol
I quit a month into work lol
They actually wanted me to work after I got into a car crash. I had to tell them I had back pain lol
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Yes, but this is the lowest common denominator only a morale killer. Management is really dumb.
Ah. I remember working retail, and when "buy online, pick up in store" was growing and becoming a thing they wanted to push more, they actually made a small team of people whose only job would be to pick the items. I guess Whole Foods just uses whoever is available, then :/
Corporate garbage can get fucked. There are people who put food on our tables like grocery store workers and there are people trying to take advantage and squeeze every drop of energy out of them to benefit nobody but themselves and their fucking investors, who can also get fucked for leaching out of other people's productivity. They can all get fucked as far as I'm concerned.
WTF is a ten minute break? lmao
Guess I'll buy this cup of soup, wait in line... ... ... oh fuck, time to clock back in! I would barely be able to get to my car, listen to two songs, and return.
Absolute GARBAGE. One of the richest companies in this history of all mankind and god-forbid people get 15 minutes.
Guess I'll buy this cup of soup, wait in line... ... ... oh fuck, time to clock back in! I would barely be able to get to my car, listen to two songs, and return.
Absolute GARBAGE. One of the richest companies in this history of all mankind and god-forbid people get 15 minutes.
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Depends on your shift length. Federal Law requires a 30 minute break after 6 hours. Many places get around that by making shifts under 6 hours.
I worked at Burger King back in ~2004-2008, and yep, you got a 20(!) minute break if you worked six hours or more. Guess what? 90% of my shifts were 5.5 hours. Best part? I often closed, which meant we were scheduled for midnight (30 minutes after the 11:30 close), but almost ALWAYS worked till 12:30/12:40am to get everything cleaned up and ready for the morning crew. But then it was conveniently too late. When I brought it up, I was told I should just be faster shutting things down... which of course was impossible.
No doubt but I imagine WF's upper management still believes that they are a top merchant to work for and this won't deter employees. Alternatively, maybe they are looking to shed some of the their more senior/longtime employees in hopes of bringing in some fresh blood at a lower starting salary.
Imagine being a major proponent of organic food and plant-based diets while also rejecting the scientific consensus around climate change. John Mackey is a very stupid man.
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Their CEO basically told his employees to donate sick days to each others during the pandemic early days. Dude is godawful.
Part of this is just labor demands from the Prime stuff. All the grocery business is having to deal with the new, high intensive labor demands that come from shopping for their customers. They need to hire more staff, but hiring and retaining people is hard because the job is legit hard, even in places where the pay is decent. So they cut breaks to get more hours in for the talent they have.
Amazon's Whole Foods online/delivery grocery pickup experience is light years ahead of everyone else. It's super successful too-the Whole Foods where I get my pickup has changed dramatically over the last year, with huge parts of the storefront being dedicated to staging delievery and pickup orders.
Amazon/Whole Foods needs more automation so these workers can do more in the same amount of time and be more productive. Cutting hours is just going to drive down employee retention and their business requires more and more training than it did in the past, so that attrition is costly.
Amazon's Whole Foods online/delivery grocery pickup experience is light years ahead of everyone else. It's super successful too-the Whole Foods where I get my pickup has changed dramatically over the last year, with huge parts of the storefront being dedicated to staging delievery and pickup orders.
Amazon/Whole Foods needs more automation so these workers can do more in the same amount of time and be more productive. Cutting hours is just going to drive down employee retention and their business requires more and more training than it did in the past, so that attrition is costly.
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He's a wacky guy. He's a Venn diagram of extreme nutritionism (a view that diet cures all health ills) and libertarian ideals.
Diet is definitely important, but he misses systemic things like poverty (many can't even afford his shit), food insecurity, and medical conditions that have nothing to do with diet. I'm a big fan of St. Jude and they're one of my fav charities, but diet isn't the reason those poor kids have terminal illnesses.
i used to work as a shopper. we were in store walking around like grocery shoppers except we were required to do everything we could to get the right items without making any substitutions. the thing is, stock can vary wildly per day. if we couldn't find an item, we had to ask and get confirmation that the item was not in stock from a whole foods employee. that could prevent them from doing what they were in the middle of.
there were so many ways the entire system could bottleneck preventing orders from going out on time and annoying just about everyone in store, customers and employees
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Sounds like the system didn't work too well :/ I've ordered Costco orders via Instacart through the year, and as a partnered 3rd party service, normally if something wasn't in stock, they would just cancel and refund you. The site lets you make a substitute if they don't have it in before the picking starts, but to make it easy they just cancel+refund if it's not there. Sounds like they worked it out smoother.
No, you've got it wrong. They don't want to hire and they've been doing everything they can to get margins higher since the buyout. One of the Amazon corporate mottos is "frugality" and they've been trying to impart this on Whole Foods leadership for a couple years now. Cutting benefits, cutting wage increases (both in per cent and frequency), cutting labor budgets every few months, it's all on purpose to make Whole Foods more profitable. They also switched the company from manual scheduling to using an app that would generate schedules and frequently leave large gaps in coverage. They tasked their customer service teams, with no extra money toward labor, to do the Amazon shopping and prioritize it over whatever is happening in the store.
The store I worked at was literally not allowed to hire for nearly a calendar year because regional kept telling us that we were over labor budget, even as the team I was on kept dwindling to the point where we couldn't comfortably staff normal business hours.
We bought some meat there over Christmas and the woman at the help desk said there were over one hundred and fifty primer shoppers in the market.
Yup, I worked 3 months as a register clerk in a tourist town that was under staffed and had me working courtesy clerk double duty, working nights when I had tried to request otherwise due to my health issues, and had me do closing shift as senior clerk my second week on the job with the other guy who was newer than me. I said I left for health reasons but a week before I quit I had a full emotional breakdown on my day off while I was dealing with a medical appointment the town over. Oh and it was technically only part time of course.
(Still better than my next job which was full time and had me a week away from a nervous breakdown when I resigned)
What a shitty thing to do. I worked for whole foods in 2005 and loved it, almost exclusively cause there was a diverse staff and everyone had "fun". It was a neat place to work.
Reading the way warehouse/fulfillment center workers are treated is gross. They don't even have enough time to make it to the bathroom on their breaks and piss in Gatorade bottles.
Whole paycheck is never gonna get my business again. Haven't been in years but this seals it for me. How fucking petty to reduce breaks by 5 minutes
Reading the way warehouse/fulfillment center workers are treated is gross. They don't even have enough time to make it to the bathroom on their breaks and piss in Gatorade bottles.
Whole paycheck is never gonna get my business again. Haven't been in years but this seals it for me. How fucking petty to reduce breaks by 5 minutes
Yeah being understaffed and busy is just a nightmare. Just insane what they expect of you all while paying you practically pennies (at least that place I worked at was cheap with pay).
Yup plus I've discovered that while I seem friendly and can handle people I don't have the stamina for front facing people jobs unless it's balanced with remote alone time, like my first job out of college, Ski Lift operator... I really need a quiet office job and my first bachelors has been useless, hopefully accounting pans out
Wish you the best! Hope you find success in that field, accounting seems like a good gig from people I knew who went into it.