Every retail place I walk into these days is staffed minimally. One untrained cashier manning 4-6 self checkout registers. 0 manned registers open. Warehouse stores with half a dozen workers on the floor.
I check on my way in these days to see that they have registers open if I’m buying a cart full of groceries or if i’m buying products that require barcodes to be scanned out of a book. I stood at a self checkout register in Lowes the other day for 10 minutes because someone wanted a 5 gallon bottle of water, someone had problems scanning a barcode and I had a hand full of nuts and bolts. The cashier was about to have a breakdown. Costco has barcodes you need to scan for muffins. but us mortals are not allowed to use the barcode scanners, we are required to either wait out the shared cashier, or lug the 25lb item into the scanning table then god forbid put the item back in the cart, those two cases of soda you scanned might… you know, i don’t know exactly why they need those huge items on the scale. Nothing is making sure your cart is empty at any point, there’s no lane hawk. They’re checking receipts 100% at the door.
When I was young, I was sold that there would be robots and air delivery, This dystopian 1984 retail hellscape is bullshit.
Shopping is so depressing and stressful now. You can’t flag down employees to ask a question anymore, everybody has been handed the work of 1.5 people on a good day. These employees are spread so thin and it’s impossible not to notice.
We have several in my city and you’ll randomly walk in to find that their pharmacy is closed in the middle of the afternoon. It’s been a real PITA to deal with since my parents are both elderly with lots of prescriptions that I pick up. I’ve had to drive 20 miles away to a different Walgreens to get insulin, spent hours on the phone trying to transfer stuff from one location to another because they can’t maintain their hours, wait in the lobby for an hour to get an urgent prescription filled, etc. I really hate their service but our other options are pretty limited since all the independent pharmacies closed down and their old pharmacy through BiMart shut down.
I experienced the same frustrations with our Walgreens, and thought that was as bad as it could get. Then my health insurance plan mandated that we all stop using in-person pharmacies and switch to this stupid mail delivery system. You know what’s worse than having to wait for Walgreens to open so you can talk to a pharmacist? Sitting on hold hoping to talk to the one anonymous random pharmacist Optum has on staff. Want to transfer a prescription? Having trouble with a particular manufacturer or generic? Good luck.
I worked in healthcare up until recently. Our executives were constantly spouting those same phrases while cutting staff and benefits to the bone. They never miss a chance to screw their employees. Also we were chronically short staffed but they had us under hiring freezes basically all the time. By the time we could hire again everyone was so burned out most of our hires quit and we were back at square one under a hiring freeze again. It’s not “difficult to staff” it’s difficult to staff when you have to fill 20 positions in 6 weeks or get your openings closed out.
“We also understand the immense pressures felt across the U.S. in retail pharmacy right now,”
Translation: We’ve cut our staff to barebones so that the CEOs can buy their annual new yacht and won’t hire enough people to man the operations.
The Walgreens in my town has started closing their pharmacy early because they don’t have enough staff to run it.
Every retail place I walk into these days is staffed minimally. One untrained cashier manning 4-6 self checkout registers. 0 manned registers open. Warehouse stores with half a dozen workers on the floor.
I check on my way in these days to see that they have registers open if I’m buying a cart full of groceries or if i’m buying products that require barcodes to be scanned out of a book. I stood at a self checkout register in Lowes the other day for 10 minutes because someone wanted a 5 gallon bottle of water, someone had problems scanning a barcode and I had a hand full of nuts and bolts. The cashier was about to have a breakdown. Costco has barcodes you need to scan for muffins. but us mortals are not allowed to use the barcode scanners, we are required to either wait out the shared cashier, or lug the 25lb item into the scanning table then god forbid put the item back in the cart, those two cases of soda you scanned might… you know, i don’t know exactly why they need those huge items on the scale. Nothing is making sure your cart is empty at any point, there’s no lane hawk. They’re checking receipts 100% at the door.
When I was young, I was sold that there would be robots and air delivery, This dystopian 1984 retail hellscape is bullshit.
Shopping is so depressing and stressful now. You can’t flag down employees to ask a question anymore, everybody has been handed the work of 1.5 people on a good day. These employees are spread so thin and it’s impossible not to notice.
We have several in my city and you’ll randomly walk in to find that their pharmacy is closed in the middle of the afternoon. It’s been a real PITA to deal with since my parents are both elderly with lots of prescriptions that I pick up. I’ve had to drive 20 miles away to a different Walgreens to get insulin, spent hours on the phone trying to transfer stuff from one location to another because they can’t maintain their hours, wait in the lobby for an hour to get an urgent prescription filled, etc. I really hate their service but our other options are pretty limited since all the independent pharmacies closed down and their old pharmacy through BiMart shut down.
I experienced the same frustrations with our Walgreens, and thought that was as bad as it could get. Then my health insurance plan mandated that we all stop using in-person pharmacies and switch to this stupid mail delivery system. You know what’s worse than having to wait for Walgreens to open so you can talk to a pharmacist? Sitting on hold hoping to talk to the one anonymous random pharmacist Optum has on staff. Want to transfer a prescription? Having trouble with a particular manufacturer or generic? Good luck.
I worked in healthcare up until recently. Our executives were constantly spouting those same phrases while cutting staff and benefits to the bone. They never miss a chance to screw their employees. Also we were chronically short staffed but they had us under hiring freezes basically all the time. By the time we could hire again everyone was so burned out most of our hires quit and we were back at square one under a hiring freeze again. It’s not “difficult to staff” it’s difficult to staff when you have to fill 20 positions in 6 weeks or get your openings closed out.
ohh yeah we’re understaffed, but we’ll be hiring in a month, don’t you worry!
Sounds like IT in a nutshell too unfortunately.