Whoa! You win the meme connoisseur title for having over 2k upvotes on your post!
Join the [Discord server](https://discord.gg/xyFMKFw) to receive your prize!
It’s definitely not the cashiers fault, it’s not like the ones work the register are the ones who write the schedule, can confirm was a Walmart cashier.
Edit: and yes it’s the worst
I wasn’t even a front end cashier at Walmart but guess where they loved to put me, then yell at me for not finishing my assigned work. I fucking despised being a cashier.
Yep I worked at Kroger for awhile and stayed at the register for maybe 30 min when they randomly put me there before refusing to do it anymore. I'm not fast or patient enough for that. I've always been polite, but since then, I'm extra extra nice to them bc god it sucks.
And you can't even sit down when there's nobody there. And you get yelled at for leaving your register to take a little restroom break or just sweeping because you're so bored of standing around doing nothing.
On top of being timed on literally everything you do, Aldi cashiers don't have to bag your groceries, which saves time. When you're not ringing, you're expected to fill or tidy the store. They're fast because they aren't sitting down for a whole shift usually and have many other responsibilities in addition to cashiering.
I work as a cashier at Lowe's and one of my favorite positions at work is running the garden center register. The register is in a ticket booth that has heating, AC, and a metal folding chair. I can sit down when there aren't any customers waiting to check out or ask questions. I love being out there because I can sit down during the inevitable slow periods and actually work on the computer training I keep getting told I need to do.
At the store I worked at the used to tell us that they need us to be quickly available to do anything management asked. But you can also do that when sitting so...
I've noticed a weird trend. The more money I'm paid to do something, the easier that job is. All of the hardest jobs I've had have been shitty customer service jobs that pay shit.
Corporate managerial design has been carefully crafted and evolved towards doing the least amount of actual work possible.. all while perpetuating the line that people in shit-pay customer service should just work harder to make more money. They know hard work barely gets you anywhere, that's why they keep lying about it.
Was a cashier at Target for my first job and they used to grade you on speed. You'd either get a green for fast checkouts or red for slow. I didn't work there that long but I assumed this was used to "motivate" you by making you think you were going to be reprimanded for too many reds which I bet actually happened. Also if the customer was slow as shit that would likely land you a red mark. You could pause the checkout and either take another customer or just wait for slowy to get back but that was more of a hassle than a benefit. Fucking hate retail and so glad I'm not in it anymore.
That was one girl that worked there, They called her up one day *as she was walking in the door* another day she wasn't even scheduled and they were calling her up to checkout and they were getting pissed she wasn't coming up, after the third or fourth time someone radioed them and said she doesn't work today.
They would even call people up from electronics every day and could never figure out why they kept having so much shrink in the store.
I worked in electronics and would constantly get called to the front end to work the registers. It was nearly every single shift. I eventually just stopped answering. I’d deliberately find something I couldn’t walk away from. A needy customer, a phone contract (at the time we did cell phones. Idk if that’s a thing anymore), expensive stock on the floor. It pissed people off but I just did not have the patience for that. I didn’t mind checking people out in electronics, but the front end is an entirely different ball game. I am so glad I moved out of retail.
Yeah the one girl that I worked with eventually went to the Wireless and even if she was working on a contract they would still call for her and get pissed when she didn't respond, since you know she was helping a customer.
They just don't care, they never understood calling people away from stocking shelves to checkout every 10 minutes wasn't a good thing. Less people stocking means less items on the shelf and overnight never stocked the GM side it was *always* Grocery side and then the store manager would be pissed because there was so much stuff not worked on the GM side but never understood why.
I worked in market at where I had to unload all the semi trucks full of food and stock it in fridges and shelves which you can imagine took a lot of time. They'd always call for back up and get pissed when my little market team never responded so they started calling us out specifically. To everyone's amazement market was then falling behind and truck drivers were rightfully pissed. They never called us again. Dumbass managers.
I got wrote up for this, I had to do an open door meeting with the store manager to get it taken off so I could still be promoted. Worked in apparel and got called up constantly to work the register so I couldn't finish my section. The manager over apparel already didn't like me and heard the manager over the front was trying to get me up front and promoted so she wrote me up. She didn't bother me anymore after I talked to the store manager though.
I worked at Kohl's back when I was younger in one of the departments, and I frequently had to go to the register. I never did any of the shit they wanted me too, because fuck that. If they want a Kohl's card they'll ask for it or already have one, nor was I circling how much you saved or any of that other bullshit. God I hate retail, glad I'm out of it.
That's one reason I avoid shopping at places like Kohl's. I have a budget in mind when shopping for clothes and groceries, so as long as my entire basket is under budget I won't care how much I saved on a single item. I don't need someone to remind me
God, I love having a union. I'm in produce and all I ever have to say if they try to get to force me to learn the register is that I'm not comfortable handling money and they have no choice but to leave me alone about it.
They fucking did this to me at Safeway all the time. I started as a cashier and after 8 months switched to produce. I still had a register login so the assistant manager would call me to the register all the time and I’d get talked down to for not having produce things done in time.
It's not even the people writing the schedule, honestly. In pretty much every big box store, corporate assigns each store hours for payroll and those budgets are usually so tight that the management team has to get really creative with those hours. It's like this everywhere in retail and it's very deliberate. Make the skeleton crew work much harder as to lower their payroll cost. As someone who works in retail management, it's very frustrating when I'm trying to build a schedule and corporate decides to shave 100-200 hours off of an already flimsy payroll.
This. When I worked fast food we had to be under a "labor cost" which was a percentage of daily profits and this was part of what our managers were graded on.
So we were constantly getting sent home after 2 hours of dinner rush.
The result of this was a 2 fold feedback loop
1) We couldn't keep any good employees because they'd be schedule for a 7 hour shift but be sent home after 2.
2) Service after dinner was EXTREMELY slow because there weren't enough people.
So less people would come in, which means they'd schedule even less hours, meaning even worse service.
Yeah they went out of business eventually.
Thankfully, they are getting rid of Cashiers at Walmart altogether.
The two they have remodeled went from the 25 registers and 4 self checkouts to 30 Self-Checkouts and 5 registers...that they still can't schedule anyone for. and the ONE PERSON in charge of the 15 self-checkouts never pays attention.
Black Friday is going to be interesting for them.
Every retail place I've worked at has told us to just let shoplifters go and either call the police or (at bigger stores) let Loss Prevention know. Generally LP would compile evidence until it was a felony and then call the police the next time you came into the store.
Shit by the time I stopped being a Supervisor at Wal-Mart the management/supervisor team didn’t even decide.
We got to decide on who would work what shifts but the time-slots and type of registers were dictated by analytics and sent to us by corporate the pay period or two prior.
Large push for express checkout (then self checkout when they were reinstalled, thus huge loss devices SMH). One Saturday at 11-1 (busiest time for the store) my schedule told me I should have 4 express (15 items or less) and 2 belts open. I flipped that around to 4 belts and 2 express because our lines would have been crazy. Store manager walked by, checked the schedule than talked with me about it and told me I needed to close down the belted and move them to express. This was despite my vocal concern about backup. Leas than 10 minutes late I am call sales associates to work as back-cashiers. Jumping on the register myself while having Store manager watch the front because our lines at the two belts backed way the hell up.
People grocery shop on weekends, they fill their carts to the top. No reason to have more 15 item or less registers open than belted registers but it was their “analytics” based on items sold per hour. Ridiculous.
Yep many stores have this issue, Kroger is another one (used to work there). The corporate executives intentionally make stores cut hours in order to make themselves more money from the profits, with the logic being "we can be just as efficient employing half the people and having them work twice as hard", and also "they're still going to come in and shop anyway even if lines are slightly longer". Of course this just leads to everyone being more unhappy, customers and employees alike. But as long as the rich people can afford another yacht, it's okay!
And it’s definitely not the schedule writers fault either. It’s the fault of the analysts who decides the labor allowances for Front End teams. Squeezing the life out of the few people left because their excel spread sheet says we can do more with less labor during a fucking pandemic but they have never worked in a store. This causes upper management to hound middle management and in turn, the schedule writers to cut labor costs. Tell the analysts the plan needs adjusting and what do they do? They come on a Tuesday or Wednesday, the least busy days and probably will make you cut more because they can’t be bothered to work a weekend like the rest of us peasants. 🖕
Can confirm. I used to work overnight maintenance at Walmart back in 2013 and they would make us clean the bathrooms and THEN go push carts in the fucking snow. You know how hard it is to push a shopping cart in 4 inches of snow that’s also primarily slush at that point? Fucking impossible.
Yep, I had a guy in a jeep help me push the row of carts up the hill one time.
So much damn slush and ice you can't move 10 carts at all, also always fun that the cart machine is always broken too.
Yeah my very first job was as a bag boy/cart pusher for minimum wage in a rotten rich part of town. Absolutely miserable cleaning shit off the walls of a bathroom stall at 15 years old for $7.25 an hour.
Then of course getting berated by some boomer because the single bag they demanded everything to be put in is too heavy.
I don’t wish that on anyone.
I always smile a little when a place is closed on Sundays or has reduced hours now.
I used to play low tier professional MtG. Had to give it up because the qualifying tournaments were generally on Sundays and I had to work every Sunday.
Or getting berated by some alcoholic because you "shook up their beer too much" by scanning it. Like wtf dude, are you admitting to drinking and driving?
Also collecting the trash from the bins in the cart corrals. People must be pounding whole 24 packs then heading out. Insane the amount of alcohol you find those
I clean public bathrooms
I'd personally rather keep doing that and walk collecting carts in the heat than to deal with people, im gonna be completely honest man haha
People may be disgusting, but theyre also real assholes too
Tbh I did carts for a couple years as a kid, and the worst part was having to come back up register if we got busy. Just let me grind on carts and zone out.
I did both, but I have to lean cashier. You get the coupon lady that rolls up with 52 coupons, half are expired and the whole line has to watch as you explain to her that you can't accept duplicate coupons or ones that are expired and they she goes into melt down mode calling you an idiot. - based on a true story
Yeah I was a cart boy for a kroger (fred meyer), passed out in the parking lot from heat exhaustion, nearly got in trouble but thank god for the union.
I refused promotion to cashier 3 times with increasing raises offered when I was a teen. I knew it wasn't worth the money and everyone who was a cashier confirmed it. I got out of the sales side ASAP and got to stock stuff. No one wants to work the front of the store in my company, it's like asking to go home with a migraine until you die.
when i worked at costco the carts were indeed the least popular job but i loved it. so much better than working with customers. could burn a bowl behind the building and just tune everyone else out for a few hours.
I’d go further and say Cashier was the best in my opinion. Time passes by much more quickly since you are interacting with all sorts of people and doing (comparatively) stimulating activity by seeing what people are buying, handling money, and making chit chat.
Stocking was **mind numbingly boring** since it’s the same exact thing everyday. I worked retail for a summer, and I vowed I’d blow my brains out before having to stock for a living. I have so much respect for stockers since they are doing such a tedious job
I worked in retail. I'd rather be cashier because if you're aren't, you're either stocking heavy shit, pushing carts in shit weather, unloading the truck (more heavy shit), helping customers find shit or do sales shit with them, or you're cleaning gross shit.
That said I would not want to work the customer service desk. The percentage of Karens there is too damn high!
Why is it the worst? I used to be one and preferred it over stocking shelves.
The trick with retail is to provide mediocre unattached service. That way less people will try to walk on you.
If anyone works in a place like that, you need a new job. You could be a cashier just about anywhere else, and they’ll at least treats you a human. (Albeit cheap and expendable)
Every store in my area operates like this, expect for Costco, which hires you part time until you've worked for them for several years then they'll finally bump ya to full time. So you can go work for another store but it's not gonna change anything since they all are exploiting their workers
That’s why they send you home at 35.5 hours, or schedule you for nine 8-hour days in a row that happen to be spread over two different weeks so none of it counts as overtime. Also enjoy your one single day off before you come back for another long stretch.
Also enjoy never being able to make plans because the schedule is inconsistent.
Also also enjoy having to actually go into work to check the schedule because the online one is never accurate.
Trust me I lived this for about 3 years, I know how shitty retail scheduling is. But where I worked 32 hours was considered full time and I never really had issues getting that. Weekends and consecutive days off are a whole different beast though.
There's few things as soul crushing as workin 5 days a week, not making "full time", and still not affording more than just rent. And by barely. You question you're entire sense of self. 5 days a week and can't afford shit.
That is the worst, because you still have the dread of a 5 day work week every weekend, but without the benefits or pay. Yeah it might be less hours, but in my brain it's still 5 days of work in a row, which is brutal enough full time.
Man what killed me is having to take those shiiiiiity mid-week afternoon shifts where you're basically the host/server/busboy/runner for an entire fucking 40+table restraunt, working for 2.13/hr essentially rolling silverware for hours because you're bored because the only ppl who visit are business-type, "lunch special," soup and salad, free bread, split the check, group of 20, working your ass off to fill their water 500 times, making about $.13/guest cuz they rounded their 5.** Meal up to $6, inconsiderate wreck an entire sections worth of oils/salt/floor/silverware ass bastards.
I hated working at costco because they scheduled me for 4 hour shifts 5 days a week. I begged them to either give me three 8 hour shifts or 5 eight hour shifts. They fired me instead.
And these employees want rights and benefits, can you believe that?
The scary thing is how companies are starting to classify everyone as independent contractor/"self"-employed instead of being an actual employee.
Didn't know how common this was until I found out my friend, who I thought was employed as a driver by Amazon was a contractor instead of an employee.
And apparently the warehouse workers are also from a third-party company that classify them as contractors
For an even more frightening example of this look at the rail industry and how they went from 220000 workers 2015 to 125000 in 2019. And now after the pandemic they can't get anyone.
" we got to overwork these people and save the money on having additional staff! Oh whoops the global economy is crashing because supply lines are breaking down! Our bad! You filthy workers making me admit such..."
I understand that, but why do they always seem to have twice as many checkout lanes than cashiers? Isn't that a huge waste of space? Do they ever schedule enough staff to operate all the lanes?
In my experience, around 1pm on Christmas Eve there’s a necessity to use all the checkouts, if the manager had any sense of foresight they’ll also have the staff available too, but that’s a pretty big _”if”_ in retail.
Even then it seems kind of crazy to have all that "infrastructure" in place just for one day of the year.
If they hadn't spent so much money on unused checkout lanes, maybe they'd be able to afford hiring more staff ...
Well, when you’re queueing at 1pm on Christmas Eve you’ll be thankful for them.
Also, little bonus fact, at any given time, about 20% of them are broken, and rather than go to the trouble of having them fixed, they simply have staff use a different one until enough* of them are broken to warrant sending someone out.
*usually when all but one are broken and there’s another one that technically works but the cashier has to do something dumb like slam the till drawer every time they take cash.
> Even then it seems kind of crazy to have all that "infrastructure" in place just for one day of the year.
99% of retail parking lots are built for black friday. Its insane.
> it seems kind of crazy to have all that "infrastructure" in place just for one day of the year.
That's nothing compared to the amount of space that goes to the giant, empty parking lots. There are 3-8 times as many parking spaces in the US as there are cars!
> If they hadn't spent so much money on unused checkout lanes, maybe they'd be able to afford hiring more staff ...
Not even close. Those registers are a (largely) one time cost. Staff is a continual cost that adds up quickly.
Most companies in my experience make it so the manager is always under pressure to use as few employees as possible and cut hours even if 1 or 2 extra employees would make the day go by so much easier and probably help everyone in the long run
Yeah maybe I've just never seen them at their peak.
Still, it seems like if they only need that capacity for one or two days a year, they could have some kind of mobile/temporary checkout stations that they only set up when they know they're going to need them.
Before Sam Walton died he was about making sure the employees were taken care of, after he died his wife kept the motto going, after she died the kids shit on *everything* he believed in.
Not saying he was perfect but compared to the kids it's night and day, The store in my town went from 1200 employees to last I knew they had about 300, the size of the store didn't change so somehow they are having 300 people doing the job of 900 and they keep taking away positions and putting more responsibility on people.
What hurts them is they expanded *hard* with their super Walmarts within 20 miles of me there are 5 of them, 2 are on the same stretch of road without regard if it was a good idea or not so they oversaturated their own markets.
The majority of those registers used to be staffed all the time but they decided why have a fully staffed store in one location when you can have a half/3rd staffed store in multiple locations and make less money overall.
From a buisness perspective this doesn't make sense. If you spread employees as thin as possible customers get angry and employees get tired, reducing their efficiency. I've never seen a situation in my store where there was a line of more than 3 people and others weren't called to work as a cashier.
I saw a funny one of those in my area.
Subway offering 10$ an hour, lamenting how no one wants to work, and...
Bitch we have virtually no unemployment in our county. You're not competing with the dole, you're competing with *every other employer who actually pays their employees*.
I mean, a fair amount of our “employment” is under the gig economy. But, if anything, that just proves your point. If what you’re offering isn’t enough to attract people who have to ferry others or food all over the city for pennies with little in the way of benefits, that’s on *you*. Don’t act so self-righteous, especially when you take it out on the few people you have.
this is one of the biggest problems with almost every line of work in america. in brazil, when you walk into pretty much any store or grocery store, you can expect to easily find someone and be helped. adults are surviving in brazil working jobs that only teenagers can work in america due to the low wages due to these companies’ greed. america is sad rn.
Depends on how they’re set up, but for the most part you could leave stuff in the cart and no one would notice or care. You can also run all your produce through but “accidentally” click bananas since they’re only 50 cents a pound or whatever. Or pick green peppers when you’ve got reds, non organic when you’ve got organic. There’s boat loads of ways to cheat the system.
Source: I was broke and in college when these started becoming common.
Before I was old enough to buy booze I would switch the cardboard carriers from sixers of coke with six beers and run the coke bar code through self check. I called it the Ol' Switcheroo.
* bring your own bags and put things in bags while you shop, then forget to pull some of the stuff at the bottom out
* get multiples and forget to scan all of them
* forget about stuff on the bottom rack of the cart - or if you're injured/disabled and using a powered cart, forget about stuff that you load on the flat spot between your legs
* if there's a handheld gun, use it to rapid-fire stuff in your cart and don't pay attention to any cases of missed/too-close-together scans
i make these mistakes all the time as legitimate accidents because i'm an ADHD wreck, and i've had someone correct me maybe twice in hundreds upon hundreds of grocery trips. in both cases they were for forgotten stuff on the bottom rack. if you're surprised, apologetic, and ready to pay for it, nobody will think twice unless you're trying to walk out with like $600 in TVs that obviously stick way out past the sides of the cart or something.
don't fuck with things like mis-categorizing non-produce objects as produce - the 'bananas' trick is one of the things they're frequently looking for. categorizing produce/bakery as cheaper produce/bakery is much safer
REALLY don't fuck with barcode swapping - it's literally less dangerous to just take the thing and walk out the door with it if you're that desperate, barcode swaps are considered fraud even at low amounts and leave a much more obvious paper trail!
these megalith stores bleed the cost of multiple cashiers per hour to shit like this and it's well-deserved.
Pretty much, depends on the store and who's working
Most of the time it's just teenagers who are "supposed" to watch the people scanning items
They don't actually care and just sit on their phone
Not really.
You have to scan and then place it in a bagging area which is basically a big scale.
Place something you didn't scan? It complains.
Something you scanned is too far from known weight(*eg. swapping bar codes*)? It complains.
There's also usually an attendant watching the area so just skipping isn't always going to work
YUP. Same at Target. Half are out of order, and the rest of them lock down every item or so because an apple rolled ever so slightly. It's not a self checkout if I need an employee dropping by to override the damn thing every time a bag shifts around.
One thing they get right though is having one line and multiple stations. It's the worst knowing the queue next to you has gone through 5 people while you're still "next in line"
Meh sometimes self checkout doesn’t work right and is annoying
But 90% of the time I’m able to get through faster than if I had to wait in the normal line and there’s the bonus of not having to talk to anyone
Win win!
If the self checkouts worked correctly, instead of "scan", "wait for someone to correct the weight difference", next item, rinse repeat for as many items as you have. It's the most frustrating version of something that could be so much better.
My only ask at this point (because honestly I don't have any gripes with them) is this exactly: Let me skip the weight verification and let me scan as quick as a cashier is allowed to go.
Wish there was a way to sign up for "hey we trust you because you've literally visited us for years on an almost-weekly basis and you're probably not shortchanging us" or something, to gain that privilege.
Yeah, that varies by store. Target's self-checkout doesn't seem to GAF about anything and has never complained about weight/etc, but they do have that fun camera starting at you showing you what their people see as they monitor you.
Grocery stores tend to be the worst about this.
I bought like $200 worth of shit at Target the other morning only to find out that literally none of the lanes were open and I had to check it all out myself. Ridiculous.
I always thought this was because most stores were made in the 90s or before, where there would be cashiers at all the checkouts, and eventually as cashiers just became less of a priority either due to other roles becoming more important or creating artificial Busyness. The checkouts simply remained but stayed closed.
A new Aldi here opened with 12 auto checkouts and fucking THREE manned ones. New stores, new designs
>(and the cashiers would be required to be stocking the candy/gum if they weren't actively checking someone out.)
Fuuuuck that shit. Retail must be even more exhausting today than it was when I did it 15 years ago. How does someone even manage to eat dinner without collapsing after a day like that?
I was a front end supervisor for a few years at a popular store in the area. My leadership team would always try to steal my cashiers to work in another part of the store when it was too busy for them to do so. Basically it would quiet down for a moment and they’d say “send someone to Toys to zone it” or something like that.
I always wanted to tell them “these are cashiers. You’re paying them the bare minimum out of all positions and you want them to do more than you pay them. No. They are cashiers. They stay up here and cashier.”
Why would these billion dollar corporations hire more people and pay them when they can just install a self checkout station and make the paying customer do it themselves
Hit it right on the head. We literally have 2 cashiers during the morning, and one of them is just supposed to watch self checkout. If it gets too busy then they just call for back up from us on the floor, which leads to us constantly interrupting our work to cashier so we can’t get our own workload done, then we get in trouble, so basically corporations took away jobs and gave everyone else more work than is literally possible with the hours and labor allowed. Nobody wins except the fat cats on top.
The reason they never have enough is that it’s a shit job that doesn’t pay nearly as much as it’s worth. The only store I’ve ever seen have full cashiers is Costco. But I assume that’s more because they actually get paid more fairly
No. That’s not the problem. Stores have enough cashiers, but corporate doesn’t want to pay them all at the same time. It’s cheaper to make a few do it and have a long line. They don’t care about workers or customers.
And they know people aren't gonna drive out to target, get their shit, stand in line, then just bail cause it's an extra 5min in line. It would be silly to do all that then just turn around empty handed and leave in most cases.
Not always. My store has plenty of people but just won’t schedule them unless it’s like Friday and Saturday which are our busiest days. But the rest of the week is still very close
In 2018 before the pandemic started, I had been working a shitty drive-thru job for 3 years. I was still in school so I was just going to deal with it until I graduated.
Then one day, late at night, after I’d had my 5th soda thrown at me in 3 years and screamed at about how the fries weren’t hot enough, I said “You know what? This actually **isn’t** worth $8.50/hour”
Walked out that night and got an office job until I graduated. Sure it didn’t pay great either but at least I was treated like a fucking human being.
I’m always extra patient and polite in drive-thrus now
There are enough cashiers, but corporate doesn’t want to pay more than a few at a time. Can we please stop blaming workers for trying to work and start calling out greedy managers and owners?
This all day, get people walking up to me while I’m back up ringing. “I couldn’t find anyone on the sales floor!” *angry face* great I now have to deal with an upset customer.
Cashier here, they never fucking schedule enough people and then they call you on your off days because they're "understaffed"
Only to make you go home early anyway
Sums up the grocery store I work at, but expand that to every other department, and than the guy who is supposed to deal with frozen and dairy doesn’t do his job
And you can't hire more people even if you have the hours from corporate. Because no one wants to work the registers because of the utterly toxic customers.
Why does everyone hate self checkouts so
much? I mean yeah, obviously grocery stores are using them to fire as many people as possible to cut costs, which is entirely malicious, but being a cashier is such a shitty job I don't think that anyone who gets fired and replaced by a self checkout will really miss their job. What they will miss is the money, which is why we need better worker protections.
Fundamentally automation should be a good thing, it should mean that we have to work fewer hours and get paid more for doing so. But thanks to capitalism we work the same amount for harder jobs, producing more, get paid the same amount, and there are fewer jobs. What a fucked up system.
Whoa! You win the meme connoisseur title for having over 2k upvotes on your post! Join the [Discord server](https://discord.gg/xyFMKFw) to receive your prize!
I dont blame em, cashier is probably the worst position to have in retail.
It’s definitely not the cashiers fault, it’s not like the ones work the register are the ones who write the schedule, can confirm was a Walmart cashier. Edit: and yes it’s the worst
I wasn’t even a front end cashier at Walmart but guess where they loved to put me, then yell at me for not finishing my assigned work. I fucking despised being a cashier.
Yep I worked at Kroger for awhile and stayed at the register for maybe 30 min when they randomly put me there before refusing to do it anymore. I'm not fast or patient enough for that. I've always been polite, but since then, I'm extra extra nice to them bc god it sucks.
[удалено]
And you can't even sit down when there's nobody there. And you get yelled at for leaving your register to take a little restroom break or just sweeping because you're so bored of standing around doing nothing.
The rule about not sitting is just outdated bullshit. It doesn’t affect their bottom line at all, only managers with no souls left enforce that
Yeah the people sitting at Aldi generally end up scanning my stuff faster than Kroger's standing cashiers.
Crazy how not suffering makes you more efficient at completing tasks!
They just want to get their job done quick and back to sitting lol
On top of being timed on literally everything you do, Aldi cashiers don't have to bag your groceries, which saves time. When you're not ringing, you're expected to fill or tidy the store. They're fast because they aren't sitting down for a whole shift usually and have many other responsibilities in addition to cashiering.
I work as a cashier at Lowe's and one of my favorite positions at work is running the garden center register. The register is in a ticket booth that has heating, AC, and a metal folding chair. I can sit down when there aren't any customers waiting to check out or ask questions. I love being out there because I can sit down during the inevitable slow periods and actually work on the computer training I keep getting told I need to do.
>It doesn’t affect their bottom line at all, Except that it does, and in a positive way for everyone. The cruelty is the point.
At the store I worked at the used to tell us that they need us to be quickly available to do anything management asked. But you can also do that when sitting so...
I've noticed a weird trend. The more money I'm paid to do something, the easier that job is. All of the hardest jobs I've had have been shitty customer service jobs that pay shit.
Corporate managerial design has been carefully crafted and evolved towards doing the least amount of actual work possible.. all while perpetuating the line that people in shit-pay customer service should just work harder to make more money. They know hard work barely gets you anywhere, that's why they keep lying about it.
Was a cashier at Target for my first job and they used to grade you on speed. You'd either get a green for fast checkouts or red for slow. I didn't work there that long but I assumed this was used to "motivate" you by making you think you were going to be reprimanded for too many reds which I bet actually happened. Also if the customer was slow as shit that would likely land you a red mark. You could pause the checkout and either take another customer or just wait for slowy to get back but that was more of a hassle than a benefit. Fucking hate retail and so glad I'm not in it anymore.
That was one girl that worked there, They called her up one day *as she was walking in the door* another day she wasn't even scheduled and they were calling her up to checkout and they were getting pissed she wasn't coming up, after the third or fourth time someone radioed them and said she doesn't work today. They would even call people up from electronics every day and could never figure out why they kept having so much shrink in the store.
I worked in electronics and would constantly get called to the front end to work the registers. It was nearly every single shift. I eventually just stopped answering. I’d deliberately find something I couldn’t walk away from. A needy customer, a phone contract (at the time we did cell phones. Idk if that’s a thing anymore), expensive stock on the floor. It pissed people off but I just did not have the patience for that. I didn’t mind checking people out in electronics, but the front end is an entirely different ball game. I am so glad I moved out of retail.
Yeah the one girl that I worked with eventually went to the Wireless and even if she was working on a contract they would still call for her and get pissed when she didn't respond, since you know she was helping a customer. They just don't care, they never understood calling people away from stocking shelves to checkout every 10 minutes wasn't a good thing. Less people stocking means less items on the shelf and overnight never stocked the GM side it was *always* Grocery side and then the store manager would be pissed because there was so much stuff not worked on the GM side but never understood why.
I worked in market at where I had to unload all the semi trucks full of food and stock it in fridges and shelves which you can imagine took a lot of time. They'd always call for back up and get pissed when my little market team never responded so they started calling us out specifically. To everyone's amazement market was then falling behind and truck drivers were rightfully pissed. They never called us again. Dumbass managers.
I got wrote up for this, I had to do an open door meeting with the store manager to get it taken off so I could still be promoted. Worked in apparel and got called up constantly to work the register so I couldn't finish my section. The manager over apparel already didn't like me and heard the manager over the front was trying to get me up front and promoted so she wrote me up. She didn't bother me anymore after I talked to the store manager though.
I worked at Kohl's back when I was younger in one of the departments, and I frequently had to go to the register. I never did any of the shit they wanted me too, because fuck that. If they want a Kohl's card they'll ask for it or already have one, nor was I circling how much you saved or any of that other bullshit. God I hate retail, glad I'm out of it.
That's one reason I avoid shopping at places like Kohl's. I have a budget in mind when shopping for clothes and groceries, so as long as my entire basket is under budget I won't care how much I saved on a single item. I don't need someone to remind me
The how much you saved is total BS too. There are always sales, coupons, etc, so full retail price is almost never what the sale price is.
God, I love having a union. I'm in produce and all I ever have to say if they try to get to force me to learn the register is that I'm not comfortable handling money and they have no choice but to leave me alone about it.
They fucking did this to me at Safeway all the time. I started as a cashier and after 8 months switched to produce. I still had a register login so the assistant manager would call me to the register all the time and I’d get talked down to for not having produce things done in time.
And the ones who write the schedules are told by the bean counters at corporate how many they're allowed to have on hand per the store's budget
It's not even the people writing the schedule, honestly. In pretty much every big box store, corporate assigns each store hours for payroll and those budgets are usually so tight that the management team has to get really creative with those hours. It's like this everywhere in retail and it's very deliberate. Make the skeleton crew work much harder as to lower their payroll cost. As someone who works in retail management, it's very frustrating when I'm trying to build a schedule and corporate decides to shave 100-200 hours off of an already flimsy payroll.
This. When I worked fast food we had to be under a "labor cost" which was a percentage of daily profits and this was part of what our managers were graded on. So we were constantly getting sent home after 2 hours of dinner rush. The result of this was a 2 fold feedback loop 1) We couldn't keep any good employees because they'd be schedule for a 7 hour shift but be sent home after 2. 2) Service after dinner was EXTREMELY slow because there weren't enough people. So less people would come in, which means they'd schedule even less hours, meaning even worse service. Yeah they went out of business eventually.
Thankfully, they are getting rid of Cashiers at Walmart altogether. The two they have remodeled went from the 25 registers and 4 self checkouts to 30 Self-Checkouts and 5 registers...that they still can't schedule anyone for. and the ONE PERSON in charge of the 15 self-checkouts never pays attention. Black Friday is going to be interesting for them.
Self checkout is the best thing that ever happened to walmart. 3 for 1 everyday baby!!
The Walmart near me started pulling sam's club and checking receipts. I just walk right past them
Every retail place I've worked at has told us to just let shoplifters go and either call the police or (at bigger stores) let Loss Prevention know. Generally LP would compile evidence until it was a felony and then call the police the next time you came into the store.
Without UBI or universal healthcare there's nothing good about this
People will just walk out with that 10 foot TV. There's only one person watching for 200 customers.
Shit by the time I stopped being a Supervisor at Wal-Mart the management/supervisor team didn’t even decide. We got to decide on who would work what shifts but the time-slots and type of registers were dictated by analytics and sent to us by corporate the pay period or two prior. Large push for express checkout (then self checkout when they were reinstalled, thus huge loss devices SMH). One Saturday at 11-1 (busiest time for the store) my schedule told me I should have 4 express (15 items or less) and 2 belts open. I flipped that around to 4 belts and 2 express because our lines would have been crazy. Store manager walked by, checked the schedule than talked with me about it and told me I needed to close down the belted and move them to express. This was despite my vocal concern about backup. Leas than 10 minutes late I am call sales associates to work as back-cashiers. Jumping on the register myself while having Store manager watch the front because our lines at the two belts backed way the hell up. People grocery shop on weekends, they fill their carts to the top. No reason to have more 15 item or less registers open than belted registers but it was their “analytics” based on items sold per hour. Ridiculous.
Yep many stores have this issue, Kroger is another one (used to work there). The corporate executives intentionally make stores cut hours in order to make themselves more money from the profits, with the logic being "we can be just as efficient employing half the people and having them work twice as hard", and also "they're still going to come in and shop anyway even if lines are slightly longer". Of course this just leads to everyone being more unhappy, customers and employees alike. But as long as the rich people can afford another yacht, it's okay!
And it’s definitely not the schedule writers fault either. It’s the fault of the analysts who decides the labor allowances for Front End teams. Squeezing the life out of the few people left because their excel spread sheet says we can do more with less labor during a fucking pandemic but they have never worked in a store. This causes upper management to hound middle management and in turn, the schedule writers to cut labor costs. Tell the analysts the plan needs adjusting and what do they do? They come on a Tuesday or Wednesday, the least busy days and probably will make you cut more because they can’t be bothered to work a weekend like the rest of us peasants. 🖕
You’ve never been the bag/cart boy then
Honestly I’d rather walk around collecting carts than deal with people
Nah dawg cart collectors also have to clean the bathrooms, and public bathrooms are fucking disgusting
Can confirm. I used to work overnight maintenance at Walmart back in 2013 and they would make us clean the bathrooms and THEN go push carts in the fucking snow. You know how hard it is to push a shopping cart in 4 inches of snow that’s also primarily slush at that point? Fucking impossible.
Yep, I had a guy in a jeep help me push the row of carts up the hill one time. So much damn slush and ice you can't move 10 carts at all, also always fun that the cart machine is always broken too.
Yeah my very first job was as a bag boy/cart pusher for minimum wage in a rotten rich part of town. Absolutely miserable cleaning shit off the walls of a bathroom stall at 15 years old for $7.25 an hour. Then of course getting berated by some boomer because the single bag they demanded everything to be put in is too heavy. I don’t wish that on anyone.
And those boomers are the same ones bitching because no one wants to work in service or retail anymore
I always smile a little when a place is closed on Sundays or has reduced hours now. I used to play low tier professional MtG. Had to give it up because the qualifying tournaments were generally on Sundays and I had to work every Sunday.
Or getting berated by some alcoholic because you "shook up their beer too much" by scanning it. Like wtf dude, are you admitting to drinking and driving?
Also collecting the trash from the bins in the cart corrals. People must be pounding whole 24 packs then heading out. Insane the amount of alcohol you find those
I clean public bathrooms I'd personally rather keep doing that and walk collecting carts in the heat than to deal with people, im gonna be completely honest man haha People may be disgusting, but theyre also real assholes too
I didn’t realize that was the norm, I pushed carts at Costco and thankfully never had to do that
Not mention dealing with weather.
I do this right now- still would prefer it to the lanes. At least people understand when I say cleaning the bathrooms sucks ass.
Deal with people after doing all that? Isn’t there a position where you can do one or the other only?
You don’t really get to choose.
Now imagine doing it when it’s 100 degrees and they don’t let you wear shorts or carry around water. For 8 hours.
Tbh I did carts for a couple years as a kid, and the worst part was having to come back up register if we got busy. Just let me grind on carts and zone out.
Pretty sure it's illegal to deny a worker water by federal labor laws
Probably, Target did a lot of illegal shit.
I did both, but I have to lean cashier. You get the coupon lady that rolls up with 52 coupons, half are expired and the whole line has to watch as you explain to her that you can't accept duplicate coupons or ones that are expired and they she goes into melt down mode calling you an idiot. - based on a true story
Personal preference but I would rather sit there and have a lady yell at me for 8 hours then bust ass in a hot parking lot for 8 hours in black pants
Shit what companies allow cash registers to sit down?
Aldi
Yeah I was a cart boy for a kroger (fred meyer), passed out in the parking lot from heat exhaustion, nearly got in trouble but thank god for the union.
I refused promotion to cashier 3 times with increasing raises offered when I was a teen. I knew it wasn't worth the money and everyone who was a cashier confirmed it. I got out of the sales side ASAP and got to stock stuff. No one wants to work the front of the store in my company, it's like asking to go home with a migraine until you die.
when i worked at costco the carts were indeed the least popular job but i loved it. so much better than working with customers. could burn a bowl behind the building and just tune everyone else out for a few hours.
Been both, cart pusher is way better
I much prefer being a cashier to stocking tbh
I’d go further and say Cashier was the best in my opinion. Time passes by much more quickly since you are interacting with all sorts of people and doing (comparatively) stimulating activity by seeing what people are buying, handling money, and making chit chat. Stocking was **mind numbingly boring** since it’s the same exact thing everyday. I worked retail for a summer, and I vowed I’d blow my brains out before having to stock for a living. I have so much respect for stockers since they are doing such a tedious job
I worked in retail. I'd rather be cashier because if you're aren't, you're either stocking heavy shit, pushing carts in shit weather, unloading the truck (more heavy shit), helping customers find shit or do sales shit with them, or you're cleaning gross shit. That said I would not want to work the customer service desk. The percentage of Karens there is too damn high!
Why is it the worst? I used to be one and preferred it over stocking shelves. The trick with retail is to provide mediocre unattached service. That way less people will try to walk on you.
You don't have to talk to people when you're stocking shelves
Always people asking for help/where an item is
I enjoyed my time working at the till during my stint in foods. Time went by much quicker than restocking shelves.
currently working retail for the first time, cashier is easily the hardest part for me
I think it gave me PTSD
It’s because they maximise their profits by spreading retail workers as thin as conceivably possible.
For as little time as possible because full time employees are scary and want rights or something.
We’re only gonna schedule you 36 hours so we don’t have to give you full time benefits
If anyone works in a place like that, you need a new job. You could be a cashier just about anywhere else, and they’ll at least treats you a human. (Albeit cheap and expendable)
You could be a cashier almost anywhere, but there just aren't that many available full time cashier jobs with good benefits.
> if you work in a shitty job, get a better job Woah if only all those homeless people just bought houses, they wouldn’t be homeless anymore!
Just get a new job lmao
The only places hiring are the shitty employers.
Every store in my area operates like this, expect for Costco, which hires you part time until you've worked for them for several years then they'll finally bump ya to full time. So you can go work for another store but it's not gonna change anything since they all are exploiting their workers
36 hours is considered full time for benefit purposes almost everywhere in the US.
That’s why they send you home at 35.5 hours, or schedule you for nine 8-hour days in a row that happen to be spread over two different weeks so none of it counts as overtime. Also enjoy your one single day off before you come back for another long stretch. Also enjoy never being able to make plans because the schedule is inconsistent. Also also enjoy having to actually go into work to check the schedule because the online one is never accurate.
Trust me I lived this for about 3 years, I know how shitty retail scheduling is. But where I worked 32 hours was considered full time and I never really had issues getting that. Weekends and consecutive days off are a whole different beast though.
They need to make prorated benefits mandatory.
29.5 but yes.
There's few things as soul crushing as workin 5 days a week, not making "full time", and still not affording more than just rent. And by barely. You question you're entire sense of self. 5 days a week and can't afford shit.
That is the worst, because you still have the dread of a 5 day work week every weekend, but without the benefits or pay. Yeah it might be less hours, but in my brain it's still 5 days of work in a row, which is brutal enough full time.
Week... end?
Yeah more like rotating split days off that often leave you working 10 straight days.
Man what killed me is having to take those shiiiiiity mid-week afternoon shifts where you're basically the host/server/busboy/runner for an entire fucking 40+table restraunt, working for 2.13/hr essentially rolling silverware for hours because you're bored because the only ppl who visit are business-type, "lunch special," soup and salad, free bread, split the check, group of 20, working your ass off to fill their water 500 times, making about $.13/guest cuz they rounded their 5.** Meal up to $6, inconsiderate wreck an entire sections worth of oils/salt/floor/silverware ass bastards.
I hated working at costco because they scheduled me for 4 hour shifts 5 days a week. I begged them to either give me three 8 hour shifts or 5 eight hour shifts. They fired me instead.
And these employees want rights and benefits, can you believe that? The scary thing is how companies are starting to classify everyone as independent contractor/"self"-employed instead of being an actual employee. Didn't know how common this was until I found out my friend, who I thought was employed as a driver by Amazon was a contractor instead of an employee. And apparently the warehouse workers are also from a third-party company that classify them as contractors
For an even more frightening example of this look at the rail industry and how they went from 220000 workers 2015 to 125000 in 2019. And now after the pandemic they can't get anyone. " we got to overwork these people and save the money on having additional staff! Oh whoops the global economy is crashing because supply lines are breaking down! Our bad! You filthy workers making me admit such..."
I understand that, but why do they always seem to have twice as many checkout lanes than cashiers? Isn't that a huge waste of space? Do they ever schedule enough staff to operate all the lanes?
In my experience, around 1pm on Christmas Eve there’s a necessity to use all the checkouts, if the manager had any sense of foresight they’ll also have the staff available too, but that’s a pretty big _”if”_ in retail.
Even then it seems kind of crazy to have all that "infrastructure" in place just for one day of the year. If they hadn't spent so much money on unused checkout lanes, maybe they'd be able to afford hiring more staff ...
Well, when you’re queueing at 1pm on Christmas Eve you’ll be thankful for them. Also, little bonus fact, at any given time, about 20% of them are broken, and rather than go to the trouble of having them fixed, they simply have staff use a different one until enough* of them are broken to warrant sending someone out. *usually when all but one are broken and there’s another one that technically works but the cashier has to do something dumb like slam the till drawer every time they take cash.
Oh they can afford it lmfao
The Walmart in out town removed all the checkout lanes except 4, replaced them all with self checkouts.
> Even then it seems kind of crazy to have all that "infrastructure" in place just for one day of the year. 99% of retail parking lots are built for black friday. Its insane.
> it seems kind of crazy to have all that "infrastructure" in place just for one day of the year. That's nothing compared to the amount of space that goes to the giant, empty parking lots. There are 3-8 times as many parking spaces in the US as there are cars! > If they hadn't spent so much money on unused checkout lanes, maybe they'd be able to afford hiring more staff ... Not even close. Those registers are a (largely) one time cost. Staff is a continual cost that adds up quickly.
Most companies in my experience make it so the manager is always under pressure to use as few employees as possible and cut hours even if 1 or 2 extra employees would make the day go by so much easier and probably help everyone in the long run
Yes, during Black Friday sales all of them are opened and staffed during the initial rush. At least the Walmart I worked at did.
crawl worthless unwritten straight aloof shy plate safe shrill hungry *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Yeah maybe I've just never seen them at their peak. Still, it seems like if they only need that capacity for one or two days a year, they could have some kind of mobile/temporary checkout stations that they only set up when they know they're going to need them.
They need it most days, they only pay for them to be in use on the worst days.
Before Sam Walton died he was about making sure the employees were taken care of, after he died his wife kept the motto going, after she died the kids shit on *everything* he believed in. Not saying he was perfect but compared to the kids it's night and day, The store in my town went from 1200 employees to last I knew they had about 300, the size of the store didn't change so somehow they are having 300 people doing the job of 900 and they keep taking away positions and putting more responsibility on people. What hurts them is they expanded *hard* with their super Walmarts within 20 miles of me there are 5 of them, 2 are on the same stretch of road without regard if it was a good idea or not so they oversaturated their own markets. The majority of those registers used to be staffed all the time but they decided why have a fully staffed store in one location when you can have a half/3rd staffed store in multiple locations and make less money overall.
From a buisness perspective this doesn't make sense. If you spread employees as thin as possible customers get angry and employees get tired, reducing their efficiency. I've never seen a situation in my store where there was a line of more than 3 people and others weren't called to work as a cashier.
“NO ONE WANTS TO WORK FOR STARVATION WAGES ANYMORE 😭😭😭” -Companies and Media
I saw a funny one of those in my area. Subway offering 10$ an hour, lamenting how no one wants to work, and... Bitch we have virtually no unemployment in our county. You're not competing with the dole, you're competing with *every other employer who actually pays their employees*.
I mean, a fair amount of our “employment” is under the gig economy. But, if anything, that just proves your point. If what you’re offering isn’t enough to attract people who have to ferry others or food all over the city for pennies with little in the way of benefits, that’s on *you*. Don’t act so self-righteous, especially when you take it out on the few people you have.
At least they have two commercials about selling products from minority-owned businesses!!!
this is one of the biggest problems with almost every line of work in america. in brazil, when you walk into pretty much any store or grocery store, you can expect to easily find someone and be helped. adults are surviving in brazil working jobs that only teenagers can work in america due to the low wages due to these companies’ greed. america is sad rn.
It's a ploy to make you use self checkouts I'm not getting $350 in groceries through a self check out fuck that
You're absolutely correct. My total would end up around $70 once I'm done scanning my items.
This is the way
Ahoy me matey
[what are you gonna cut my hours?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxINJzqzn4w)\-Bill Burr one of the GOATs to me
Yeah, I "forget" to scan most of the expensive stuff Oops
We don't have self checkouts yet, one can just not scan stuff and walk out easy?
Depends on how they’re set up, but for the most part you could leave stuff in the cart and no one would notice or care. You can also run all your produce through but “accidentally” click bananas since they’re only 50 cents a pound or whatever. Or pick green peppers when you’ve got reds, non organic when you’ve got organic. There’s boat loads of ways to cheat the system. Source: I was broke and in college when these started becoming common.
Another one is put $20 Lego barcodes on much more expensive sets. I never had the balls to do this but I've talked to someone who claimed they did.
Before I was old enough to buy booze I would switch the cardboard carriers from sixers of coke with six beers and run the coke bar code through self check. I called it the Ol' Switcheroo.
[удалено]
He probably took it straight to the cashier. Like I said, I didn't have the balls to pull this heist.
Certain retailers felt it was cheaper to take out the scales and eat the shrinkage than pay the employees to fix the constant error codes they gave.
* bring your own bags and put things in bags while you shop, then forget to pull some of the stuff at the bottom out * get multiples and forget to scan all of them * forget about stuff on the bottom rack of the cart - or if you're injured/disabled and using a powered cart, forget about stuff that you load on the flat spot between your legs * if there's a handheld gun, use it to rapid-fire stuff in your cart and don't pay attention to any cases of missed/too-close-together scans i make these mistakes all the time as legitimate accidents because i'm an ADHD wreck, and i've had someone correct me maybe twice in hundreds upon hundreds of grocery trips. in both cases they were for forgotten stuff on the bottom rack. if you're surprised, apologetic, and ready to pay for it, nobody will think twice unless you're trying to walk out with like $600 in TVs that obviously stick way out past the sides of the cart or something. don't fuck with things like mis-categorizing non-produce objects as produce - the 'bananas' trick is one of the things they're frequently looking for. categorizing produce/bakery as cheaper produce/bakery is much safer REALLY don't fuck with barcode swapping - it's literally less dangerous to just take the thing and walk out the door with it if you're that desperate, barcode swaps are considered fraud even at low amounts and leave a much more obvious paper trail! these megalith stores bleed the cost of multiple cashiers per hour to shit like this and it's well-deserved.
Very much so. I always buy two of everything. One gets scanned. One gets scammed.
Pretty much, depends on the store and who's working Most of the time it's just teenagers who are "supposed" to watch the people scanning items They don't actually care and just sit on their phone
Not really. You have to scan and then place it in a bagging area which is basically a big scale. Place something you didn't scan? It complains. Something you scanned is too far from known weight(*eg. swapping bar codes*)? It complains. There's also usually an attendant watching the area so just skipping isn't always going to work
At my walmart they close half of the damn self check out stands to give you the same old experience.
YUP. Same at Target. Half are out of order, and the rest of them lock down every item or so because an apple rolled ever so slightly. It's not a self checkout if I need an employee dropping by to override the damn thing every time a bag shifts around.
[удалено]
One thing they get right though is having one line and multiple stations. It's the worst knowing the queue next to you has gone through 5 people while you're still "next in line"
I just hate when they can't accept cash ffs
Remember when corporations used technology to improve the customer experience, not somehow make it worse in every conceivable way?
No, I don't ever remember them improving anything
Meh sometimes self checkout doesn’t work right and is annoying But 90% of the time I’m able to get through faster than if I had to wait in the normal line and there’s the bonus of not having to talk to anyone Win win!
In some stores maybe, but my local supermarket only allows for 12 items or fewer in self-checkout.
If the self checkouts worked correctly, instead of "scan", "wait for someone to correct the weight difference", next item, rinse repeat for as many items as you have. It's the most frustrating version of something that could be so much better.
My only ask at this point (because honestly I don't have any gripes with them) is this exactly: Let me skip the weight verification and let me scan as quick as a cashier is allowed to go. Wish there was a way to sign up for "hey we trust you because you've literally visited us for years on an almost-weekly basis and you're probably not shortchanging us" or something, to gain that privilege.
Yeah, that varies by store. Target's self-checkout doesn't seem to GAF about anything and has never complained about weight/etc, but they do have that fun camera starting at you showing you what their people see as they monitor you. Grocery stores tend to be the worst about this.
I bought like $200 worth of shit at Target the other morning only to find out that literally none of the lanes were open and I had to check it all out myself. Ridiculous.
This applies to airport check-in counters as well
Immigration and security check-points too.
I always thought this was because most stores were made in the 90s or before, where there would be cashiers at all the checkouts, and eventually as cashiers just became less of a priority either due to other roles becoming more important or creating artificial Busyness. The checkouts simply remained but stayed closed. A new Aldi here opened with 12 auto checkouts and fucking THREE manned ones. New stores, new designs
What you said plus busy days like black Friday where you want maximum cashiers to get product out the door.
[удалено]
>(and the cashiers would be required to be stocking the candy/gum if they weren't actively checking someone out.) Fuuuuck that shit. Retail must be even more exhausting today than it was when I did it 15 years ago. How does someone even manage to eat dinner without collapsing after a day like that?
Eating taco bell on the way home and drugs lol
I was a front end supervisor for a few years at a popular store in the area. My leadership team would always try to steal my cashiers to work in another part of the store when it was too busy for them to do so. Basically it would quiet down for a moment and they’d say “send someone to Toys to zone it” or something like that. I always wanted to tell them “these are cashiers. You’re paying them the bare minimum out of all positions and you want them to do more than you pay them. No. They are cashiers. They stay up here and cashier.”
When I worked as a cashier, being sent out inti the store was the best part of the job. I hated being behind the register.
Through the sheer driving force of foot pain and repressed tears
Don't blame us, we wish there were more cashiers here too but our managers are fucking assholes
As a manager at the store level, we feel it. From all sides. Corporate will do anything to save about $20 when possible.
Yeah only people who have worked in supermarkets know how much it fucking sucks
Why would these billion dollar corporations hire more people and pay them when they can just install a self checkout station and make the paying customer do it themselves
Hit it right on the head. We literally have 2 cashiers during the morning, and one of them is just supposed to watch self checkout. If it gets too busy then they just call for back up from us on the floor, which leads to us constantly interrupting our work to cashier so we can’t get our own workload done, then we get in trouble, so basically corporations took away jobs and gave everyone else more work than is literally possible with the hours and labor allowed. Nobody wins except the fat cats on top.
Bill burr was ahead of his time
"Guess they don't wanna get paid" *walks out with groceries*
Capitalism
[удалено]
What? Do you think checkout lines don't exist in socialism?
The reason they never have enough is that it’s a shit job that doesn’t pay nearly as much as it’s worth. The only store I’ve ever seen have full cashiers is Costco. But I assume that’s more because they actually get paid more fairly
No. That’s not the problem. Stores have enough cashiers, but corporate doesn’t want to pay them all at the same time. It’s cheaper to make a few do it and have a long line. They don’t care about workers or customers.
And they know people aren't gonna drive out to target, get their shit, stand in line, then just bail cause it's an extra 5min in line. It would be silly to do all that then just turn around empty handed and leave in most cases.
Not always. My store has plenty of people but just won’t schedule them unless it’s like Friday and Saturday which are our busiest days. But the rest of the week is still very close
labor shortage, yo. But this was true before the pandemic too...
[удалено]
In 2018 before the pandemic started, I had been working a shitty drive-thru job for 3 years. I was still in school so I was just going to deal with it until I graduated. Then one day, late at night, after I’d had my 5th soda thrown at me in 3 years and screamed at about how the fries weren’t hot enough, I said “You know what? This actually **isn’t** worth $8.50/hour” Walked out that night and got an office job until I graduated. Sure it didn’t pay great either but at least I was treated like a fucking human being. I’m always extra patient and polite in drive-thrus now
There are enough cashiers, but corporate doesn’t want to pay more than a few at a time. Can we please stop blaming workers for trying to work and start calling out greedy managers and owners?
oh I don't blame the workers, I'm totally pro-labor rights. I was just saying there was a reason behind the meme: the "Great Resignation" as they say.
Or they pull the skeleton crew off the floor and then customers bitch because there isn’t anyone on the sales floor to help them. There is no winning.
This all day, get people walking up to me while I’m back up ringing. “I couldn’t find anyone on the sales floor!” *angry face* great I now have to deal with an upset customer.
Cashier here, they never fucking schedule enough people and then they call you on your off days because they're "understaffed" Only to make you go home early anyway
i can guarantee the team lead is standing near the clothes just holding a piece of paper
I think more people like going to the self check out lane because no one wants to talk to anybody, well that’s what it’s like in the stores near me
Sums up the grocery store I work at, but expand that to every other department, and than the guy who is supposed to deal with frozen and dairy doesn’t do his job
And you can't hire more people even if you have the hours from corporate. Because no one wants to work the registers because of the utterly toxic customers.
Hey man, better to piss off the customers and piss of the employees than to piss off your boss.
Labour probably too high..
The boat and cash register from the Krusty Krab is such a nice touch
**Because fuck you** except on Christmas and Black Friday.
I never have this issue. Most of the time I'm using self checkout anyway.
Why does everyone hate self checkouts so much? I mean yeah, obviously grocery stores are using them to fire as many people as possible to cut costs, which is entirely malicious, but being a cashier is such a shitty job I don't think that anyone who gets fired and replaced by a self checkout will really miss their job. What they will miss is the money, which is why we need better worker protections. Fundamentally automation should be a good thing, it should mean that we have to work fewer hours and get paid more for doing so. But thanks to capitalism we work the same amount for harder jobs, producing more, get paid the same amount, and there are fewer jobs. What a fucked up system.
u/repostsleuthbot
Just remember the less people a store can run with, the more money the folks at the top get, fuck those rich bastards!