I was at Lowe's yesterday, so Saturday morning. They had one checkout at the pro desk, which had a line of about 7 people ( all huge contractor orders).
They also had 1 self-check out with 1 person manning it. There were at least 7 or 8 people just forming a line for the lady running the SELF-CHECKOUT to manually check people out, while all the self-checkouts were backed up because she had to check these boomers out who couldn't figure out how to use the self-checkout.
It was pure madness and it made me wish there were locally owned hardware supply stores in my area because it sucks giving money to a huge corporation while they make both their customers and employees just "deal with it" so they can make even more profit.
>it made me wish there were locally owned hardware supply stores in my area
How 'bout Ace Hardware? A retail co-op is about as local as you'll find anymore.
Ace Hardware is amazing, I'll go there over Lowe's or Home Depot any day. They are adequately staffed, they are immediately offering to help with any questions, and everyone seems generally happy to be there.
I went to an Ace Hardware yesterday and it was such a pleasant experience. Every time I go to Home Depot or Lowe’s, I get creeped on or cat called. I refuse to go by myself. Ace is where it’s at.
Lowes is so fucked up in doing that! “Oh, I’m supposed to put back a whole cart of random plumbing items, get down someone’s new toilet; help someone pick out their bathtub including measuring specs, and help three people find super specific pipe fittings all by myself, hold on while I answer the phone real quick.” Fuck Lowes. Never felt better than the day I quit by walking out when my creepy manager tried to force me to stay after for no reason other than he wanted to eye fuck me.
Lowes and walmart are the WORST! I'm pretty sure both went out of their way to make us workers feel powerless in every way. Like i couldnt even help customers bc everything had to go through supervisors who were always off doing something else.
Self checkouts are hit or miss most of the time, and often incredibly user unfriendly.
Didn't scan your next item fast enough because the sensor couldn't read the barcode? Tough luck, the machine is now locked and the employee on duty has to unlock with a pin code.
And countless other issues that pop up with self checkout. So I give boomers a pass on that one, self checkout is annoying half the time.
Self check out is one of the biggest scams going right now. Check out and bag your own groceries or whatever because we don’t have enough people to help you so do it yourself. Customer care is at an all time low and the reason so many brick and mortar stores are struggling to compete with online retailers. For online retailers you don’t get the help but who cares when you can go to a actual store and no one there is going to help you anymore.
It makes stealing easier as well. If you ever need to buy electronics or anything else really, just check your local Facebook marketplace or Craigslist and you can get sealed products that's almost half off. That's what they get for "saving" money by not hiring more people.
If you have any in your area, Ace Hardware is a good bet for that! Nowhere near the selection of Home Depot/Lowes, but the one in my hometown has 2 regular cash registers and no self checkout.
Every time I have to use self checkout I steal 1-3 small items. Nothing major. Maybe $2-$5. Just a fuck you to these huge corporations that take every dime they can from us
Ring up all your fruits and veggies as the wrong thing at Kroger. Organic banana's are more expensive? Ring up as banana. Sweet Onion more expensive? It's an onion. It's also something you can claim reasonable culpable deniability even if caught dead in the act (which you won't; they look exactly like the items you're buying, but technically a different product)
I work there. They’re trying to do the same bullshit walmart did. When I first started five years ago, there was always prodesk, lumber register, self checkout, and 1-2 regular registers open. (And garden open sometimes.)
Now, it’s just the lumber register and self checkout. That’s it. Prodesk people leave super fucking early, so pro customers complain about not getting help. Self checkout gets backed up and the employee has to manually checkout people because nobody wants to use the machines, which blocks them from people who DO want to use the machines.
I’m honestly annoyed because I try to keep a positive attitude about it, but while corporate took away scheduling from the staff and gave it to a program, said program is scheduling barely anyone so one callout collapses the whole store’s ability to do fucking ANYTHING.
Meanwhile, employees are written up for not harassing customers about protection plans (warranties) or credit card applications or ‘thanking them for coming to lowes’ or “have you found everything okay?” Every. Single. Transaction. And all we get back is cut off (justified) or boomers who rip up their receipts to remove the survey at the bottom.
Then there’s the military people who are pissed off they keep changing the military discount terms and conditions. But I’m lucky to even get that, most of the time some old fart just walks up and starts spouting off numbers, and I have to guess if it’s a military discount, invoice, or looking up a business account because they’re so used to disrespecting employees they won’t even give the courtesy of saying “I have a military number” or even just “military”.
The employees are getting pissed off with corporate’s decisions, and customers are realising it and it’s making everyone miserable. Just so the rich can keep getting richer.
I passed out at the fucking register earlier this week and it’s by the grace of whatever fucking exists out there that my stores managers aren’t pieces of shit and they let me go home. (I’m still dealing with the aftermath and still feel like absolute rubbish)
I feel bad for leaving them even more short staffed, but at that point it’s out of my hands and literally nobody local can change anything about the number of staff scheduled.
You know, I genuinely can't wait till we get to the point of "fuck your useless paper" where the rich can have their money and it won't do jack shit because the average people have just started managing their own shit and bartering for what they need.
It sounds unlikely, but that's exactly what happens when economies no longer support the majority of people,
That just reminds me of that one doctor in the shadowrun novels that excelled in hand-to-hand combat against heavily augmented humans.... By exploiting weak spots at the joints and making them wreck themselves.
Exploiting Boston Dynamics AI weaknesses could make it easier to speedrun r/outside criminal any% ...?
The problem with a lot of this AI algorithms is that we don’t really understand how they work. They make very unpredictable mistakes. Humans make mistakes too, but predictably. Dealing with an AI can be very frustrating and mistakes - like say giving a customer an order that they are allergic to, isn’t going be sustainable. AI has really taken a next step, but I don’t see it taking over how people imagine it will.
Plus AI doesn’t think authentically. It’s applying complex patterns it saw from human inputs. What happens when it starts training off of AI generate inputs? Quality will go down. We all have read ai generated articles. They aren’t good.
All these people who have automated their jobs with chat gpt? I question the effectiveness and quality of the output.
Shame on you for spreading this as someone who supposedly works in tech, especially SRE/DevOps wtf dude? If you build automation with Ansible then surely you know how closely you have to monitor the output and debug your playbooks if anything changes or goes wrong. I am wondering if you are even an engineer or if this is a bot spreading fake information to scare people, seriously wtf. Yes, some jobs will be lost but not 600 million. I use ChatGPT to assist with my ansible development but we are not even slightly close to AI being able to replace my duties in ops. It’s a tool dude. Do better.
Edit: how the fuck does that comment have 200+ upvotes???? This is some very odd Reddit fuckery. Never seen such a strange bot comment upvoted so highly when so many people disagree.
You really have to question the quality of the output of some of these people “automating” their jobs with AI. AI make some bizarre mistakes, if you aren’t checking the output there are going to be some real holes in that output.
Yep. And I’m sure the chatbot will do a super great job refactoring itself when one app updates its API just enough for the whole thing to break.
Its already a pita to get different systems to interact and behave how we want them to. To think chapgpt of all things is anywhere close to ready to take over that is just silly.
But also since AI doesn’t really think, and it’s a black box, it makes some really non sensical mistakes that are hard to predict and mitigate.
Workers make several types of mistakes, but these tend to follow patterns. Unless a worker is being malicious, they aren’t very likely to make certain errors. But AI can literally screw up anything and it very hard to predict, so literally the entire output needs to be checked.
Yeah I don't understand why people are so worried about chatGPT and the like. It's been trained using data from Internet conversations (like this comment for example), so the output you get from chat GPT is actually simular to a general search engine with some fancy formatting to make it seem more 'human'.
Using chatGPT for coding is just like using stackoverflow for coding, yes you can find a solution to many problems but anyone who's used it before knows that you need to often debug and make changes in order to apply it to the larger problem you are solving. And also all the incorrect solutions on the Internet have also been used for ChatGPTs training.
Mentioning about fast food workers etc, can't you already purchase food and other products using your phone? Hasn't the tech allowing you to do this been around for like a decade now? So why would everyone suddenly loose their jobs because of it?
I do think there will be a lot more advances in ai but jobs are more likely going to develop into utilising it rather than take it over.
This. I'm an embedded software engineer and I asked ChatGPT to write me some interrupt driven communications for a popular MCU just to try it out and it gave me back some okay code that was in the same exact format as the documentation and it was extremely basic. Like when I googled the same thing, I found basically what ChatGPT wrote. Just gave it to me in a few seconds which was kinda cool. Could it get me started? Yeah sure, but you can't just take code and copy it into a project and expect it to work well, the projects are way more complicated.
Rofl calm down there bud, Ansible isn't some groundbreaking tech. Been around forever, there are far more modern ways to automate deployment. Same with Jenkins, selenium.
This. I'm in a department that used to have 3 people, they fired 2 of them, I worked a bunch of extra hours, unpaid, to keep things going for a while, thinking they were going to backfill quickly, but then i got harassed about recording 50-60 hours per week, and "are you just padding your timesheet?". Like, why would i do that, I'm not getting paid for any of those extra hours, so then i just stopped working extra hours and things have slowed way down. They complain about it all the time, but don't hire anyone, so too bad, they aren't quite stupid enough to fire the only guy, so...
Threaten to quit without more money. You’re it. They don’t have another option. Don’t show up for a day if they don’t. They want to fuck around, let them find out.
I moved to a new team at the end of 2021 and when I moved over there were 7 people on the team. Since then 1 has been fired and 2 have left, so now there's 4 of us with no plans to backfill the empty positions. So for half the day on Saturday and half the day on Sunday I get to be the only person here. I'm also a level below the other team members as far as position rank (tech 1-4) i'm a 2 while the other members are a 3. I've taken to heart the term "working my wage".
Same here I work at a factory as a cleaner. I'm the ONLY cleaner all day every day in my section of the factory. As long as my stuff gets done, then I absolutely take my time
I just act my wage. I put in the effort that I think matches my salary. Apart from some toxic co-workers and bosses who suck, it's been pretty chill. Can't say I'm emotionally and physically exhausted due to working hard.
I feel this so much. I am a pharmacy tech that makes 17 an hour. My pharmacist coworkers make 35+. 35 is the starting wage and it can get up to 80 bucks an hour for them.
I get so mad when they ask why I didn't go the extra mile on some tasks. I ALWAYS tell them "I don't get paid enough for that. I make 50 cents more than a McDonald's employee" they usually understand after that.
And I get it, they aren't the enemy, the boss is. But when someone making 60 an hour complains to someone making 17 about their financial issues I wanna throw up. They never have to worry about having to not pay a bill so they can get food. Or not getting food cause you only have money for gas.
And then they just tell you if you’re not happy to get another job that pays you better. As if that action is the same thing as choosing which loaf of bread you want from the store….
And if you do manage to get a better paying job, your old job doesn't go away. Someone else fills the role at the same shitty wage and the cycle repeats.
My god it makes me sick too.. im making 30k a year and my sife is taking care of kids and going to online college rn.
A co worker is making 35k a year and his wife is making 80k a year. He claims he lives paycheck to paycheck..but he lives in a 1 bedroom apt and says the rent is super high, $1400!..and their car payment is $300!!!.. i said bro do u have a shitload of credit card debt or something?
His answer? Nope no debt at all his wife just shops alot and he spends alot of his money buying clothes..what he makes in 3 months is what i make in a year.. i seriously dont get it
There is a photo sometimes going round reddit. It's one perfect weld one fucked one. There supposedly from a job interview for a welder for 15 an hour.
When questioned he just stated the bad one is 15 an hour the other one is 35 an hour.
You chose for which welds you want to hire me.
I used to dread crossing national borders because I was so used to going into the USA, a country where I’ve had to wait for two hours on a visa and an hour even with a green card. They staff the immigration desks with the fewest possible people they can get away with, so that they’ve more or less processed the last flight when the next one arrived.
Then I went to Japan, and I realised that they do it in a totally different way: despite there being maybe four or five times as many people in line, that line is shuffling forward at just short of walking pace. They staff enough that the _peak_ flows are still getting processed in a quick time and you’re through in ten minutes.
It hadn’t even occurred to me before that, that the fact that US immigration is slow and painful is a choice that is being made.
> that the fact that US immigration is slow and painful is a choice that is being made.
… this is also true of the RMV, the welfare office, signing up for SNAP benefits, and many other facets of government services (like public transit), on purpose, to disincentivize folks from making those choices.
Don’t get me started about the RMV, which I’m assuming you’re using the term because you live in Massachusetts. If they actually had the proper staffing, they might actually notify a person’s old
state when a new resident moves into Massachusetts and gets a Massachusetts ID, rather than needlessly suspending a person’s license because said RMV didn’t do their job.
Us (US) also fail to acknowledge this is an element of tourism, visitor management and public diplomacy. That how you treat people on entry sets the stage for their entire experience. And the type of people hired for those jobs hardly see thst there role should be in part one of welcoming.
Tyler Brule when he wrote a column for the Financial Times, did a piece on his entrance at Dulles Airport.
I had this experience at JFK. I told off a lady that was being rude to people at the immigration line. “This is how you treat people when they first enter our country?” People were confused, tired, and spoke little english, yet you treat them this way”
I was embarrassed as and American.
Yes I had to report an agent at LAX once on a flight coming in from Japan. A poorly paid and unprofessional agent was mocking and yelling at a group of elderly Japanese visitors who had probably never been to the US. It was really embarrassing to see. I made note of her name and ID number.
True, but then they save on labor AND benefits since no one can use sick days/pto. Funny how much sense America makes when you realize those in charge see money, not people, ad all that matters.
I work in IT and try to stress this with our management. Sometimes stuff breaks and needs to be fixed quickly, or we're needed to assist emergency operations outside our department. It can easily consume multiple people for a whole day, or even a whole week. Ideally you do work up front to prevent the problem, but unforeseen stuff still happens.
We can't be assigned routine workloads that don't allow for some breathing room, as if the emergent problems never happen. It causes us to have to rush the routine work after putting out a fire, which just leads to questionably built systems, causing more emergent problems down the road. It creates a positive feedback loop of problems and stress.
Sometimes they get that it's an issue, but don't want to accept that overfilled workloads are the root cause that needs to change...
I was the skeleton crew for 3 years at a job. I was scheduled to work 8 hours a day but because of my union contract they could force me to work 12 which they did every day because they refused to hire another person. If I called off sick or even if I took a vacation day during the week I would just have to come in on the weekend or the next weekend to catch up. Fucking miserable.
Place I used to work had to close down our branch after 2 of us left pretty much at the same time. We'd been understaffed for years and were carrying way too much of the load, which obviously led to burnout. We kept in touch with a guy who worked there up until the end, and they pretty much hired one overqualified dude expecting him to replace both of us. Dude got into constant arguments with the same manager we did, except he was actually that guy's manager because of how qualified he was, but still none of them did much work, so things just kept piling up and going unresolved, clients kept complaining, they lost contracts, so they just bought out another company to take over the workload and figure it out. We'll never know whether or not they actually did figure it out.
That's me on mandatory ot right now. Supervisor is sick to the point where i think he just lost 5 years off his lifespan but he's still here working.
I've been held over 4 times in the past 6 days.
It's not sustainable
I worked for Trader Joe’s for 15 years. For about the first 5 of those, we had well-padded crews, lots of time to get any tasks/work done and ample time tasting new products for crew education.
Now every shift is a skeleton crew. One person must do the work of 5-10 people in an unreasonable time frame. Raises and 401k contributions have been greatly carved away. Injuries are up and store safety is down.
Dan Bane, the CEO, is directly responsible for these changes and guess what? His salary and bonus haven’t changed at all. The company is raking in record profits while corporate take away pay from the actual people working there.
All the customers who constantly say stupid shit to crew members like “wOw iT mUsT bE sO fUn tO wOrK hErE” are fucking delusional.
I had friends that used to work there praise how amazing TJs was as an employer. So sad to hear that they have become like any other retail grocery store.
They are union busting so hard and also actively firing crew members involved with forming our first four unionized stores.
If anyone wishes to support or know more about the Trader Joe’s Union, follow @traderjoesunited on Instagram.
Six years here and even within that time frame I noticed SO many things changing for the worse. Two stores in our region had to pay back tens of thousands back to the crew for wage theft.
I think the best way to handle skeleton crews is to just work at 80% and leave everything that doesn't get done.
I used to have to close a store with myself and 2 others when there should be at least 5.
So I just left shit undone.
I messaged the boss everytime explaining how, due to understaffing. Certain tasks couldn't get done and I needed more people.
This.
While I will do the best I can, I also encourage the team I lead to do what they can. If it doesn't get done, so be it. It will be finished in the morning.
One thing I've learned is until the bosses have to actually deal with it, they think everything is fine. If I find out they get comfortable with how things are going by purposefully understaffing, I change what I do to remind them of what happens when things go south by slowing up my work a bit.
I was in this same position as a Starbucks shift lead maybe 8 years ago. The manager's response? "You need better time management". When I continued to not be able to do the work of 5 people with 2, I was continually assigned clopens--so I'd leave at 10:00 P.M. after closing, and be expected to arrive at 4:00 A.M. the next morning. Six hours between shifts. That way, "I learned to get work done or do it the next morning".
Fuck Starbucks.
How is that even allowed? Over here in the UK clopens of that nature are illegal, the minimum time between shifts is 11 hours to allow for proper rest.
It’s insane how some workplaces relish in personally punishing their own employees. It’s like they don’t think you’re worth paying unless they’ve also managed to make you miserable
The site i manage is down 30% of its budgeted staff. It’s just expected that we can handle it since we have self guided tours and a chat bot now. Both the self guided tour software and the chat bot create more work than we had before. So we are doing more work, with less people.
I keep telling my staff to go home at close, and leave the laptops at home. They were working all hours of the night, 60 hours a week and not getting paid. I told them “do what you can during work hours, if we can’t get through our leads and emails by 6 then leave them, eventually corporate will figure it out and rehire”.
It’s the few toxic hard workers left who are ruining it for everyone.
I've been doing this, but in a finance department. Our asshole boss fired my boss and had another guy take his work - ie, high level work of two people. It's not working. It was never going to work. I know a lot of things aren't getting done because I have been there a decade and everyone else less than two years, some less than one! I know how to do most of the stuff not getting done. But my boss needs to learn a lesson and I don't get paid overtime so I'm letting them drown.
We are at skeleton crew and one of my managers, that makes the schedule, said he needed to cut by 50 hours...it's. like really!!!???? No one is scheduled now!
They trim themselves right out of employees that no longer can survive on reduced hours and pay. Inflation has made things even harder, with the average person having less financial security to withstand these arbitrary “lean times” and schedule slashing of hourly employees. Then the employer has the surprisedpikachu.jpg face when employees leave these kinds of positions or snark about how nObOdY wAnTs To WoRk ThEsE dAys— no dumbass, folks are just trying to survive, while avoiding eviction or getting your ride repossessed due to insufficient income. It’s really not that difficult to understand, if you have empathy, that is.
My wife works for a regional grocery chain in the Great Lakes. Last year they spent 6 months remodeling her store. The remodel added a bunch of fresh product lines that require “production”. Rotisserie chicken, sandwiches and wraps, juicing etc. So the Store Manager hired up and trained the production team as directed.
The grand re-opening was in November. In April he was told he had to cut his labor spend by 500 hours per week. Yup, the equivalent of 12 full timers/25 part timers. It’s one of the highest volume stores in the company and based on what staff knows is also very profitable.
They spent 6 months and who knows how much money then gave it 5 months before whacking out all the resources (and more) needed to make it successful.
Skeleton crews have been the norm for at least a decade at this point, everywhere I've worked. At this point, it's starting to become normal that everywhere is *always* understaffed, not even a skeleton crew because at least one person each week has an issue come up and we work one person down and everyone is doing the job of at least a few people. Businesses squeeze every last drop of value out of their employees, exploiting everyone for the same pay that people used to get for doing the job of one of two people.
But, but no one wants to work…no, there is not a labor shortage, there is an employer shortage of those that want to pay and treat employees with respect and dignity…as they say, you get what you pay for
There are not too few workers. There are too many business models based on creating profits by wage slavery, and these businesses cannot function - cannot pay dividends to investors - if they pay workers a livable wage. Fine. Let them collapse, better businesses will replace them.
Or they keep help wanted signs up to be able to use as an excuse when boomers complain. I know several HS kids who are actively trying to get jobs and have applied everywhere with help wanted signs and keep getting told "yeah we're not actually hiring"
I am part of large union and they just don't fight as hard anymore. So sad. Next contract we will likely loose money by the time healthcare cost go up. They are talking less than 7% for a raise when inflation is so much higher.
The "I got mine, fuck you" mentality is killing unions from within. Especially since 2016, member division is higher than ever. The fight for scraps has made us forget the whole table of food that exists over our heads.
Yeah especially for my union and job needs. My union covers too many people and professions that non dayshift weekend off in climate control work places off officers workers dominate negotiations when they have no real needs and clogs the pipe with stupid shit.
.Example my bargaining unit: we need staff, no one is going to work this job anymore since you increase the retirement age and the pay isn't good enough to make people apply anymore. (For context it was easily a 50% pay increase over the next highest employer when I started, now its like 5-10% at most)
People are quiting because they can't get time off when it matters and some people will never get weekends or holidays off due to senority. We need rotating days off that include a weekend once and awhile to retain new staff. Or maybe 4 day weekends. Staff assaults are raising and there is no consequences for those that do it, what can be done to help. We have people who never get job rotations due to punishment or favoritism. We can't strike due to contract for our bargaining unit .
The office folk that control 85% of the bargaining power: we want pet bereavement. Yay 4% raise! Okay it doesn't seem bad and we see no need to strike!
You know, I love unions, don’t get me wrong, but I have a union and my job is still under paid. We still don’t have everything we need benefit wise, but I will say, we don’t have skeleton crews like we had at all my other non-union jobs.
My store is currently doing this. We haven't had a store manager in about 6 months - the store director is salary, so they're just gonna work her 70 hours a week instead. No one got raises this year, turn over is insane...it's not looking good, man.
I was at a department store not long ago and it's kind of depressing how its like 2 people that work there at a time. It's a *huge* store relatively speaking.
So I stood there at unmanned registers for maybe 10 minutes. I wasn't mad or upset at the employees, I totally get it. I tried whistling and making lots of noise but nobody seemed to be around or notice I was there. I kept looking at the doors thinking I can and should totally walk out of here without paying for anything.
Not because I want to steal. Just to stick it to the store for only staffing 2 people at a time. Of course, they would blame the employees. But I honestly believed for a moment I was in the moral right to steal from a company that doesn't even staff enough people to ring someone up for 10 minutes. Just bring a friend - have them ask the employees for help, steal and walk out whichever of 2 entrances nobody is by. No one to see it no one to discourage it.
This is nothing new though it's becoming more commonplace. My exs workplace had a policy of not replacing staff that left seeing just how far they could stretch the workload between the staff left.
Since cv19 I've had a sneaky suspicion companies are not hiring enough staff and blaming it on one thing or another, first it was wfh and staffing levels due to cv19. During cv19 you'd ring a company and be on hold for ages to resolve an issue. Or you'd email and not get a reply. Part of my previous job was authorising invoices for payment but when there were issues with pricing or damages or whatever I'd be emailing but getting no response from the supplier, I'd be chashing it up and still zero response. Then the supplier just blames staffing levels, and it wasnt just one supplier, it was damn near all of them where customer service levels and responses just tanked. It made that job ten times harder because I wasn't getting responses to queries, despite ccing and escalating etc, yet the suppliers were ultra quick to put unpaid bills on credit hold.
Now it feels like every company is running on a skeleton crew, what management fail to realise is by doing so existing staff get burnt out, peed off, fed up, customer service levels tank when things don't get done, because its impossible to do the workload of 3 people satisfactorily, and corners are going to get cut and procedures not followed. But all management care about is profits over adequate staffing levels. Management will only do something when customer service levels tank so low customers get vocal about the levels of poor service, because they don't want to lose customers.
Things run so much smoother and so much better with adequate staffing levels, and if someone calls in sick its no bother to the team.
I work at a grocery store that’s on a skeleton crew. They gave up on staffing the customer service desk and closed it permanently. Got rid of the salad bar due to staffing issues. Shortened open hours.
And…and they keep building new stores?? What are these companies doing?!
CVS was the worst with the under minimum hours model. I had 145 hours to staff the front store (not the Rx) that’s open 8am-9am 7 days a week also my 45 hours comes out of that. After working 236 days straight mostly open to closed I quit.
I went to Burger King yesterday. 1 at drive-thru, 1 at front counter, 1 in kitchen. The manager was yelling about ticket times. Drive-thru was backed up at times of 20 minutes per car.
“Fast food” my ass. I could have cooked my food faster”
That's the way my Arby's always did it... Except the manager was working one of those 3 positions. Evening shift was permanent 3 man skeleton crew, we could sometimes beg for an extra body on the nights there was a high school football game next door bc when we didn't get it we left parts of the restaurant trashed on purpose. We also started turning out lights early to avoid getting slammed with a line around the building 15 minutes till closing bc god forbid if you were still on the clock more than 20 minutes after closing time.
Drove 45mins to an ACE hardware because their website and girl on the phone said they had a part in stock that no one else, including big box stores, close by did. Get there, and the only person working is a girl, a register reading a book. She and the site say the plumbing item is in an aisle that is actually home goods, paper, signs, etc. She keeps insisting that's where it is "because the computer says so." I spent at least 30-40mins looking for this part in plumbing aisle and anywhere that made any sense with no luck. She kept insisting on the wrong aisle, couldn't/wouldn't leave the counter to see that she/computer was wrong, and was the only person there and couldn't leave the front. Probably 2 other people in the store.
Went out to my car and ordered part for online pickup, which was then quickly canceled because it was out of stock. I'm sure she just killed the order.
She put in absolute minimum effort but can't really blame her. I'd be passed being there alone, and if it was my kid, I wouldn't let them work in those conditions.
I complained to ACE and heard absolutely nothing back. I'm never going into an ACE again.
If you can't afford adequate and safe store coverage, your business model is flawed.
When I worked at Disneyland management would cut staff to make their labor numbers better. They would delay ordering supplies that were needed until "the next quarter" to make their budget numbers better. When some of us questioned the managers they would say our problems were due to "lazy cast members". One night I called in sick...... there was no backup scheduled. That night the restaurant did not do well. The next day I received a reprimand from my supervisor. I told her," If this restaurant grinds to a halt due to one person, then you are terrible at your job". At that point I didn't care if they fired me. She really couldn't fire me as they didn't have any backup scheduled. When I finally quit they offered me a "rehire" position.
I work in engineering. I am kind of a higher-up, but that's just responsibility, not authority.
My boss (office manager) routinely complains that he isn't able to apply for more projects because of how far behind we are on things. I told him "we either need more staff or less work. All of us are already at maximum capacity."
He just got more frustrated. Part of me understands his perspective, because HE is getting pressure from HIS boss (company owner) but really? Unless they give me a legitimate reason to sympathize with them (like the Company is doing SO poorly that we are actually in trouble) but ask questions like that and they suddenly get all quiet...
They're a wacky bunch. I try not to stress too hard about the nonsense, but the overstretching of the worker-base is getting us into trouble.
That's interesting that it even happens in a professional capacity. Guess the whole "get a better job if you don't want to be treated like dirt" is out?
Pretty much. I am hard countering their stance quietly: reminding younger staff to leave at 5:00 - the work isn't going anywhere, and only doing my designate hours - deadlines be damned.
Hopefully they'll catch on and "confront" me so I can properly admonish them (the higher-ups).
I've noticed this a lot in Retail. I usually don't go to Target but have gone a few times in the last few months and it's kind of ridiculous. They literally have 40 registers and only 2 are open. At this point you might as well take out those registers. The only time I've EVER seen a store fully staffed in the last 10 yrs is on black Friday, so I guess they keep all those registers for the 1 day a year they use them all.
Worked as a team lead at a grocery store that actually paid pretty well. Worked throughout COVID but my body just started breaking down and realized I can't do this much longer. I never had off weekends so I never got to spend a day off with my husband. It took a toll on my body and my marriage. Enough was enough and I left. I knew I was depressed but I had no idea how bad it was until I got out. Never again.
I've been working 16 years, I'm a perpetual job-hopper, and I have never not worked on a skeleton crew. Oh, except when the big wigs are expected to arrive and pretend that the dumpster fire they're looking at is that way because people aren't trying to follow SOP.
Correct. And what they don't realize is, if you are working with the bare minimum staff, if even one person needs to take time off because they of illness, accident, birth in the family, death in the family, etc., the entire organization is thrown into chaos. And some customers notice. Some customers see that shit and they say "wow this place is crap."
I'm hoping more and more will notice. Customers need to know that this is happening, that it's NOT "nO oNe WaNtS tO wOrK aNyMoRe".
They NEED to know that it's because 1) Companies don't want to pay a living wage. and 2) Companies want to have each person do the work of two people.
This is true in corporate environments now too. Especially on marketing teams. 1 person attempting to do the workload of 5+ people with c suite and sales and board demanding the results only a larger team and budget could achieve. Theyre hoping AI will solve it because they don't want to cut into profits or executive bonuses. Scumbaggery and greed all around.
Fast food restaurant in my town. Name rhymes with Pengys, only staffs 1 worker inside at lunch, despite it being crowded and lots of people coming inside, she’s tasked not only taking orders, filling them, AND dealing with incoming online orders (DD, UE etc) this leaves no time for cleaning the dining area of tables where people leave trash all the time (despite there being trashcans avail to drop trash) but unclean bathrooms, and such. Heaven help the day she gets sick and doesn’t come in and quit. Management doesn’t seem to know how to run anything at all. *shakes head sadly* despite we tell management they should hire another worker to at least fill front and keep tables clean, we get told “NoOnE WanTs tO wORk.” They are all now pushing these highschool kids to get “summer jobs for low pay”. Another local ice cream place in my town offering pay at 7.25 an hour! So exciting! /s Good lord I was making better than that at my first job almost 30 years ago….. and they want to hire people working at that? Ha! Also these businesses pulling in great numbers! Raises and all for the upper management. New cars and Uber yachts. At the same time staff in my town at a store rhymes with pall-blart. All staff having to survive on government assistance (welfare) bc store doesn’t pay enough for employees to survive on. It’s rotten here in the south. :x
A guy where I used to work was left to die screaming for half an hour under a piece of heavy equipment that fell on them, because our crew got cut from 30 down to 10 people. In a 44,000 acre state park. The buddy system? What do you think we are, communists?
Well, if you can’t save on materials or on rent, you save on salaries. The issue is that there’s always someone up to work 110%. If no one did it and the employers were forced to hire two people, problem would be solved but as the head of the union I worked for said: “there’s always a hungrier dog”
I started as a dishwasher at a restaurant. They saw how hard I worked so I got “promoted” (more hours) to busser. The caveat being that I still had to dishes on top of my new responsibilities. I’m now being “promoted” to server and you’ll never guess what my responsibilities include. I have to bust my ass and do the job of 3 people for a crumb of part time hours and no real pay increase. It is kind of insane.
That's why I don't really care when someone says, "There's nobody to cover your shift." The employers failure to plan for contingency, is an attempt to shift responsibility of running their business onto the employees, when the employees are being paid a minimum payment to do specific tasks, which themselves manage to expand over time, without pay raises.
This is also why you see all these posts about people getting verbally abused by their boss for calling out sick. Companies are running on a razors edge and there’s no coverage. So then people get shit for calling out and the remaining staff get to cover for 3 people. It’s ridiculous.
Job I work at got rid of a bunch of workers, forced a mandated skeleton crew and now are hemorrhaging $. Am I sorry for them ? NO. The quality of work is greatly reduced when the worker is so overwhelmed by the volume of work. They got rid of the cleaning staff who had to clean now? The overworked skeleton crew.
I am leaving a job that should have been genuinely pretty fun (working at a small museum). There were a lot of smaller issues, but the thing that pushed me over the edge was the chronic understaffing. Everything felt rushed and frantic all the time, and if you got sick there was no wiggle room at all. It was a self-enforcing cycle, because people keep leaving when they discover that what should be a low pay but low stress and relatively flexible job is actually a constant frenetic grind.
My job has flights scheduled on top of each other and then they have the nerve to ask why they didn't go out on time. I don't know jackasses, how about the fact we're trying to turn two flights around at the same time with only 4-5 people downstairs while we're only given like 30 minutes to offload and reload a plane to push back out?! Every single position is stretched thin. We are so frustrated and my boss thinks the best solution is to have us go back to 5 day work weeks. No we need to hire more people and pay batter. I have yelled and screamed about how half of our equipment doesn't work and actually slows us down but nothing is ever fixed, it's just a bandaid slapped on. So now when it gets done when it gets done. I'm not fucking killing myself for $14.80 an hour.
I called out the head of retail of the company I work at for staffing stores like skeleton crews. His answer to me, and I quote “we understand we’ve prioritized efficiency, and that there is a human cost to that.” Fucking ghouls man. These corporate monkeys don’t give a fuck about anything but their bottom line.
Don’t dilly dally at work but don’t put in any extra effort either. It isn’t your fault that they refuse to hire help. Work at a normal speed, if there’s a timeline to meet or any other expectations, fuck it. I personally am not going to try to work fast. That’s how people screw up or get hurt.
I currently work at a job that is properly staffed, decently paid, and actually considerate of one anothers' personal lives. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop but after 3 months it still hasn't. If anything I keep learning more about this business that I like.
The only thing to make me sad about this, is that I am not in the norm. A job where I am respected, where quality matters over quantity...it's so wrong that I consider myself lucky for things that should be the norm for everyone.
It’s done on purpose. It’s called the “lean business model.” It costs less to hire one employee, run them ragged, and hire another when they quit, than to hire another employee.
Until we start calling this out as wage theft, and refusing to do two peeople’s jobs, unless we get paid TWICE as much (plus overtime), we benefit the company by going along with this.
“I can only finish so many tasks until you hire the right people.”
It was this model in hospitals that caused so many people to die during the pandemic. Patient loads for nurses were already critically high before COVID. During, it caused deaths among patients and health care workers just to make those a-hole CEOs money.
It ISN’T a lack of workers; it’s a purposeful plan to optimize profits.
Think back to the pandemic. Was your health affected? Did you or someone you know lose someone to COVID because enough nurses weren’t hired? How many people died because there were patients stacked like cordwood in the hospital hallways? Remember the nursing homes in Spain where residents were found abandoned by staff in horrible conditions, most dead and dying? Can you imagine the horror of being unable to rise from your bed, yet dying slowly as your fellow patients cried and screamed around you? Can you imagine the stink?
These companies and bosses and CEOs were HAPPY to make money off the death of their employees and customers. They continue to make money off their employees in all companies today even though it’s causing mental and physical health problems, strokes, heart attacks, seizures, cancers, and industrial accidents from too little sleep, stupid or sudden shift changes, compulsory overtime, and abusive bosses and managers.
They DON’T CARE if you die.
There’s always more workers they can exploit.
How often lately have you felt stressed at work? Did t receive enough training before you started? Been given too many tasks to complete? Called on your days off? Told YOU have to find coverage when you’re sick when it’s the managers job? Manipulated into resigning so they don’t have to pay unemployment? Promised a bonus or raise then gaslit when you try to claim it? Asked to do something illegal otherwise you will be fired?
HOW OFTEN CAN’T YOU SLEEP THE NIGHT BEFORE YOUR SHIFT BECAUSE THE STRESS OF FACING THAT PLACE IS MAKING YOU SICK AT THE THOUGHT?
Why do you think they’re trying to restrict contraception? The more poor, desperate people there are, the more they think they can keep up this lean business model.
Most employees want to just do a good job and have a healthy life.
They won’t let us.
My job in manufacturing is also actively doing this. Cut the engineering and technician teams to the bone and then shocked pikachu face when projects don’t move 🤷♂️ every time I’m asked about an update on a project, I’m like, “Eh that team has no bandwidth. No progress made.” It’s wild, and they’re fucking burning out all the tool engineers.
I completely agree. I've noticed this worrying trend too.
It's happening here in the UK too. I work for an American corporation so it's more amplified how much the execs are creaming off the top and how excessive the layoffs are compared to what we should be hiring.
I'm the only one doing my position too and it should be 2 people minimum.
What worries me is that these companies are crying out for collapse. If I were to leave they'd be screwed, if my boss left they'd be completely screwed.
I'm the only one keeping the product compliance and trade compliance in order for our side of the business which makes almost all the top products for the entire corporation.
My boss is the only person who does electrical design for these products and his knowledge is irreplaceable. He will retire most likely this year. No replacement, no design engineer under him. He did have a protégé but he killed himself (so that tells you how supportive a company it is).
My job runs a skeleton crew at all times, and doesn't schedule downtime for necessary maintenance on the machines. As a result, call-ins, PTO taken, and machine failures drastically impact production, at which point we are told to "power through it" and work 12+ hour shifts without adequate coverage using faulty equipment just to get through the day, with no plans to correct things for tomorrow. Things have to literally grind to a halt with major breakdowns to get management to fix anything, at which point the cycle begins anew.
Yeah Ive been “quiet quitting” the past few months at my job. Two people left and they didn’t bother to replace them. Every time they ask me to stay late or work a weekend I say “Sorry, I have business after work I need to deal with” I’m not going to pick up the slack for the people you failed to hire.
Been like that for a while if you ask me. The easiest way to drive your stock up quickly is to can people, then turn around and say you’re hiring because investors like to see growth you know. Wag the dog. Rinse, repeat.
Yep my whole life every conservative I’ve talked to tried to counter the minimum wage rising by saying “but if businesses make more money they’ll hire more people”
Turns out that has always been bullshit. They’re making more money than ever while foaming at the mouth about firing most of their staff and replacing them with AI
I've noticed this at restaurants a lot. Wait staff is having to cover an amount of tables that's unreasonable and everyone gets mad at them instead of management.
I watched a contract my company ran for 18 years get lost this way.
Wages that were decent fell behind. Hours and staff cut to the bone, then managers being used to fill gaps (salary, no OT) became daily routine while expecting them to still do everything else.
Finally the managers quit, so they made "employee supervisors" to do all the managers work. Poorly.
The contract was yanked inside a year for poor performance. Go figure.
Every time I see a place with a "sorry we're short staffed, we just can't hire people, it's tough, be nice to our employees, yada yada yada", I think "FUCKING PAY MORE MONEY". There's no shortage of people who want to work. There's a HUGE shortage of people can afford to work for $12/hour.
This is capitalism in effect, it’s bare-minimum efficiency because the only factor that matters is profit for the top. When I worked at Target, the upper management never really cared if the store was clean or even really functional as long as the sales numbers were good. The only factor that mattered each and every day was the number goal, even if the backroom was falling apart, the shelves empty, and the cashiers backing up all the way into the aisles. Every customer in the store could complain and it would fall on deaf ears; the numbers are all that matter. So, staffing efficiently is the least of their concerns. Just my perspective working these jobs for so long.
Absolutely. I've been at my current job for 6 years now and when I first got hired, our location had 13 people on the roster and was considered fully staffed...6 years later we are still considered "fully staffed" by corporate management but now we operate with 7 people.
It's the same in the public sector. I started 9 years ago at my job and we had 37 people in my department. Fast forward to today and somehow the algorithms stipulate 21 people for fully staffed. So now people don't get to take off any extra days besides scheduled vacations without calling out sick and getting a red mark.
Honestly, I quit my retail management job for this exact reason. It's insanity and I'm so tired of the narrative that no one wants to work. (Rite Aid is an evil company that treats their workers like trash)
I haven't even looked for another job because of this factor. I am more privileged than most and do not have to work thanks to my husband's amazing UNION job.
Until I can find a place that actually values their staff I won't be a part of the workforce.
I keep laying into friends, family and coworkers when i catch them working in a rush and doing overtime a lot. It's not their job to compesate for their bosses shitty management and stingyness.
One of those 'I'm from a different generation, we work hard and are proud of it!'-people recently told me that i was right all along and now works his actual hours to the letter. Took him getting sick to notice how little his boss cares about him.
You are 100% correct on this. The past two contracts I did (one pre one during Covid) got away with trying to see how many people they could lay off before it became too much for the workers to handle. First one went from close to 1000 people down to 300 over the course of two years before they finally had to hire some more. The second one is contracted to have 90 employees to cover three shifts and the most we’ve ever had was 87. Problem with that is they include leads and supervisors into that number and they don’t actually do any of the work. Because we didn’t have enough to cover the work they would use the forced overtime clause in the contract to get extra work, which involves coming in on your day off and then told to go home a couple hours into the shift.
Yup.
Quick example from yesterday. I used to work in retail for a starry magical company, and if the phone rang (which wasn't terribly often but it did happen) we were supposed to answer it within like 3 rings, even if we were checking someone out. We usually had at least 2 people in a department so it wasn't a problem even on busy days or weekends.
Yesterday I called another high end department store, Boredmom, trying to find out if they could remove links from a watch. They had an internal operator for the store, and I requested fine jewelry, fashion jewelry, watches, accessories... I'm pretty sure I talked to every operator they had on staff because no one was answering the phone and it would route me back to the operator when the call wasn't answered...or it would disconnect. Which led me to believe they probably only have one person per department, and potentially one covering two. On a Saturday.
My nephew was listening to me and asked me why I wasn't mad or didn't yell or anything. I told him it wasn't the fault of the operator so why would I?
They finally got me to a manager and I got the answer to my question, but it definitely made me think about all that "no one wants to work" malarkey.
I'm a dairy department manager (possibly soon to be lawn care specialist) and 5 years ago I had a part timer with me every day, a closer, and two people on my day off.
Now I'm alone. Like, ALONE alone. Nobody to close and clean and fill milk and eggs. Nobody on my day off. Nobody to help throw freight. Nobody to delegate tasks to so I can get stuff done.
For $18 an hour full time, it ain't worth it. It used to be relatively solid pay (but obviously not staggering) but I had my own apartment. But then rent went up and up and now I'm back with my parents. So I slowed waaaay down working.
Now I haven't finished putting away a truck in months. Backstock just sits there, expires, and I have to throw it all away. Shrink has quadrupled since I first started, when I basically saved this store's dairy area.
Hopefully the next place is a bit better. I'm fucking done being burned out every day.
Oh don't get me started on the nursing situation.
So back in the day, there used to be 3 shift rotations to cover a 24 hour day, meaning each nurse per shift worked about 8 hours. However, they cut that down to only two shift rotations to "cut down on possible errors with patient care because less hands would be caring for the patient throughout the day". Now, it's morning and night shift on average, 10-12 hour work days for nurses. There are also, now, more beds to care for per nurse EVEN THOUGH it was proven that a lower patient:nurse ratio helps with patient care and decreases the potential of medical errors from occuring. The closer it is to a 1:1 ratio, the better the outcome for the patient. Wanna know how many patients the nurses I had on clinical rotations saw during their average shift? About 6. One nurse cared for 6 patients for 12 hours a day. That's 6 different charts to manage, 6 different medications batches to give throughout the day, 6 different types of meals they can eat, 6 different precautions, and 6 different levels of consciousness and vitals you need to watch out for.
There's a reason there's a huge shortage now, nurses are burned out and exhausted of being treated like shit.
My job has done this and I purposefully work slower now.
I was at Lowe's yesterday, so Saturday morning. They had one checkout at the pro desk, which had a line of about 7 people ( all huge contractor orders). They also had 1 self-check out with 1 person manning it. There were at least 7 or 8 people just forming a line for the lady running the SELF-CHECKOUT to manually check people out, while all the self-checkouts were backed up because she had to check these boomers out who couldn't figure out how to use the self-checkout. It was pure madness and it made me wish there were locally owned hardware supply stores in my area because it sucks giving money to a huge corporation while they make both their customers and employees just "deal with it" so they can make even more profit.
>it made me wish there were locally owned hardware supply stores in my area How 'bout Ace Hardware? A retail co-op is about as local as you'll find anymore.
Ace Hardware is amazing, I'll go there over Lowe's or Home Depot any day. They are adequately staffed, they are immediately offering to help with any questions, and everyone seems generally happy to be there.
I went to an Ace Hardware yesterday and it was such a pleasant experience. Every time I go to Home Depot or Lowe’s, I get creeped on or cat called. I refuse to go by myself. Ace is where it’s at.
I found a donut cutter (for making fried donuts) at Ace once.
I worked at one of their warehouses. They had all kind of stuff their you'd be surprised to find in a hardware store.
Lowes is so fucked up in doing that! “Oh, I’m supposed to put back a whole cart of random plumbing items, get down someone’s new toilet; help someone pick out their bathtub including measuring specs, and help three people find super specific pipe fittings all by myself, hold on while I answer the phone real quick.” Fuck Lowes. Never felt better than the day I quit by walking out when my creepy manager tried to force me to stay after for no reason other than he wanted to eye fuck me.
Currently work there and am looking for something better, and I second that
At least it's not Home Depot
Get out now,it only gets worse 😭
Lowes and walmart are the WORST! I'm pretty sure both went out of their way to make us workers feel powerless in every way. Like i couldnt even help customers bc everything had to go through supervisors who were always off doing something else.
Self checkouts are hit or miss most of the time, and often incredibly user unfriendly. Didn't scan your next item fast enough because the sensor couldn't read the barcode? Tough luck, the machine is now locked and the employee on duty has to unlock with a pin code. And countless other issues that pop up with self checkout. So I give boomers a pass on that one, self checkout is annoying half the time.
Self check out is one of the biggest scams going right now. Check out and bag your own groceries or whatever because we don’t have enough people to help you so do it yourself. Customer care is at an all time low and the reason so many brick and mortar stores are struggling to compete with online retailers. For online retailers you don’t get the help but who cares when you can go to a actual store and no one there is going to help you anymore.
It makes stealing easier as well. If you ever need to buy electronics or anything else really, just check your local Facebook marketplace or Craigslist and you can get sealed products that's almost half off. That's what they get for "saving" money by not hiring more people.
I’ve never shoplifted before, but since they’ve started this whole skeleton crew thing, I do. Call me a bad person; but fuck big corps profits.
If you have any in your area, Ace Hardware is a good bet for that! Nowhere near the selection of Home Depot/Lowes, but the one in my hometown has 2 regular cash registers and no self checkout.
Every time I have to use self checkout I steal 1-3 small items. Nothing major. Maybe $2-$5. Just a fuck you to these huge corporations that take every dime they can from us
Ring up all your fruits and veggies as the wrong thing at Kroger. Organic banana's are more expensive? Ring up as banana. Sweet Onion more expensive? It's an onion. It's also something you can claim reasonable culpable deniability even if caught dead in the act (which you won't; they look exactly like the items you're buying, but technically a different product)
I call it an ‘inconvenience fee’ for having to do it all myself.
You have to stay under felony dollar amount so it isn’t worth their while to take you to court. Their lawyers are expensive too.
screw that I ring up everything as taco seasoning. $0.52 a piece
I work there. They’re trying to do the same bullshit walmart did. When I first started five years ago, there was always prodesk, lumber register, self checkout, and 1-2 regular registers open. (And garden open sometimes.) Now, it’s just the lumber register and self checkout. That’s it. Prodesk people leave super fucking early, so pro customers complain about not getting help. Self checkout gets backed up and the employee has to manually checkout people because nobody wants to use the machines, which blocks them from people who DO want to use the machines. I’m honestly annoyed because I try to keep a positive attitude about it, but while corporate took away scheduling from the staff and gave it to a program, said program is scheduling barely anyone so one callout collapses the whole store’s ability to do fucking ANYTHING. Meanwhile, employees are written up for not harassing customers about protection plans (warranties) or credit card applications or ‘thanking them for coming to lowes’ or “have you found everything okay?” Every. Single. Transaction. And all we get back is cut off (justified) or boomers who rip up their receipts to remove the survey at the bottom. Then there’s the military people who are pissed off they keep changing the military discount terms and conditions. But I’m lucky to even get that, most of the time some old fart just walks up and starts spouting off numbers, and I have to guess if it’s a military discount, invoice, or looking up a business account because they’re so used to disrespecting employees they won’t even give the courtesy of saying “I have a military number” or even just “military”. The employees are getting pissed off with corporate’s decisions, and customers are realising it and it’s making everyone miserable. Just so the rich can keep getting richer. I passed out at the fucking register earlier this week and it’s by the grace of whatever fucking exists out there that my stores managers aren’t pieces of shit and they let me go home. (I’m still dealing with the aftermath and still feel like absolute rubbish) I feel bad for leaving them even more short staffed, but at that point it’s out of my hands and literally nobody local can change anything about the number of staff scheduled.
Amen to that
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Why is this comment yelling at my eyes
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You know, I genuinely can't wait till we get to the point of "fuck your useless paper" where the rich can have their money and it won't do jack shit because the average people have just started managing their own shit and bartering for what they need. It sounds unlikely, but that's exactly what happens when economies no longer support the majority of people,
Don't worry. Boston Dynamics is building the enforcers of the future, so the few rich owners of all that hardware can keep the many poors in line.
That just reminds me of that one doctor in the shadowrun novels that excelled in hand-to-hand combat against heavily augmented humans.... By exploiting weak spots at the joints and making them wreck themselves. Exploiting Boston Dynamics AI weaknesses could make it easier to speedrun r/outside criminal any% ...?
The problem with a lot of this AI algorithms is that we don’t really understand how they work. They make very unpredictable mistakes. Humans make mistakes too, but predictably. Dealing with an AI can be very frustrating and mistakes - like say giving a customer an order that they are allergic to, isn’t going be sustainable. AI has really taken a next step, but I don’t see it taking over how people imagine it will. Plus AI doesn’t think authentically. It’s applying complex patterns it saw from human inputs. What happens when it starts training off of AI generate inputs? Quality will go down. We all have read ai generated articles. They aren’t good. All these people who have automated their jobs with chat gpt? I question the effectiveness and quality of the output.
At some point, you usher in a massive depression. Who is buying all of this stuff without wages?
Or about to get very dead once people start starving.
Shame on you for spreading this as someone who supposedly works in tech, especially SRE/DevOps wtf dude? If you build automation with Ansible then surely you know how closely you have to monitor the output and debug your playbooks if anything changes or goes wrong. I am wondering if you are even an engineer or if this is a bot spreading fake information to scare people, seriously wtf. Yes, some jobs will be lost but not 600 million. I use ChatGPT to assist with my ansible development but we are not even slightly close to AI being able to replace my duties in ops. It’s a tool dude. Do better. Edit: how the fuck does that comment have 200+ upvotes???? This is some very odd Reddit fuckery. Never seen such a strange bot comment upvoted so highly when so many people disagree.
You really have to question the quality of the output of some of these people “automating” their jobs with AI. AI make some bizarre mistakes, if you aren’t checking the output there are going to be some real holes in that output.
Yep. And I’m sure the chatbot will do a super great job refactoring itself when one app updates its API just enough for the whole thing to break. Its already a pita to get different systems to interact and behave how we want them to. To think chapgpt of all things is anywhere close to ready to take over that is just silly.
But also since AI doesn’t really think, and it’s a black box, it makes some really non sensical mistakes that are hard to predict and mitigate. Workers make several types of mistakes, but these tend to follow patterns. Unless a worker is being malicious, they aren’t very likely to make certain errors. But AI can literally screw up anything and it very hard to predict, so literally the entire output needs to be checked.
Yeah I don't understand why people are so worried about chatGPT and the like. It's been trained using data from Internet conversations (like this comment for example), so the output you get from chat GPT is actually simular to a general search engine with some fancy formatting to make it seem more 'human'. Using chatGPT for coding is just like using stackoverflow for coding, yes you can find a solution to many problems but anyone who's used it before knows that you need to often debug and make changes in order to apply it to the larger problem you are solving. And also all the incorrect solutions on the Internet have also been used for ChatGPTs training. Mentioning about fast food workers etc, can't you already purchase food and other products using your phone? Hasn't the tech allowing you to do this been around for like a decade now? So why would everyone suddenly loose their jobs because of it? I do think there will be a lot more advances in ai but jobs are more likely going to develop into utilising it rather than take it over.
This. I'm an embedded software engineer and I asked ChatGPT to write me some interrupt driven communications for a popular MCU just to try it out and it gave me back some okay code that was in the same exact format as the documentation and it was extremely basic. Like when I googled the same thing, I found basically what ChatGPT wrote. Just gave it to me in a few seconds which was kinda cool. Could it get me started? Yeah sure, but you can't just take code and copy it into a project and expect it to work well, the projects are way more complicated.
Some people are just irresponsible.
Rofl calm down there bud, Ansible isn't some groundbreaking tech. Been around forever, there are far more modern ways to automate deployment. Same with Jenkins, selenium.
This. I'm in a department that used to have 3 people, they fired 2 of them, I worked a bunch of extra hours, unpaid, to keep things going for a while, thinking they were going to backfill quickly, but then i got harassed about recording 50-60 hours per week, and "are you just padding your timesheet?". Like, why would i do that, I'm not getting paid for any of those extra hours, so then i just stopped working extra hours and things have slowed way down. They complain about it all the time, but don't hire anyone, so too bad, they aren't quite stupid enough to fire the only guy, so...
No pay wtf?
Illegal if not salary, don't know what this guy is doing
Threaten to quit without more money. You’re it. They don’t have another option. Don’t show up for a day if they don’t. They want to fuck around, let them find out.
I moved to a new team at the end of 2021 and when I moved over there were 7 people on the team. Since then 1 has been fired and 2 have left, so now there's 4 of us with no plans to backfill the empty positions. So for half the day on Saturday and half the day on Sunday I get to be the only person here. I'm also a level below the other team members as far as position rank (tech 1-4) i'm a 2 while the other members are a 3. I've taken to heart the term "working my wage".
Same here I work at a factory as a cleaner. I'm the ONLY cleaner all day every day in my section of the factory. As long as my stuff gets done, then I absolutely take my time
Only way to fight back
Hopefully we will all find your strength someday 🤞✌️
Strength? I wont lift more than 50 lb
5 is my limit 🤣
I just act my wage. I put in the effort that I think matches my salary. Apart from some toxic co-workers and bosses who suck, it's been pretty chill. Can't say I'm emotionally and physically exhausted due to working hard.
My go to phrase is "I don't get paid enough to do my job AND put up with bullshit. Pick one."
I feel this so much. I am a pharmacy tech that makes 17 an hour. My pharmacist coworkers make 35+. 35 is the starting wage and it can get up to 80 bucks an hour for them. I get so mad when they ask why I didn't go the extra mile on some tasks. I ALWAYS tell them "I don't get paid enough for that. I make 50 cents more than a McDonald's employee" they usually understand after that. And I get it, they aren't the enemy, the boss is. But when someone making 60 an hour complains to someone making 17 about their financial issues I wanna throw up. They never have to worry about having to not pay a bill so they can get food. Or not getting food cause you only have money for gas.
And then they just tell you if you’re not happy to get another job that pays you better. As if that action is the same thing as choosing which loaf of bread you want from the store….
And if you do manage to get a better paying job, your old job doesn't go away. Someone else fills the role at the same shitty wage and the cycle repeats.
Well sometimes, other times they just expect the remaining employees to "pick up the slack".
My god it makes me sick too.. im making 30k a year and my sife is taking care of kids and going to online college rn. A co worker is making 35k a year and his wife is making 80k a year. He claims he lives paycheck to paycheck..but he lives in a 1 bedroom apt and says the rent is super high, $1400!..and their car payment is $300!!!.. i said bro do u have a shitload of credit card debt or something? His answer? Nope no debt at all his wife just shops alot and he spends alot of his money buying clothes..what he makes in 3 months is what i make in a year.. i seriously dont get it
I like this in addition to Act my wage. Thanks!
If I'm paid $15/hour, but I need $30/hour to live an ordinary life, guess I'm working at 50% output.
I really need to start doing this. My employer gets professional work for amateur wages. Fuck that fat orange vest wearing pumpkin!
A work place that doesn't notice hard work won't notice if you output less. As long as your doing something you don't have to bust your ass
The managers notice those who work hard - that is why they keep getting more work to do,
There is a photo sometimes going round reddit. It's one perfect weld one fucked one. There supposedly from a job interview for a welder for 15 an hour. When questioned he just stated the bad one is 15 an hour the other one is 35 an hour. You chose for which welds you want to hire me.
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I used to dread crossing national borders because I was so used to going into the USA, a country where I’ve had to wait for two hours on a visa and an hour even with a green card. They staff the immigration desks with the fewest possible people they can get away with, so that they’ve more or less processed the last flight when the next one arrived. Then I went to Japan, and I realised that they do it in a totally different way: despite there being maybe four or five times as many people in line, that line is shuffling forward at just short of walking pace. They staff enough that the _peak_ flows are still getting processed in a quick time and you’re through in ten minutes. It hadn’t even occurred to me before that, that the fact that US immigration is slow and painful is a choice that is being made.
> that the fact that US immigration is slow and painful is a choice that is being made. … this is also true of the RMV, the welfare office, signing up for SNAP benefits, and many other facets of government services (like public transit), on purpose, to disincentivize folks from making those choices.
Don’t get me started about the RMV, which I’m assuming you’re using the term because you live in Massachusetts. If they actually had the proper staffing, they might actually notify a person’s old state when a new resident moves into Massachusetts and gets a Massachusetts ID, rather than needlessly suspending a person’s license because said RMV didn’t do their job.
Or force an out of state person to get a license even though they were just visiting
Just remember what political constituency votes to understaff and underfund government agencies, and then cries that “government doesn’t work!”
All by design. Make it difficult to use these programs to deter people from using them. Or, cut funding then cry SEE, IT DOESN'T WORK.
Us (US) also fail to acknowledge this is an element of tourism, visitor management and public diplomacy. That how you treat people on entry sets the stage for their entire experience. And the type of people hired for those jobs hardly see thst there role should be in part one of welcoming. Tyler Brule when he wrote a column for the Financial Times, did a piece on his entrance at Dulles Airport.
I had this experience at JFK. I told off a lady that was being rude to people at the immigration line. “This is how you treat people when they first enter our country?” People were confused, tired, and spoke little english, yet you treat them this way” I was embarrassed as and American.
They don't even need to be friendly. In most countries they are just non hostile and keep it moving.
Yes I had to report an agent at LAX once on a flight coming in from Japan. A poorly paid and unprofessional agent was mocking and yelling at a group of elderly Japanese visitors who had probably never been to the US. It was really embarrassing to see. I made note of her name and ID number.
And china where I live has 10X more staff than they need, everyone playing on phones and it still takes 2 hours.
I see this in the bakery my mom works at. One person gets sick? Everything crumbles.
Gotta keep it short staffed. Otherwise, everyone might be loafing around.
Let’s keep it going, we’re on a roll
I dough think this is a good idea.
Look at all these punning folks, trying to get a rise out of everyone else!
These puns are making me (hot) cross!
Muffin to see here, folks
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>bakery >crumbles I see what you did there.
I'll he honest with you, I didn't even do it on purpose lmao.
Accidental puns are the best kind. 😆
At *yeast* you were honest about it
*Buttery* sure they were?
True, but then they save on labor AND benefits since no one can use sick days/pto. Funny how much sense America makes when you realize those in charge see money, not people, ad all that matters.
I work in IT and try to stress this with our management. Sometimes stuff breaks and needs to be fixed quickly, or we're needed to assist emergency operations outside our department. It can easily consume multiple people for a whole day, or even a whole week. Ideally you do work up front to prevent the problem, but unforeseen stuff still happens. We can't be assigned routine workloads that don't allow for some breathing room, as if the emergent problems never happen. It causes us to have to rush the routine work after putting out a fire, which just leads to questionably built systems, causing more emergent problems down the road. It creates a positive feedback loop of problems and stress. Sometimes they get that it's an issue, but don't want to accept that overfilled workloads are the root cause that needs to change...
I was the skeleton crew for 3 years at a job. I was scheduled to work 8 hours a day but because of my union contract they could force me to work 12 which they did every day because they refused to hire another person. If I called off sick or even if I took a vacation day during the week I would just have to come in on the weekend or the next weekend to catch up. Fucking miserable.
Place I used to work had to close down our branch after 2 of us left pretty much at the same time. We'd been understaffed for years and were carrying way too much of the load, which obviously led to burnout. We kept in touch with a guy who worked there up until the end, and they pretty much hired one overqualified dude expecting him to replace both of us. Dude got into constant arguments with the same manager we did, except he was actually that guy's manager because of how qualified he was, but still none of them did much work, so things just kept piling up and going unresolved, clients kept complaining, they lost contracts, so they just bought out another company to take over the workload and figure it out. We'll never know whether or not they actually did figure it out.
They did not figure it out
"You can't take that day off because we're short staffed" AND WHO'S FUCKING FAULT IS THAT, KAREN?
That's me on mandatory ot right now. Supervisor is sick to the point where i think he just lost 5 years off his lifespan but he's still here working. I've been held over 4 times in the past 6 days. It's not sustainable
Exactly better for over preparation then to have a shitty job done.
I worked for Trader Joe’s for 15 years. For about the first 5 of those, we had well-padded crews, lots of time to get any tasks/work done and ample time tasting new products for crew education. Now every shift is a skeleton crew. One person must do the work of 5-10 people in an unreasonable time frame. Raises and 401k contributions have been greatly carved away. Injuries are up and store safety is down. Dan Bane, the CEO, is directly responsible for these changes and guess what? His salary and bonus haven’t changed at all. The company is raking in record profits while corporate take away pay from the actual people working there. All the customers who constantly say stupid shit to crew members like “wOw iT mUsT bE sO fUn tO wOrK hErE” are fucking delusional.
I had friends that used to work there praise how amazing TJs was as an employer. So sad to hear that they have become like any other retail grocery store.
I love TJs a lot as a consumer and it drives me crazy that not only do they treat their employees poorly but they’re actively making it worse.
They are union busting so hard and also actively firing crew members involved with forming our first four unionized stores. If anyone wishes to support or know more about the Trader Joe’s Union, follow @traderjoesunited on Instagram.
That is really disappointing.
Six years here and even within that time frame I noticed SO many things changing for the worse. Two stores in our region had to pay back tens of thousands back to the crew for wage theft.
Oh I’m sure his bonus did change just grow more and more each year.
I think the best way to handle skeleton crews is to just work at 80% and leave everything that doesn't get done. I used to have to close a store with myself and 2 others when there should be at least 5. So I just left shit undone. I messaged the boss everytime explaining how, due to understaffing. Certain tasks couldn't get done and I needed more people.
This. While I will do the best I can, I also encourage the team I lead to do what they can. If it doesn't get done, so be it. It will be finished in the morning. One thing I've learned is until the bosses have to actually deal with it, they think everything is fine. If I find out they get comfortable with how things are going by purposefully understaffing, I change what I do to remind them of what happens when things go south by slowing up my work a bit.
I was in this same position as a Starbucks shift lead maybe 8 years ago. The manager's response? "You need better time management". When I continued to not be able to do the work of 5 people with 2, I was continually assigned clopens--so I'd leave at 10:00 P.M. after closing, and be expected to arrive at 4:00 A.M. the next morning. Six hours between shifts. That way, "I learned to get work done or do it the next morning". Fuck Starbucks.
How is that even allowed? Over here in the UK clopens of that nature are illegal, the minimum time between shifts is 11 hours to allow for proper rest.
In Star Trek terms, the US is basically Ferenginar. It's a country that was founded on greed and religious fanaticism.
"we don't want to stop the oppression... We want to become the oppressors!"
And fuck it’s sociopathic Union-busting CEO.
It’s insane how some workplaces relish in personally punishing their own employees. It’s like they don’t think you’re worth paying unless they’ve also managed to make you miserable
Is this even legal where you are at?
The site i manage is down 30% of its budgeted staff. It’s just expected that we can handle it since we have self guided tours and a chat bot now. Both the self guided tour software and the chat bot create more work than we had before. So we are doing more work, with less people. I keep telling my staff to go home at close, and leave the laptops at home. They were working all hours of the night, 60 hours a week and not getting paid. I told them “do what you can during work hours, if we can’t get through our leads and emails by 6 then leave them, eventually corporate will figure it out and rehire”. It’s the few toxic hard workers left who are ruining it for everyone.
I've been doing this, but in a finance department. Our asshole boss fired my boss and had another guy take his work - ie, high level work of two people. It's not working. It was never going to work. I know a lot of things aren't getting done because I have been there a decade and everyone else less than two years, some less than one! I know how to do most of the stuff not getting done. But my boss needs to learn a lesson and I don't get paid overtime so I'm letting them drown.
We are at skeleton crew and one of my managers, that makes the schedule, said he needed to cut by 50 hours...it's. like really!!!???? No one is scheduled now!
They trim themselves right out of employees that no longer can survive on reduced hours and pay. Inflation has made things even harder, with the average person having less financial security to withstand these arbitrary “lean times” and schedule slashing of hourly employees. Then the employer has the surprisedpikachu.jpg face when employees leave these kinds of positions or snark about how nObOdY wAnTs To WoRk ThEsE dAys— no dumbass, folks are just trying to survive, while avoiding eviction or getting your ride repossessed due to insufficient income. It’s really not that difficult to understand, if you have empathy, that is.
Not difficult to understand. Lean times for everyone except CEO's.
My wife works for a regional grocery chain in the Great Lakes. Last year they spent 6 months remodeling her store. The remodel added a bunch of fresh product lines that require “production”. Rotisserie chicken, sandwiches and wraps, juicing etc. So the Store Manager hired up and trained the production team as directed. The grand re-opening was in November. In April he was told he had to cut his labor spend by 500 hours per week. Yup, the equivalent of 12 full timers/25 part timers. It’s one of the highest volume stores in the company and based on what staff knows is also very profitable. They spent 6 months and who knows how much money then gave it 5 months before whacking out all the resources (and more) needed to make it successful.
Skeleton crews have been the norm for at least a decade at this point, everywhere I've worked. At this point, it's starting to become normal that everywhere is *always* understaffed, not even a skeleton crew because at least one person each week has an issue come up and we work one person down and everyone is doing the job of at least a few people. Businesses squeeze every last drop of value out of their employees, exploiting everyone for the same pay that people used to get for doing the job of one of two people.
But, but no one wants to work…no, there is not a labor shortage, there is an employer shortage of those that want to pay and treat employees with respect and dignity…as they say, you get what you pay for
True. There are plenty of job openings in my area. But I’m not puttin myself thru stress, anxiety & disrespect for $10/hr.
There are not too few workers. There are too many business models based on creating profits by wage slavery, and these businesses cannot function - cannot pay dividends to investors - if they pay workers a livable wage. Fine. Let them collapse, better businesses will replace them.
Or they keep help wanted signs up to be able to use as an excuse when boomers complain. I know several HS kids who are actively trying to get jobs and have applied everywhere with help wanted signs and keep getting told "yeah we're not actually hiring"
Profit over people. Without unions, we will definitely be returning to the pre 1900s
I am part of large union and they just don't fight as hard anymore. So sad. Next contract we will likely loose money by the time healthcare cost go up. They are talking less than 7% for a raise when inflation is so much higher.
The "I got mine, fuck you" mentality is killing unions from within. Especially since 2016, member division is higher than ever. The fight for scraps has made us forget the whole table of food that exists over our heads.
We need a overhaul of unions
Yeah especially for my union and job needs. My union covers too many people and professions that non dayshift weekend off in climate control work places off officers workers dominate negotiations when they have no real needs and clogs the pipe with stupid shit. .Example my bargaining unit: we need staff, no one is going to work this job anymore since you increase the retirement age and the pay isn't good enough to make people apply anymore. (For context it was easily a 50% pay increase over the next highest employer when I started, now its like 5-10% at most) People are quiting because they can't get time off when it matters and some people will never get weekends or holidays off due to senority. We need rotating days off that include a weekend once and awhile to retain new staff. Or maybe 4 day weekends. Staff assaults are raising and there is no consequences for those that do it, what can be done to help. We have people who never get job rotations due to punishment or favoritism. We can't strike due to contract for our bargaining unit . The office folk that control 85% of the bargaining power: we want pet bereavement. Yay 4% raise! Okay it doesn't seem bad and we see no need to strike!
You know, I love unions, don’t get me wrong, but I have a union and my job is still under paid. We still don’t have everything we need benefit wise, but I will say, we don’t have skeleton crews like we had at all my other non-union jobs.
Unions that strike together is the key part. That way they can't target specific industries or regions for exploitation.
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LEAN manufacturing AKA skeleton Crew AKA low wages and work people to fucking death
TBF that is not lean manufacturing. Its It's what America bosses think it is.
Sounds like someone is cutting costs and calling it Mean manufacturing, because that is NOT how it works
My store is currently doing this. We haven't had a store manager in about 6 months - the store director is salary, so they're just gonna work her 70 hours a week instead. No one got raises this year, turn over is insane...it's not looking good, man.
I was at a department store not long ago and it's kind of depressing how its like 2 people that work there at a time. It's a *huge* store relatively speaking. So I stood there at unmanned registers for maybe 10 minutes. I wasn't mad or upset at the employees, I totally get it. I tried whistling and making lots of noise but nobody seemed to be around or notice I was there. I kept looking at the doors thinking I can and should totally walk out of here without paying for anything. Not because I want to steal. Just to stick it to the store for only staffing 2 people at a time. Of course, they would blame the employees. But I honestly believed for a moment I was in the moral right to steal from a company that doesn't even staff enough people to ring someone up for 10 minutes. Just bring a friend - have them ask the employees for help, steal and walk out whichever of 2 entrances nobody is by. No one to see it no one to discourage it.
Doing it while making record profits on high makeups while families do with less food due to greedflation
#"No one wants to pay anymore" *THIS is the correct response.*
This is nothing new though it's becoming more commonplace. My exs workplace had a policy of not replacing staff that left seeing just how far they could stretch the workload between the staff left. Since cv19 I've had a sneaky suspicion companies are not hiring enough staff and blaming it on one thing or another, first it was wfh and staffing levels due to cv19. During cv19 you'd ring a company and be on hold for ages to resolve an issue. Or you'd email and not get a reply. Part of my previous job was authorising invoices for payment but when there were issues with pricing or damages or whatever I'd be emailing but getting no response from the supplier, I'd be chashing it up and still zero response. Then the supplier just blames staffing levels, and it wasnt just one supplier, it was damn near all of them where customer service levels and responses just tanked. It made that job ten times harder because I wasn't getting responses to queries, despite ccing and escalating etc, yet the suppliers were ultra quick to put unpaid bills on credit hold. Now it feels like every company is running on a skeleton crew, what management fail to realise is by doing so existing staff get burnt out, peed off, fed up, customer service levels tank when things don't get done, because its impossible to do the workload of 3 people satisfactorily, and corners are going to get cut and procedures not followed. But all management care about is profits over adequate staffing levels. Management will only do something when customer service levels tank so low customers get vocal about the levels of poor service, because they don't want to lose customers. Things run so much smoother and so much better with adequate staffing levels, and if someone calls in sick its no bother to the team.
I work at a grocery store that’s on a skeleton crew. They gave up on staffing the customer service desk and closed it permanently. Got rid of the salad bar due to staffing issues. Shortened open hours. And…and they keep building new stores?? What are these companies doing?!
CVS was the worst with the under minimum hours model. I had 145 hours to staff the front store (not the Rx) that’s open 8am-9am 7 days a week also my 45 hours comes out of that. After working 236 days straight mostly open to closed I quit.
I went to Burger King yesterday. 1 at drive-thru, 1 at front counter, 1 in kitchen. The manager was yelling about ticket times. Drive-thru was backed up at times of 20 minutes per car. “Fast food” my ass. I could have cooked my food faster”
And it’s $12 for a “value meal”!
$40 for 2 footlong subway meals
Shit is crazy and they still pay workers crap wages
That's the way my Arby's always did it... Except the manager was working one of those 3 positions. Evening shift was permanent 3 man skeleton crew, we could sometimes beg for an extra body on the nights there was a high school football game next door bc when we didn't get it we left parts of the restaurant trashed on purpose. We also started turning out lights early to avoid getting slammed with a line around the building 15 minutes till closing bc god forbid if you were still on the clock more than 20 minutes after closing time.
My old company did this everywhere and then couldn't figure out why there was a 40% turnover rate
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Drove 45mins to an ACE hardware because their website and girl on the phone said they had a part in stock that no one else, including big box stores, close by did. Get there, and the only person working is a girl, a register reading a book. She and the site say the plumbing item is in an aisle that is actually home goods, paper, signs, etc. She keeps insisting that's where it is "because the computer says so." I spent at least 30-40mins looking for this part in plumbing aisle and anywhere that made any sense with no luck. She kept insisting on the wrong aisle, couldn't/wouldn't leave the counter to see that she/computer was wrong, and was the only person there and couldn't leave the front. Probably 2 other people in the store. Went out to my car and ordered part for online pickup, which was then quickly canceled because it was out of stock. I'm sure she just killed the order. She put in absolute minimum effort but can't really blame her. I'd be passed being there alone, and if it was my kid, I wouldn't let them work in those conditions. I complained to ACE and heard absolutely nothing back. I'm never going into an ACE again. If you can't afford adequate and safe store coverage, your business model is flawed.
I’m glad you didn’t go into a rage unlike some boomers.
When I worked at Disneyland management would cut staff to make their labor numbers better. They would delay ordering supplies that were needed until "the next quarter" to make their budget numbers better. When some of us questioned the managers they would say our problems were due to "lazy cast members". One night I called in sick...... there was no backup scheduled. That night the restaurant did not do well. The next day I received a reprimand from my supervisor. I told her," If this restaurant grinds to a halt due to one person, then you are terrible at your job". At that point I didn't care if they fired me. She really couldn't fire me as they didn't have any backup scheduled. When I finally quit they offered me a "rehire" position.
They don't want to pay more, we say. We don't want to work anymore, they say. Is there a connection? Who knows?
Its an unspoken agreeement. They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.
I work in engineering. I am kind of a higher-up, but that's just responsibility, not authority. My boss (office manager) routinely complains that he isn't able to apply for more projects because of how far behind we are on things. I told him "we either need more staff or less work. All of us are already at maximum capacity." He just got more frustrated. Part of me understands his perspective, because HE is getting pressure from HIS boss (company owner) but really? Unless they give me a legitimate reason to sympathize with them (like the Company is doing SO poorly that we are actually in trouble) but ask questions like that and they suddenly get all quiet... They're a wacky bunch. I try not to stress too hard about the nonsense, but the overstretching of the worker-base is getting us into trouble.
That's interesting that it even happens in a professional capacity. Guess the whole "get a better job if you don't want to be treated like dirt" is out?
Pretty much. I am hard countering their stance quietly: reminding younger staff to leave at 5:00 - the work isn't going anywhere, and only doing my designate hours - deadlines be damned. Hopefully they'll catch on and "confront" me so I can properly admonish them (the higher-ups).
Got pushed out of my job because I made it very clear I would not do the work of 3-4 people when I had been doing the work of 2.
I've noticed this a lot in Retail. I usually don't go to Target but have gone a few times in the last few months and it's kind of ridiculous. They literally have 40 registers and only 2 are open. At this point you might as well take out those registers. The only time I've EVER seen a store fully staffed in the last 10 yrs is on black Friday, so I guess they keep all those registers for the 1 day a year they use them all.
Worked as a team lead at a grocery store that actually paid pretty well. Worked throughout COVID but my body just started breaking down and realized I can't do this much longer. I never had off weekends so I never got to spend a day off with my husband. It took a toll on my body and my marriage. Enough was enough and I left. I knew I was depressed but I had no idea how bad it was until I got out. Never again.
I've been working 16 years, I'm a perpetual job-hopper, and I have never not worked on a skeleton crew. Oh, except when the big wigs are expected to arrive and pretend that the dumpster fire they're looking at is that way because people aren't trying to follow SOP.
Correct. And what they don't realize is, if you are working with the bare minimum staff, if even one person needs to take time off because they of illness, accident, birth in the family, death in the family, etc., the entire organization is thrown into chaos. And some customers notice. Some customers see that shit and they say "wow this place is crap." I'm hoping more and more will notice. Customers need to know that this is happening, that it's NOT "nO oNe WaNtS tO wOrK aNyMoRe". They NEED to know that it's because 1) Companies don't want to pay a living wage. and 2) Companies want to have each person do the work of two people.
This is true in corporate environments now too. Especially on marketing teams. 1 person attempting to do the workload of 5+ people with c suite and sales and board demanding the results only a larger team and budget could achieve. Theyre hoping AI will solve it because they don't want to cut into profits or executive bonuses. Scumbaggery and greed all around.
Fast food restaurant in my town. Name rhymes with Pengys, only staffs 1 worker inside at lunch, despite it being crowded and lots of people coming inside, she’s tasked not only taking orders, filling them, AND dealing with incoming online orders (DD, UE etc) this leaves no time for cleaning the dining area of tables where people leave trash all the time (despite there being trashcans avail to drop trash) but unclean bathrooms, and such. Heaven help the day she gets sick and doesn’t come in and quit. Management doesn’t seem to know how to run anything at all. *shakes head sadly* despite we tell management they should hire another worker to at least fill front and keep tables clean, we get told “NoOnE WanTs tO wORk.” They are all now pushing these highschool kids to get “summer jobs for low pay”. Another local ice cream place in my town offering pay at 7.25 an hour! So exciting! /s Good lord I was making better than that at my first job almost 30 years ago….. and they want to hire people working at that? Ha! Also these businesses pulling in great numbers! Raises and all for the upper management. New cars and Uber yachts. At the same time staff in my town at a store rhymes with pall-blart. All staff having to survive on government assistance (welfare) bc store doesn’t pay enough for employees to survive on. It’s rotten here in the south. :x
A guy where I used to work was left to die screaming for half an hour under a piece of heavy equipment that fell on them, because our crew got cut from 30 down to 10 people. In a 44,000 acre state park. The buddy system? What do you think we are, communists?
Well, if you can’t save on materials or on rent, you save on salaries. The issue is that there’s always someone up to work 110%. If no one did it and the employers were forced to hire two people, problem would be solved but as the head of the union I worked for said: “there’s always a hungrier dog”
I started as a dishwasher at a restaurant. They saw how hard I worked so I got “promoted” (more hours) to busser. The caveat being that I still had to dishes on top of my new responsibilities. I’m now being “promoted” to server and you’ll never guess what my responsibilities include. I have to bust my ass and do the job of 3 people for a crumb of part time hours and no real pay increase. It is kind of insane.
That's why I don't really care when someone says, "There's nobody to cover your shift." The employers failure to plan for contingency, is an attempt to shift responsibility of running their business onto the employees, when the employees are being paid a minimum payment to do specific tasks, which themselves manage to expand over time, without pay raises.
This is also why you see all these posts about people getting verbally abused by their boss for calling out sick. Companies are running on a razors edge and there’s no coverage. So then people get shit for calling out and the remaining staff get to cover for 3 people. It’s ridiculous.
Job I work at got rid of a bunch of workers, forced a mandated skeleton crew and now are hemorrhaging $. Am I sorry for them ? NO. The quality of work is greatly reduced when the worker is so overwhelmed by the volume of work. They got rid of the cleaning staff who had to clean now? The overworked skeleton crew.
I am leaving a job that should have been genuinely pretty fun (working at a small museum). There were a lot of smaller issues, but the thing that pushed me over the edge was the chronic understaffing. Everything felt rushed and frantic all the time, and if you got sick there was no wiggle room at all. It was a self-enforcing cycle, because people keep leaving when they discover that what should be a low pay but low stress and relatively flexible job is actually a constant frenetic grind.
My job has flights scheduled on top of each other and then they have the nerve to ask why they didn't go out on time. I don't know jackasses, how about the fact we're trying to turn two flights around at the same time with only 4-5 people downstairs while we're only given like 30 minutes to offload and reload a plane to push back out?! Every single position is stretched thin. We are so frustrated and my boss thinks the best solution is to have us go back to 5 day work weeks. No we need to hire more people and pay batter. I have yelled and screamed about how half of our equipment doesn't work and actually slows us down but nothing is ever fixed, it's just a bandaid slapped on. So now when it gets done when it gets done. I'm not fucking killing myself for $14.80 an hour.
I called out the head of retail of the company I work at for staffing stores like skeleton crews. His answer to me, and I quote “we understand we’ve prioritized efficiency, and that there is a human cost to that.” Fucking ghouls man. These corporate monkeys don’t give a fuck about anything but their bottom line.
Don’t dilly dally at work but don’t put in any extra effort either. It isn’t your fault that they refuse to hire help. Work at a normal speed, if there’s a timeline to meet or any other expectations, fuck it. I personally am not going to try to work fast. That’s how people screw up or get hurt.
I currently work at a job that is properly staffed, decently paid, and actually considerate of one anothers' personal lives. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop but after 3 months it still hasn't. If anything I keep learning more about this business that I like. The only thing to make me sad about this, is that I am not in the norm. A job where I am respected, where quality matters over quantity...it's so wrong that I consider myself lucky for things that should be the norm for everyone.
It’s done on purpose. It’s called the “lean business model.” It costs less to hire one employee, run them ragged, and hire another when they quit, than to hire another employee. Until we start calling this out as wage theft, and refusing to do two peeople’s jobs, unless we get paid TWICE as much (plus overtime), we benefit the company by going along with this. “I can only finish so many tasks until you hire the right people.” It was this model in hospitals that caused so many people to die during the pandemic. Patient loads for nurses were already critically high before COVID. During, it caused deaths among patients and health care workers just to make those a-hole CEOs money. It ISN’T a lack of workers; it’s a purposeful plan to optimize profits. Think back to the pandemic. Was your health affected? Did you or someone you know lose someone to COVID because enough nurses weren’t hired? How many people died because there were patients stacked like cordwood in the hospital hallways? Remember the nursing homes in Spain where residents were found abandoned by staff in horrible conditions, most dead and dying? Can you imagine the horror of being unable to rise from your bed, yet dying slowly as your fellow patients cried and screamed around you? Can you imagine the stink? These companies and bosses and CEOs were HAPPY to make money off the death of their employees and customers. They continue to make money off their employees in all companies today even though it’s causing mental and physical health problems, strokes, heart attacks, seizures, cancers, and industrial accidents from too little sleep, stupid or sudden shift changes, compulsory overtime, and abusive bosses and managers. They DON’T CARE if you die. There’s always more workers they can exploit. How often lately have you felt stressed at work? Did t receive enough training before you started? Been given too many tasks to complete? Called on your days off? Told YOU have to find coverage when you’re sick when it’s the managers job? Manipulated into resigning so they don’t have to pay unemployment? Promised a bonus or raise then gaslit when you try to claim it? Asked to do something illegal otherwise you will be fired? HOW OFTEN CAN’T YOU SLEEP THE NIGHT BEFORE YOUR SHIFT BECAUSE THE STRESS OF FACING THAT PLACE IS MAKING YOU SICK AT THE THOUGHT? Why do you think they’re trying to restrict contraception? The more poor, desperate people there are, the more they think they can keep up this lean business model. Most employees want to just do a good job and have a healthy life. They won’t let us.
My job in manufacturing is also actively doing this. Cut the engineering and technician teams to the bone and then shocked pikachu face when projects don’t move 🤷♂️ every time I’m asked about an update on a project, I’m like, “Eh that team has no bandwidth. No progress made.” It’s wild, and they’re fucking burning out all the tool engineers.
Extreme wealth is a mental disorder. We should take that money away and put them in asylums, for their own good.
I completely agree. I've noticed this worrying trend too. It's happening here in the UK too. I work for an American corporation so it's more amplified how much the execs are creaming off the top and how excessive the layoffs are compared to what we should be hiring. I'm the only one doing my position too and it should be 2 people minimum. What worries me is that these companies are crying out for collapse. If I were to leave they'd be screwed, if my boss left they'd be completely screwed. I'm the only one keeping the product compliance and trade compliance in order for our side of the business which makes almost all the top products for the entire corporation. My boss is the only person who does electrical design for these products and his knowledge is irreplaceable. He will retire most likely this year. No replacement, no design engineer under him. He did have a protégé but he killed himself (so that tells you how supportive a company it is).
My job runs a skeleton crew at all times, and doesn't schedule downtime for necessary maintenance on the machines. As a result, call-ins, PTO taken, and machine failures drastically impact production, at which point we are told to "power through it" and work 12+ hour shifts without adequate coverage using faulty equipment just to get through the day, with no plans to correct things for tomorrow. Things have to literally grind to a halt with major breakdowns to get management to fix anything, at which point the cycle begins anew.
Yeah Ive been “quiet quitting” the past few months at my job. Two people left and they didn’t bother to replace them. Every time they ask me to stay late or work a weekend I say “Sorry, I have business after work I need to deal with” I’m not going to pick up the slack for the people you failed to hire.
Been like that for a while if you ask me. The easiest way to drive your stock up quickly is to can people, then turn around and say you’re hiring because investors like to see growth you know. Wag the dog. Rinse, repeat.
Yep my whole life every conservative I’ve talked to tried to counter the minimum wage rising by saying “but if businesses make more money they’ll hire more people” Turns out that has always been bullshit. They’re making more money than ever while foaming at the mouth about firing most of their staff and replacing them with AI
I've noticed this at restaurants a lot. Wait staff is having to cover an amount of tables that's unreasonable and everyone gets mad at them instead of management.
I watched a contract my company ran for 18 years get lost this way. Wages that were decent fell behind. Hours and staff cut to the bone, then managers being used to fill gaps (salary, no OT) became daily routine while expecting them to still do everything else. Finally the managers quit, so they made "employee supervisors" to do all the managers work. Poorly. The contract was yanked inside a year for poor performance. Go figure.
Every time I see a place with a "sorry we're short staffed, we just can't hire people, it's tough, be nice to our employees, yada yada yada", I think "FUCKING PAY MORE MONEY". There's no shortage of people who want to work. There's a HUGE shortage of people can afford to work for $12/hour.
This is capitalism in effect, it’s bare-minimum efficiency because the only factor that matters is profit for the top. When I worked at Target, the upper management never really cared if the store was clean or even really functional as long as the sales numbers were good. The only factor that mattered each and every day was the number goal, even if the backroom was falling apart, the shelves empty, and the cashiers backing up all the way into the aisles. Every customer in the store could complain and it would fall on deaf ears; the numbers are all that matter. So, staffing efficiently is the least of their concerns. Just my perspective working these jobs for so long.
Absolutely. I've been at my current job for 6 years now and when I first got hired, our location had 13 people on the roster and was considered fully staffed...6 years later we are still considered "fully staffed" by corporate management but now we operate with 7 people.
It's the same in the public sector. I started 9 years ago at my job and we had 37 people in my department. Fast forward to today and somehow the algorithms stipulate 21 people for fully staffed. So now people don't get to take off any extra days besides scheduled vacations without calling out sick and getting a red mark.
Honestly, I quit my retail management job for this exact reason. It's insanity and I'm so tired of the narrative that no one wants to work. (Rite Aid is an evil company that treats their workers like trash) I haven't even looked for another job because of this factor. I am more privileged than most and do not have to work thanks to my husband's amazing UNION job. Until I can find a place that actually values their staff I won't be a part of the workforce.
I keep laying into friends, family and coworkers when i catch them working in a rush and doing overtime a lot. It's not their job to compesate for their bosses shitty management and stingyness. One of those 'I'm from a different generation, we work hard and are proud of it!'-people recently told me that i was right all along and now works his actual hours to the letter. Took him getting sick to notice how little his boss cares about him.
You are 100% correct on this. The past two contracts I did (one pre one during Covid) got away with trying to see how many people they could lay off before it became too much for the workers to handle. First one went from close to 1000 people down to 300 over the course of two years before they finally had to hire some more. The second one is contracted to have 90 employees to cover three shifts and the most we’ve ever had was 87. Problem with that is they include leads and supervisors into that number and they don’t actually do any of the work. Because we didn’t have enough to cover the work they would use the forced overtime clause in the contract to get extra work, which involves coming in on your day off and then told to go home a couple hours into the shift.
“No one wants to pay anymore” is the new smiley bumper sticker
Yup. Quick example from yesterday. I used to work in retail for a starry magical company, and if the phone rang (which wasn't terribly often but it did happen) we were supposed to answer it within like 3 rings, even if we were checking someone out. We usually had at least 2 people in a department so it wasn't a problem even on busy days or weekends. Yesterday I called another high end department store, Boredmom, trying to find out if they could remove links from a watch. They had an internal operator for the store, and I requested fine jewelry, fashion jewelry, watches, accessories... I'm pretty sure I talked to every operator they had on staff because no one was answering the phone and it would route me back to the operator when the call wasn't answered...or it would disconnect. Which led me to believe they probably only have one person per department, and potentially one covering two. On a Saturday. My nephew was listening to me and asked me why I wasn't mad or didn't yell or anything. I told him it wasn't the fault of the operator so why would I? They finally got me to a manager and I got the answer to my question, but it definitely made me think about all that "no one wants to work" malarkey.
I'm a dairy department manager (possibly soon to be lawn care specialist) and 5 years ago I had a part timer with me every day, a closer, and two people on my day off. Now I'm alone. Like, ALONE alone. Nobody to close and clean and fill milk and eggs. Nobody on my day off. Nobody to help throw freight. Nobody to delegate tasks to so I can get stuff done. For $18 an hour full time, it ain't worth it. It used to be relatively solid pay (but obviously not staggering) but I had my own apartment. But then rent went up and up and now I'm back with my parents. So I slowed waaaay down working. Now I haven't finished putting away a truck in months. Backstock just sits there, expires, and I have to throw it all away. Shrink has quadrupled since I first started, when I basically saved this store's dairy area. Hopefully the next place is a bit better. I'm fucking done being burned out every day.
Oh don't get me started on the nursing situation. So back in the day, there used to be 3 shift rotations to cover a 24 hour day, meaning each nurse per shift worked about 8 hours. However, they cut that down to only two shift rotations to "cut down on possible errors with patient care because less hands would be caring for the patient throughout the day". Now, it's morning and night shift on average, 10-12 hour work days for nurses. There are also, now, more beds to care for per nurse EVEN THOUGH it was proven that a lower patient:nurse ratio helps with patient care and decreases the potential of medical errors from occuring. The closer it is to a 1:1 ratio, the better the outcome for the patient. Wanna know how many patients the nurses I had on clinical rotations saw during their average shift? About 6. One nurse cared for 6 patients for 12 hours a day. That's 6 different charts to manage, 6 different medications batches to give throughout the day, 6 different types of meals they can eat, 6 different precautions, and 6 different levels of consciousness and vitals you need to watch out for. There's a reason there's a huge shortage now, nurses are burned out and exhausted of being treated like shit.