I didn't work for Fred Meyer/Kroger long. I was a temp hired during a store reset. The one thing that really struck me during that time, however, was Kroger's obsession with the employee door at the back.
Everyone had to use it, all the time. If you used the front door, you got written up. If you swiped your card at the back door and then used the front, you got written up. They had anti-passback software on the door to enforce this. The loss prevention office was, conveniently, mere inches from the employee door, allowing them to run random checkpoints to look in your shopping bags and lunch boxes. Despite this, every manager I asked swore up and down that the employee door obsession had nothing to do with theft - though no one would ever give me a straight answer as to what else it might be. This despite the fact that the punch clock (fortunately not the kind that requires fingerprint scanning, as I don't want someone having my fingerprint) is, of course, about a mile away at the front of the store.
The lunchbox inspections were annoying, but whatever, sometimes employees do steal. It's far more insulting that everyone denies it has anything to do with loss prevention when all available evidence points to that. How dumb do they think we are?
(The other things that struck me were the ridiculous degree to which home office controls everything, and then tendency one of my bosses to defend the planogram-makers with the old "I'd like to see you do better" line even when the source of my complaint was a product that would not physically fit with the prescribed shelf setup).
Good post, and I can relate quite a lot to your points.
If people had any clue as to how many cameras and other AP resources are in place (and the list is growing) in the average big chain retail stores these days, you wouldn't even feel comfortable going to the rest room. Swear.
FM must run things a lot different, or else your store manager is just on crack. None of these things ever happen at any Kroger store I've EVER heard of. Not allowed to use the front door? where else would you go in from? The weird inspections... nope nothing like that here. That's just weird as hell.
As far as the cameras... if that bothers you don't go to any store i suppose. i'm no fan of the creepy nsa spying either but it's to be expected at a store.
And yes, you have to use the back door all the time, and the LP guys do check everyone's bags on the way out (though very occasionally - like I said, I was a temp, so there 5-6 weeks, and it only happened once).
Convenient, in that the official-unofficial employee parking was nearby, and so was the break room. Inconvenient in that the punch clock was at the front of the store, and you could apparently still get in trouble for running in the store, even when you hadn't punched in yet and the store hadn't opened yet. I got a lot of practice perfecting a cheaty fastwalk to get around that, though everyone else still seemed to think I was running and it took a toll on my legs after a while.
I worked somewhere where you could go through the front door (back door was reserved for truck deliveries only), BUT you couldn't park in the front parking lot, and since the store was in the middle of a strip mall, you had to walk ALL the way around the strip mall just to get to your car. They also checked bags, except it was everyone, every day. At my job now, everyone has to use the front door--even to take out garbage. This is partly because 95% of the workers are smokers and a lot of them used to sneak out the back to smoke. So now they put an alarm on it...:/
As for Kroger, everyone came through front door. The back was locked most of the time and you had to get a key if you wanted to dump out old oil from the deli (which, btw, if it wasn't done regularly--I saw it done like 3 times in the 10 months I worked there--sucked because of how heavy them damn things can get).
