Your favorite complainer on the forum, MrFreightBoss here. You might be happy to hear that I won't actually be complaining, at least not directly, with this post.
I have a question for those of you that have been with the company for 10 + years or so. I've worked at 3 different Kroger stores, and they have all had crews scheduled super thin, with not enough coverage to actually get everything done, which leaves everybody rushing and killing themselves just to try and complete the work. I've seen posts on here about skeleton crews at some of your stores as well, so I'm assuming it's common today. Was this always the case? I'm honestly curious to know if they used to schedule heavier. I worked at a different company for a bit and we always had PLENTY of help. If it wasn't always the case, when did it change?
I look forward to hearing from you guys!
-Josh
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You had an employee bbq yesterday? Thanks for telling the night crew...
Hey Josh any corporation will give the Store Head the maximum dollars for extracting the ultimate energy of their crew with "Sweet tounges" carrot sick promises and operate their stores!!!! Just leave the decision in the hands of almighty... Enjoy the coffee do not look or worry about the cup friend . what we ( they) sow will reap
I have 30 years with Kroger and we always had plenty of help until about 2004 when the good corporate people started retiring. In my opinion that is when Kroger started to go downhill cutting hours. I am on the frontend and they will will not let the frontend have hours like before. I always felt like they were trying to get rid of cashiers. These stupid programs that corporate comes up with now are just that stupid. We did better years ago when we did not have these programs. If a customer lies on you they believe customers instead of their employees. I have always thought that corporate should have to work a few weeks dealing with the public and see what they try to pull maybe then corporate would see the the light and put their employees first instead of customer first. Years ago customers had some brains but in the last maybe ten years they do not have any brains. God willing this is my last year working. I am retiring in a year I cannot stand to go to work anymore. I guess I am burnt out.
We always used to have enough staff for the deli until the middle of 2016. After that we started having skeleton crews, including having only 2 people close on Sundays. Sundays are our worse day, we always have a line with at least 4 people all day. Trying to get your breaks is terrible.
I feel its a mixture of corporate trying to cut back our hours and lack of employees. Working here has gotten so bad over the last few years that new hires don't stick around past 1 month usually and a lot of the people who have been here for a while quit or retired. The new hires that made it past 1 month tend to call off every few weeks too.
I have 30 years with Kroger and we always had plenty of help until about 2004 when the good corporate people started retiring. In my opinion that is when Kroger started to go downhill cutting hours. I am on the frontend and they will will not let the frontend have hours like before. I always felt like they were trying to get rid of cashiers. These stupid programs that corporate comes up with now are just that stupid. We did better years ago when we did not have these programs. If a customer lies on you they believe customers instead of their employees. I have always thought that corporate should have to work a few weeks dealing with the public and see what they try to pull maybe then corporate would see the the light and put their employees first instead of customer first. Years ago customers had some brains but in the last maybe ten years they do not have any brains. God willing this is my last year working. I am retiring in a year I cannot stand to go to work anymore. I guess I am burnt out.
Thank you very much for this information! I felt like it was probably in the early 2000's when things started going to crap. They just force work to get done in as little time as possible, and these programs are seriously ridiculous, I totally agree. They need to start looking at the employee before the customer. I'm happy to hear this is your last year, congrats on making it through 30 years with Kroger!
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You had an employee bbq yesterday? Thanks for telling the night crew...
We always used to have enough staff for the deli until the middle of 2016. After that we started having skeleton crews, including having only 2 people close on Sundays. Sundays are our worse day, we always have a line with at least 4 people all day. Trying to get your breaks is terrible.
I feel its a mixture of corporate trying to cut back our hours and lack of employees. Working here has gotten so bad over the last few years that new hires don't stick around past 1 month usually and a lot of the people who have been here for a while quit or retired. The new hires that made it past 1 month tend to call off every few weeks too.
Ah I'm sorry to hear this. Corporate needs to make some changes to make Kroger a more appealing place to work, rather than a "kill yourself to get everything done and no breaks" kind of place. I feel your pain, I actually never take breaks. Throwing freight, we feel like we'll get too far behind if we take breaks at all. The workloads make it impossible to take breaks and get it all done on time. That is one of my biggest complaints with this company.
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You had an employee bbq yesterday? Thanks for telling the night crew...
I always take my breaks. It is in my contract. I was told, "If you skip breaks, they will write them out of the contract."
Not my problem that the people they hire for night stock can't keep up. As a night manager, I can only get so much out of everyone.
MrFreightBoss wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
We always used to have enough staff for the deli until the middle of 2016. After that we started having skeleton crews, including having only 2 people close on Sundays. Sundays are our worse day, we always have a line with at least 4 people all day. Trying to get your breaks is terrible.
I feel its a mixture of corporate trying to cut back our hours and lack of employees. Working here has gotten so bad over the last few years that new hires don't stick around past 1 month usually and a lot of the people who have been here for a while quit or retired. The new hires that made it past 1 month tend to call off every few weeks too.
Ah I'm sorry to hear this. Corporate needs to make some changes to make Kroger a more appealing place to work, rather than a "kill yourself to get everything done and no breaks" kind of place. I feel your pain, I actually never take breaks. Throwing freight, we feel like we'll get too far behind if we take breaks at all. The workloads make it impossible to take breaks and get it all done on time. That is one of my biggest complaints with this company.
I always take my breaks. It is in my contract. I was told, "If you skip breaks, they will write them out of the contract."
Not my problem that the people they hire for night stock can't keep up. As a night manager, I can only get so much out of everyone.
MrFreightBoss wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
We always used to have enough staff for the deli until the middle of 2016. After that we started having skeleton crews, including having only 2 people close on Sundays. Sundays are our worse day, we always have a line with at least 4 people all day. Trying to get your breaks is terrible.
I feel its a mixture of corporate trying to cut back our hours and lack of employees. Working here has gotten so bad over the last few years that new hires don't stick around past 1 month usually and a lot of the people who have been here for a while quit or retired. The new hires that made it past 1 month tend to call off every few weeks too.
Ah I'm sorry to hear this. Corporate needs to make some changes to make Kroger a more appealing place to work, rather than a "kill yourself to get everything done and no breaks" kind of place. I feel your pain, I actually never take breaks. Throwing freight, we feel like we'll get too far behind if we take breaks at all. The workloads make it impossible to take breaks and get it all done on time. That is one of my biggest complaints with this company.
That is some crap. How in the world can they just think to take out your breaks if you don't take them? See that is a major prob with the company. I would love to get both of my breaks if I could. But I can't always do it, cause every time I turn around to get one, one of my co-workers that is barely doing much of anything in the first place, is racing off to get a smoke break, on their cell phone, taking a break to meet up with their roommate that is bringing them X,Y, and Z and I doubt all of them are clocking out for as much time as they just walk off on you. So instead of writing them out. I think they should make it so that we get a white board and when folks get in they write their name down and time they are in and out. And then when folks say they are taking a break folks can look for themselves to see who is getting the right amount of breaks in or just slacking off/making up excuses.
I have worked for Kroger 19 years now. I remember when I was hired that I was at the last person listed on a 2 page schedule for the Deli/Bakery department. I was hired in February and had full time by July of that year because they wanted the department fully staffed all the time. People in our department also were not as stressed out as we are now. I think it was early 2000's that they started cutting hours and it has just gotten worse. Usually when there is a call off now in our department there is no one we can call in and they refuse to pay someone overtime to come in. It is usually just me and one other person all morning in bakery and then just one closer after we leave. We never have time for production anymore and the floor never gets filled after we leave. Management expects everything to be done with less help. And we are doing all kinds of sampling events storewide that are just a waste of time. Most of the time they wait until after the schedule for that week is written and they say of by the way we need to take this person from your department for this sampling event and then you have no one to cover that persons shift.
Our store has been under construction for over a year now as they turn us into a Marketplace store and we still get slammed. Management is always saying add hours to your schedule but the thing is none of the part time people are willing to come in on their days off and for what they start out at I really can't say that I blame them. And forget about allowing full time people to come in for overtime. We have a FedEx distribution place down the road from us and we keep losing our help to them because their starting pay is much higher and they get over 30 hours a week. I think some of the main office people need to actually work in the stores once a year, and not during a slow period or with a fully staffed department since they don't seem to understand why things don't get done. We are going into Easter weekend and we are already behind on stuff. Everyone in the department is burnt out and no one is really happy with their jobs anymore.
My favorite this is when people from the main office are supposed to do a walk through (which is all the time with all the construction going on) so they add all of these extra hours so the store looks excellent for their 10 minute walk through, but during a busy weekend or call offs they don't want to give any hours then complain when things are not done.
This just sucks to read these stories about how Kroger used to be vs. how they are now. Also rather sad as well. It truly is no wonder why thigns are the way they are.
This isn't changing by much. The minute the Kroger effect rolls through your store skeleton crews become popular. You can thank the union bi-law that says "Call your fellow departments for assistance in the front end if you need more help."
Been working for Kroger for almost 10 years total, across two Kroger stores and a Fred Meyer. Things were fine at the first Kroger I worked at. That was my store until 2008, in Michigan. I moved to Washington state seeking better opportunities. Fred Meyer was perfectly fine until a different store manager replaced the one who hired me. His first thing as soon as he was in was cut every single department's hours to hell. I was part time and had been getting anywhere from 20-36 hours before him. After he came it was 16 hours every week. You can't possibly survive in Washington state on that! Eventually I had a argument with him about it and was encouraged to quit - he was trying to eliminate my position anyway since I kept nagging him for hours. So I had to move again.
I currently work in Missouri, which has only three Kroger stores. They are a part of Central Division. Kroger struggles to compete with the other local grocery chains and thus tries to cut costs - by simply running everything on a skeleton crew. Every department is ran at the bare minimum to get the job done by their little number book somewhere in Kroger corporate (which is made by idiots who have never actually worked in a grocery store themselves their entire life). This may not be such a huge issue if it weren't for the fact that current workers aren't as productive as they used to be, and the ones that are simply won't because no one else is. On top of that problem, I work as a grocery night stocker. Grocery can never get even halfway decent people anyway because most who do get hired never stay. Why would they when they get paid minimum wage to do such a hard job? The few who do stay are the ones who do the absolute minimum they can to ensure they don't get fired, talk to each other constantly, always leave their mess for the Grocery Night Manager or day Grocery to clean up, call off or are late frequently, won't help each other, won't do what they are told to do, never condition, never get their truck worked (every once in a while they do but not usually), never tie the bale, etc. One that got hired had the nerve to talk on her phone through her bluetooth device all night long. Needless to say she got fired.
So we clearly need more people or they need to discipline employees, right? Wrong! No more than 7 people have ever been in the overnight crew (we currently have 5). They refuse to hire them or tell us they can't hire them. Also, not one person in this entire store has been written up since I started here about three years ago. We get huddles with the store manager every once in a while for a pep talk, but no verbal warnings or write ups. So then...can the current workers have more hours and be full-time to help compensate for that fact? Nope! Only two of us are full-time...all the rest get asked to stay over every truck night. Otherwise they only get about 20-30 hours a week unless someone is on vacation. And most will not come in on their day off if they get called in to work.
So yeah...seems to me based on what has been said on these forums and other employees that I have spoke with, that the conclusion is this: Kroger has turned from a decent place to work to absolutely horrendous, and is no longer worth working for. Kroger refuses to adapt their business model to match their competition and their new workforce. Hell, even Wal-Mart starts their employees at a higher wage than we do. Also, the thing these guys don't realize is that everybody talks. When one employee has a bad work experience they tell everyone else they know not to work there (which is probably the reason we don't get many new grocery people). But this store, and Kroger itself has done this to themselves by expecting one person to do the workload of 2-4 people. And it's all because the corporate higher-ups, the board of directors, and the store managers want their bonuses. So in the end it all comes down to greed.
Here at least, key retailing was something that kept hours in the store. When the focus turned off of that, they began to cut hours drastically. Now, they are bringing it back with no hours to go with it, I find it absolutely hilarious how bad stores are if they only use the hours allotted to them.
I work with a couple of people who've worked for various local Krogers over the last 30 years. They claim that before 2008 or so, not only were hours readily available, full time was as well. Nobody gave a second thought to somebody going full time. We keep the ELMS book and it currently dates back to 2008. To give an example:
Dry grocery(I can't remember sales figures, but overall store volume is up ~30% since 2008 and since the reset 2 years ago, grocery is outpacing other core departments)
I started late 2007, and we averaged 375 hours weekly, and things were getting tough when they wanted us at 340 during slow periods.
Today at 30% higher volume, they want grocery at ~285 hours. Nothing ever gets done anymore. Loads always roll over. Not a dolly or two, but usually half the load. Backstock is done once a week and customer complaints are always high. With half of the aisles not getting touched
The main difference I see is that when we operated with more hours, not only was the load getting up expected, but backstock to be turned nightly as well as the aisles holes & lows shot. A much better customer experience.
Another effect I see is the fact that order evolution only forecasts sales to the night of the load, but if the load is never up that night then you've got holes everywhere, especially because order evolution's prime focus is keeping inventory as low as possible without running out. So there really is no margin of error and the customer experiences this.
The problem is the fact that finding a crew who can average the 55 cases per hour that kroger desires is simply impossible when they basically are hired at minimum wage and stay there for years with little to no chance at going full time. Who is going to break their backs in the middle of the night for minimum wage? Kroger simply can't grasp the fact that they can't staff the stores with the expectation that everybody is going to be a superstar. It's unrealistic. Just because 1/100 is able to do something does not make it an average to base production on.
Corporate also prioritizes the store getting conditioned over load getting worked. I simply cannot wrap my mind around this. We have been told explicitly on multiple occasions, leave the shelves bare, but the rest needs to get conditioned. Corporate even gave our store manager the biggest azz chewing that he claims he's ever received in his 35 years with the company for not conditioning a couple of nights during the week before christmas. How dare he prioritize having must have holiday items on the shelf over making it look pretty?
Here is a prime example:
2000 case friday night grocery truck.
Hours scheduled: 24.
8 hours to condition the store
4-5 hours to break down load
2-3 hours replenishing must haves from the back(sugar, water, drinks, paper towels/other super fast movers that sell out everyday)
That only leaves 9 hours to stock. Even if people were working at the expected production capabilities(which at our store they average 35 cases per hour), that's only 450 cases out of the 2000 that came in. That's pretty much the entire load sitting in the back. The next night? Also only 3 people, again, nothing gets done and a peyton load comes in.
