Whole Foods workers seek to unionize
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Ha... now there's a carefully chosen phrase.
“[We] have an open-door policy that encourages team members to bring their comments, questions and concerns directly to their team leaders,”
I'd refer to this gif[0] but I know they're not serious. If anyone believes individual cashiers asking for maternity leave is a good way to get it, I've got a bridge you might also be interested in buying.
0: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-3AkXJmV0AIY/T_Yj4_zOF7I/AAAAAAAAAJ...
I recognize that your comment is dripping of cynicism so I'm not entirely sure which parts are true.
You're saying that you can't get maternity leave at Whole Foods (or in the entire USA maybe? I don't know whether this is national or just that Whole Foods is somehow a horrible, terrible, no good employer) when you ask? How about with a doctor's note that says that yes indeed, you're pregnant? Isn't there laws about that sort of stuff? And wasn't Whole Foods supposed to be the upmarket, organic, do-goodery, happy happy joy joy supermarket?
Seriously when I read stuff like this I wonder how it's possible that America functions, well, at all. Do they expect people to just bleep the groceries in-between the contractions? Hey yo don't worry I can breast-feed the little one with a single hand and use the other hand to bag your leek.
No, that's not what he's saying, and no, a single person does not have the same leverage an entire collective has against a larger company.
I'm not kidding, so I'll ask again, even clearer. Does America not have the concept of maturity leave by law? Is it like considered a perk or something?
I'm so confused because, well, where I live when you're pregnant, tell the boss is exactly what you'd do! And then you get maturity leave. And the GGP says that that's somehow totally laughably ridiculous, so laughably ridiculous that it warrants sharing imgur gifs, and I really don't get it and I also still don't get how America can function at all when something as basic as this isn't, well, basic.
ps. also you're not being very helpful with "No, that's not what he's saying" without telling me what he is saying.
"The United States, Suriname, Papua New Guinea, and several island countries in the Pacific Ocean are the only countries that do not require employers to provide paid time off for new parents."
That's not terribly surprising, fascist ideologies are typically very family-centric, to the point of actual Darwinism/eugenics.
It's one more reason why I don't think the rising, bipartisan, hyper-capitalist, reactionary tide in the US can be accurately called fascism. It's a different creature in a lot of ways.
I have found myself in the same position as the parent as a non-US resident who ended up in discussions where the assumptions made by those from the US and those not from the US about the rights of workers are so wildly different it stalls the conversation.
> If anyone believes individual cashiers asking for maternity leave is a good way to get it, I've got a bridge you might also be interested in buying.
Sequoia is referring implicitly to the significant difference in power and efficacy of individual vs collective bargaining in the United States. Collective bargaining (e.g. unionization -> union negotiations) has long been a way for workers to effect more change in workplace conditions and compensation than they would otherwise be able to, alone.
Paid maternity leave is a luxury in the United States.
The bridge comment implies gullibility.
since up to 12 unpaid weeks is mandatory, people find a way to make it work, by saving money and going back to work very soon.
it is a common rhetorical trick in discussions of labor politics in the US to pretend that employers treat everyone the way they treat upper-middle-class salaried professionals (“i’m sure the boss would be reasonable if they just went and asked!”). So people may have assumed you were doing this rather than genuinely thinking things worked differently.
It's a metaphor.
The implication is that in the absence of a bargaining organization and a written agreement, employees will go to their manager with a situation, and the manager will have to invent an individual policy on the spot, which will be more trouble for all, and probably worse for the employee. Certainly less fair, since not everybody has the same manager, or the same relationship with them.
Pregnancy is the vehicle of this metaphor. Nobody would claim that pregnant women would be better off without a written policy for maternity leave. All other situations are the tenor. There's no reason to believe that individual-serving-sized policies for other situations would work any better than for maternity leave.
sequoia isn't saying anything about maternity leave. They're using maternity leave as an example, to say something about the need for collective bargaining.
As of 1993, companies with 50 employees or more must offer unpaid maternity leave.
Well, there's two kinds of mandatory maternity leave:
Job protected leave, in which the employee is entitled to be returned to work after their leave, which may or may not be paid, and
Paid leave, in which the employee is entitled to pay while on leave, whether or not they are entitled to return to work (in principle; in practice, mandated paid leave is usually also job protected.).
The US (for some employees of some employers) has federally-guaranteed job protected maternity (and paternity) leave, but no federal mandate for paid leave for either. Some states have additional job protected leave mandates and/or paid leave mandates.
Most other developed countries seem to see that slightly differently. But ok, it is a stance you can discuss - however, it becomes enormously cynical when combined with the conservative aversion against welfare rights:
So you're pregnant or sick and happen to not have enough resources to live from savings for a few months. If neither the state nor the employers are obligated to help you, who exactly is?
Admittedly, this was reddit, so apologies if I'm misrepresenting real-life conservatives here, but that thread got me thinking that a lot of the political discussion might, at the root, actually be about social darwinism.
If you want to live in a socially darwinistic society, that's your bag. But don't pretend the people suffering it are 'uneducated'. You devalue both these people, and education in general.
Interesting, I didn't know that.
Sounds suspiciously similar to today's "meritocracy"...
These are whole foods workers. they are not rocket surgeons, they can be easily replaced by stepping outside and finding the next person that walks by. These are the types of jobs that will be automated away in the near future due to stuff like this. Your average skillless worker won’t have a job to go to if they keep making themselves more and more expensive.
I'm going to guess that a very small portion of WFMs employees have the ability to successfully negotiate their employment terms
A very small portion of all employees have that ability, much less an opportunity to attempt to negotiate the terms of their employment. I think a lot of people here overestimate the leverage that the average employee - including tech industry employees - actually have with their employers.
But this thread is about those average employees, and even exceptional employees in most fields have little to no power to set terms.
Why would anybody be obligated to help you if you've decided to take up a hugely resourceful personal project?
Kids and pregnancy is expensive, and should remain so. How is making a kid is different from taking your time to go on a trip around the world, or recording an album, or doing anything else like that?
If you can't afford it, don't do it. It's that simple. Cases when it's out of your control (medical conditions) are different, of course, but they are not the norm and conversation about pregnancy and kids should not be revolving around them.
That's a great neologism. It's now a right to take other people's paychecks?
The only real question is what that support looks like. For most of the Western world, it includes things like paying women for maternity leave, and not complaining or acting like this is a big controversial idea.
If you don't want to live in a society, there are certainly places on earth you could go to live out your days in isolation, and you might be happy there. Give it a try, hey, why not? If we miss you, we'll let you know.
Can you elaborate on what socialism you think people are voting for?
Cause right now we don't have free education--we have massive loans we award to children that can never be disposed of.
We don't have free health care--we have the worst of both possible systems, with only now a real national discussion about bringing our horrible health care in line with literally the rest of the western world.
Where's this socialism people keep voting for, and when's it going to start reaching us and affecting our lives in a meaningful way???
But you said "people are voting for socialism" (in a discussion about some group unionizing) and that's just a bullshit claim. This country is so far from socialist policies, and no one's running on a socialist platform, it's just empty words to say anyone's voting for socialism.
As if people have any negotiating power without unions, as if there is not a well-documented power imbalance in this country. Your attitude toward the common woman/man = why we can't have nice things. You and people like you labeling any thing that gives people a decent chance socialism = why we can't have nice things. Would you consider Denmark a socialist country?
Or maybe you were just being glib?
Generally not, unless if you're some hot shit or in a well unionized job. Heck, in tons of jobs people are lucky to get their toiler breaks...
>I don't know whether this is national or just that Whole Foods is somehow a horrible, terrible, no good employer)
Of course it is national.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/02/05/the-w...
>How about with a doctor's note that says that yes indeed, you're pregnant?
Usually such a leave concerns the period after you've given birth.
>Isn't there laws about that sort of stuff?
In lower paying fire-at-will jobs, laws don't mean much. They can find 100 ways to fire you in ways that don't break the letter of the law if you ask for something the law supposedly guarantees.
https://www.babygaga.com/15-times-bosses-fired-women-on-mat-...
>And wasn't Whole Foods supposed to be the upmarket, organic, do-goodery, happy happy joy joy supermarket?
Public image doesn't mean anything for how a business operates. Apple was supposed to be "in the intersection of fine arts and technology" but has people in horrible working conditions, Google was supposed to "not be evil".
You say that the parent is "dripping of cynicism", but I can't make heads or tails of your questions. Are you from abroad, and have no contact whatsoever with the USA (friends, etc)? Are you from a nordic country and are astonished that such things are possible? Or maybe you're from the US, but have too much wealth to ever be involved in working people's concerns? Because they sound dripping with out-of-touch, and I'm not even American (I just have many friends there).
>They can find 100 ways to fire you in ways that don't break the letter of the law if you ask for something the law supposedly guarantees.
That can be actionable too. If you are pregnant and they fire you, they are opening themselves up to so much liability it outweighs the few dollars they might save.
You'd be surprised.
The FMLA only mandates for unpaid leave. That's unlike most western european countries. And even that's under BS conditions and subject to employer power plays as opposed to totally normal and acceptable (and paid).
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/06/what-family-lea...
https://newfoodeconomy.org/giving-kitchen-staplehouse/
https://www.motherjones.com/media/2017/05/working-mothers-mo...
>That can be actionable too. If you are pregnant and they fire you, they are opening themselves up to so much liability it outweighs the few dollars they might save.
Maternity leave is not just for pregmant people. What about after birth?
Besides, there are lots of ways to make it so it's not actionable.
I am indeed from abroad and my only contact with the USA is through HN. I vaguely know some people who work in the Bay Area but they all have good jobs so which parts of their job benefits are perks and which are law or norm was never clear to me. I truly believed all civilized countries had at least some sort of government mandated paid maternity leave. Basically I imagined that in the US it'd be 2 weeks instead of N months. Thanks for elaborating.
then they've heard of FMLA.
If we're talking about paid, that seems incredibly unusual for an hourly position at a retail store. Does anyone offer that?
Yes, including Whole Paycheck[0] as well as Trader Joe's and Safeway and Von's and everybody else.
While I can imagine Amazon having a loathing of unions, if they really want to be in this space they will sooner or later have to contend with the fact that this is an industry that needs a union. And I think, at obvious risk of being wrong, that the US is going to become once again more union-friendly in the coming years.
So maybe a very friendly, not very confrontational, laid-back and smiley group of workers flirting with unionization might be a way for Amazon to put a toe in that water without overcommitting. Much as the WholeFoods acquisition was per se.
[0]: Whole Foods goes by this nickname in California. Because you spend your...
It makes me question the thoughts of anyone who consistently uses them in an argument or rant. It feels as if the speaker is more interested in scoring laughs than making any point.
I shop at Whole Foods quite frequently. There isn't some conspiracy or nefarious intent in calling Whole Foods "Whole Paycheck" -- it's usually used amongst Whole Foods shoppers between themselves when they describe their shopping experience (...in my experience)
If it is still tough for you to grasp, I will break it down for you really simply.
Whole Foods sells the same shit you can now find at most any other grocery stores (even Food Lion and Walmart in some markets) at stupid high prices. It's colloquially referred to as "Whole Paycheck" because yes, it is a funny jab at the fact that you spend much more shopping for groceries there than any other grocery store. That's basically the end of the story. I can buy organic milk, eggs, bread, coffee, apples, bananas, some vegetables, and coconut water from Whole Foods and also Kroger (or Harris Teeter in my market) and I will easily spend at least 10 more dollars for those items at Whole Foods.
That's why it's called "Whole Paycheck" -- yes not by "everyone" but by enough people that random internet strangers that never have met before are agreeing that is what it is referred to at times.
It's done in either self-deprecating jest or as an insult.
To consistently use the diminutive rather than the actual name is to signal to others that you are "in" somehow. That you are "the same". Depending on the manner in which you use it, indicates which group you're looking to belong to. Using these terms and also going full alphabet soup, which happens when people talk shop, isn't for the purpose of disseminating information, but to tell people you are informed.
If you want people to understand you, you should be clear and simple.
Unions aren't about undoing alienation under Capitalism, they're about making Capitalism survivable for laborers.
Why?
"...an industry that needs a union.."
Why?
"...more union-friendly in the coming years"
Why?
Nothing you said is grounded in any actual analysis or verifiable facts.
I'd argue that undifferentiated skills that require little education make this an industry poorly suited to unions; Even if you unionize you have little chance of success since most workers are easily replaced by scabs or increased automation. Many workers are also kids in school (speaking from experience -- I used to work in a produce department while studying),and so would not join a union regardless due to the temporary nature of their employment. Butchers and bakers may be an exception, but these are the minority compared to checkout workers, stock boys, or produce workers.
So maybe they'd benefit significantly from the fruits of unionization as experienced in more technically complex industries...but they are highly unlikely to receive those fruits.
Another job that was more uniform was in a factory, where I was making roughly $12 / hour. Not only was it unskilled labor, but those jobs were slowly disappearing as lines were being replaced with fully automated systems that only needed a third, at most, of the people to run them. Any effort to raise wages or unionize would merely ensure that the remaining lines were replaced sooner rather than later.
Therein lies the problem with trying to "solve" unskilled work. It's easier to automate, and there's more people capable of doing it. Given that often means that supply exceeds demand, wages are inevitably going to stay low, or the jobs will simply evaporate.
Why shouldn't Whole Foods workers form a union as well? I remember I was 5 minutes late once at a mom and pop health food store and the boss put up a very public and angry note about the behavior. It was rude and embarrassing. I was probably making $5/hour, if that. I guess the job was easy... but appeasing the very particular clientele was NOT.
So: first: employers can't choose (freely) who to lay off. It's first in last out, or if you want to sidestep that, you'll have to compensate the employee quite heavily.
Second: "proper" union strikes have a very protected status. An employer who would hire scabs would be quickly taken out of business. They'd switfly be blockaded by other unions in sympathy. So for example: a store hiring scabs to replace striking union store workers would quickly find that their trash isn't picked up, that the cleaners don't show up, that no electrician fixes their fridges, and so on (Also: these type of measures are also protected).
Without having these two protections (can't fire, can't hire scabs) unions are very weak compared to employers. I'd argue that with these protections, unions and employers have a pretty equal playing field.
Note also that these protections didn't come free: the employers' share of the deal was that there is no minimum wage and you can't have protected strikes during the agreement periods which are typically 1-3 years. So the strikes will occur at known intervals if negotiations for the next agreement stalls.
EDIT Re-reading this I realised I missed some perspective. A key ingredient related to hiring and firing in the society I want to (and do) live in is that when someone loses their job they have unemployment benefits that cover a significant fraction of their salary. This gives them time to find another job and makes losing your job a much less traumatic event.
It's like they want to go, and their employer is letting them. They're straining at the leash to be unemployed, and the employer graciously releases them from the burden of their contract.
They're being fired.
Let go is a euphemism for made redundant/laid off. I do agree that it is a euphemism.
My all time favorite ridiculous doublespeak is "we reached out to the employee and let them go". I heard that once from a company's pr dept. after firing a worker due to some public scandal.
For example I work in a non-union company, and if I have children and you have none, you get laid off before I do. Regardless of who's "better" and who's been there longer. That's in Germany; I would assume, say, France and Spain have much stricter rules around layoffs.
> if you want to sidestep that, you'll have to compensate the employee quite heavily
That makes it less attractive to fire an employee, but still potentially worth the business' while in some cases. It feels like it's tipping the balance slightly more in favour of the workers, and doesn't inherently seem wrong to me.
Do you mean "lay off"? Employers should be able to fire anyone with cause regardless of when they were hired.
In the US, an employer may 'lay off' as much staff as they want and then hire new people into those positions.
In France, for example, a 'lay off' must close the position and not hire a new body into that role for 12-24 months.
This may be difficult to prove, but the laws exist.
I like the 12-24 month waiting period as it would help reduce lay off abuse.
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2013/02/25/french-workers/
Try their sale items, particularly if you live in an area that already has the Amazon Prime 10% discount on sale items. The sale prices were then usually lower than any other store in the area (SF) where I lived. For people who want specialty items (dietary choices, health conditions, etc.) I haven't really found a better option.
maybe you can help America's wage slaves see how "silly" it is to shop somewhere besides Whole Foods
Try reading comprehension before you try snark.
It sometimes surprises people that, as a Libertarian, I applaud workers attempts to unionize. It's really the only way for those who just want to put in an honest days work to combat continually living under a cloud of worry their job/benefits will not be taken from them and given to those with equal skills but who are more desperate to survive.
In a truly free market, individual workers should be allowed and, in some cases, encouraged to organized.
Most people work there because of the perceived culture of being free-spirit & hippy, but from my observation it's not that great of a place to build a career & wealth. Or perhaps it's par for the course and I'm just accustom to tech companies treating their people pretty well given how competitive the market is for top talent.
Source: I live in Austin with friends who work at the HQ.
Maybe the workers hoped things would get better absent labor organization, but now that they’re being managed by a company rife with labor abuses, their circumstances have become more clear to them.
I just felt I needed to clarify that attacking Amazon and painting them red in the press for poor employment practices that WF has upheld for a long time was not really a diplomatic strategy for approaching your new boss, especially when a lot of WF employees likely wanted Amazon to be a "hands-off" acquirer.
https://www.epi.org/publication/its-not-just-monopoly-and-mo...
So no, there aren’t really “plenty of options” to get paid or treated better. Just better returns for those already at the top.
Also, it is truly impressive to see people work and succeed going from “not very much” to “boy he’s a force”. Just takes effort, go figure.
But no such thing exists in America, so that's how do many people get stuck with no options.
Inflation and Trump not having a morality record is kind of given if you can believe CNN and the NY Times...
The rest of your statement requires explanation for my head to wrap around... The phrase frumentarious frippery springs to mind.
I don't really understand what you're saying, but Obama had a despicable morality record as well. Kill list, 7 wars, drone bombed American citizens with no due process, dropped 26,000 bombs in 2016 alone, tortured people including Chelsea Manning.
This is a weird juxtaposition. You appear to be implying that "first black president" and "less than stellar morality" are moral opposites.
And if that's just "fake news" given it has been reported in multiple sources, then I suppose I can just call any retort you make as "fake news" as well.
> Walking into changing rooms of teenage girls isn't indicative of moral character, or is being the focus of multiple sexual assault allegations.
Congrats on inventing this never-before-seen grammatical construct, though.
Best economy for whom? The U.S. economy as a whole has expanded greatly since the 1980s, but it's the individuals' economies that matter, and they haven't expanded much.
You should be looking at who the gains from that economy are going to.
Having been in the UFCW Local 367, it takes 3 years to get 3 weeks PTO - it's 1 week the first year.
And you get "sick days", but you had to call in sick for 2 days (and lose that pay) and have a doctor's note, to start getting sick pay.
If you do call in sick, you have to explain to the manager that they'll be short a person all day, and customers will find the store that much busier and harder to shop in. Stores don't have a "b-roster" to call in when someone is sick.
Journeyman checker wages have been frozen at 18.50/hour for a decade. And it takes 4 years to work the hours to become journeyman, which increases in every subsequent union contract.
Someone on HN or Reddit mentioned that grocery charities are actually a tactic to estimate the sign of the derivative of e the customer base's grocery-discretionary income, as a hint of when to raise prices.
Feels so dirty, like free health screenings for employees, when the real purpose is to built an insurance risk profile for a geographic area.
I was under the impression that a corporation can take a tax deduction for charitable donations. There's a line item for it on Form 1120 (https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1120.pdf)
Since the income and the deduction directly offset each other, this is a zero sum maneuver.
And there is concern that these checkout charities are replacing more traditional means of corporate giving, reducing net contributions.
Whether or not they make you feel ambushed, due diligence is worth hope before giving, as some companies (and the non-profits they give to) are more worthy than other.
[0] Such as walgreens. But there are some places, like Costco, that will match customer and employee giving.
[1] Petco
South Park making fun of them for it in 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKsOwJ8AGWo
/edit:I'd rather be asked about a membership once at the cashier's than by every sales staff I talk to during my visit.
So, to be fair, I don't recall being pushed, since it made sense to me, and they wouldn't push me now because I'm already a member.
FWIW the dividend is pretty nice. Combined with the sale I saved a pretty solid chunk of money on a nice cooler.
If you anticipate shopping there more than once, or for any large item (excluding sales), then a membership is worth it. The dividend is 10% so it pays for itself after $200.
Do you realize that REI is a co-op [1] and the membership will entitle you to cash back on your purchases and a vote for their board of directors? It's a one-time fee, and mine paid for itself the first year I had it. It's a stupid grocery store loyalty card.
TYPO DETECTED: I just realized I meant to say it's not a stupid grocery store loyalty card, it's way better for the customer.
But in the email they asked if I wanted the money, or I could donate it.
Right now I could use the money, but now I feel just a little bad about it.
Though I do appreciate your well cultivated sense of suspicion and cynicism. Keep it up!
-- OR --
You file it as income to your sole proprietorship or llc; you "sponsor" something charitable as an expense.
Either way, the deduction and the income are at best 0 sum.
Though, if it's less than $600; they may not file a 1099 and you may "forget" to report it.
I'm a regular salaried employee, all my income is reported on a W2. Pre-Trump, if I donated $ to my favorite charity...it's deductible if I exceed standard deduction.
That is to say that on w2 income you will pay payroll tax and on 1099 you may pay self employment tax -- in addition to income tax. You then get to deduct the income tax only. So the presented case, to get paid a small sum as a contractor that either you or the company will donate to a charity; it's going to be a net 0 or net negative to take the income and then donate it 100% compared to letting the company donate it.
The relevant changes were to the standard deduction and the % cap (if you're donating >50% of your income). Technically, the standard deduction doesn't matter here at all, that's a choice, it would be a net negative for the filer to choose itemized over the standard if they don't exceed the standard.
The 2018 changes also effect the pass through rate, so there is a small possibility that if you took payment in your pte, you'd be taxed at 21% cap, your business didn't make enough to pay self employment tax, and then you donate the money from your normal earned income at the 22 or 24% rate.
Just like colleges and the healthcare industry.
Got to pay all those vp's of vp's of vp's.
The Red Cross is frequently accused of having excessive management costs and mismanaging funds; if you do a little research (a) they appear to have reasonable overhead (b) a lot of the accusations seem to come from competing charities with higher overheads.
https://www.npr.org/2014/12/04/368453320/red-cross-misstates...
Charity Navigator: https://www.redcross.org/about-us/our-work/international-ser... Haiti spending: https://www.redcross.org/about-us/our-work/international-ser...
They're a charity. You didn't stop donating to charity.
By analogy, the main rocket on the space shuttle has two stages of fuel pumps...powered by rocket fuel. So you could say that's inefficient, why not run fuel straight from the tanks into the rocket. But it can't pump enough in to get enough thrust unless it uses some of its fuel so that it could burn even more fuel.
My personal charity gripe is the blood bank. They make it out like you're a hero, meanwhile they bill the patient thousands of dollars. They hide behind "but people with disease might donate if we paid them", well they pay people for plasma. And they have to test for HIV anyway (not only that, HIV isn't even a death sentence anymore). If they want my blood they can donate it to the patient or give me 50% of what they bill.
As to the Red Cross, It also feels pretty sketch.
https://www.npr.org/2014/12/04/368453320/red-cross-misstates...
> NPR and ProPublica went in search of the nearly $500 million and found a string of poorly managed projects, questionable spending and dubious claims of success, according to a review of hundreds of pages of the charity's internal documents and emails, as well as interviews with a dozen current and former officials.
> The Red Cross says it has provided homes to more than 130,000 people, but the number of permanent homes the charity has built is six.
By all means, donate to a deserving charity. The RC probably isn't one.
You got tested on this.
Prime account is just the replacement for their rewards program. For the month of... may? The old one who stopped and the prime one hadn't started. This made some customers mad.
Plus it's a lot easier if you're basically running off a script to do the eight hours of repetition.
It's extremely common for cashiers to be required to ask if customers are part of whatever program is relevant, if they would like the current promotion, etc. Nobody's going to get fired for forgetting once... but if you're reminded repeatedly by management and you continue not to, then what would you expect to happen?
Yeah, I have prime - but I am not putting the app on my phone and don't want to give my phone number out, or be bothered too. Just let me buy my groceries in piece.
Of course not; everything there is (was?) insanely expensive because they knew their core customers would pay.
Sure is. I understand that the club nonsense is a marketing stunt, but at the end of the day WH is (was?) overpriced, which is all that matters.
The higher price may make people think they are buying a premium quality product, and derive additional pleasure of consuming luxury goods even while not knowing it was marked up peasant food.
If you do a lot of shopping on Amazon anyway the app is a win.
Once I can use it to scan groceries as I put them in the cart and walk straight to the car it’ll be even better.
Note: you may have to link your phone number to your Amazon account at the link below before this works:
I’d expect a massive fucking award for not constantly pissing off customers with this nonsense.
But matthewmacleod lives in a world where the cashier will be rewarded (rather than fired) for ditching the script and just getting on with it. We'd all like to live in matthewmacleod's world, but I don't think any of us actually do...
This happens at shops I occasionally use in the UK now too, and with some of them it’s bad enough that I actively avoid shopping in them if there’s any possible alternatives. Point is that this kind of incessant nagging is another metrics-driven measure that doesn’t necessarily have the expected results.
And you're actually validating Amazon's policy: you're annoyed and yet you're still both a Prime member and a WF client, which means they lost nothing by annoying you.
I just cancelled my prime account after multiple "annoyances" of packages not coming in 3 days, being dropped at the post office instead and getting delayed a day, and the straw that broke the camel's back - no compensation for missed delivery dates. I had to twist an agent's arm like crazy to get a month of prime.
I go to Super Duper in SF, and every time, the employee is forced to ask: "Have you been to Super Duper before?" If I say yes, "Welcome back!" if I say no, "Welcome!"¹. It is pointless. All I want is lunch. Want to see that I've been here before? You have my credit card number…
¹The exact words might not be right, the point is that there is no meaningful difference to the customer between the responses.
All they want is to know whether they need to explain to you in detail or if you already have a sense of the menu.
Not sure what you find odd with people trying to provide you good service. smh
You missed the point of my post: they don't explain the menu to you in detail, if you answer in the negative. This particular part of their script occurs after you order to, so there isn't even an opportunity.
Their menu is also bog-standard hamburgers, with not a whole lot of options.
> trying to provide you good service
No service is being provided during this part of the interaction, is my point. The whole thing would be more pleasurable if it was genuine, and not a forced, scripted word track.
Yeesh. If that bugs you then... just lighten up. Most people aren't anti-social to such an extreme. You're the odd man out here, not the rest of humanity.
Really? People like the forced conviviality? In San Francisco, one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the country? With a sizable number of first-generation immigrants, unacculturated to the strange customs of the USA?
Why can't we have attentive food service, where they pour you fresh coffee the second you sign them to but not earlier, and where they don't intrude on the conversation every 3 to 5 minutes?
Most of the world doesn’t have the bizarre forced scripted friendliness in customer service that the US has. People are allowed to be polite or friendly in their own personal way.
I prefer it - but fast food countries value consistency over higher highs and lower lows.
I guess that is arguably the world we have been trending towards but it’s not the only viable world.
The real world is one where you do the job you're paid to do.
Actually the real world is the one where the FTC has largely given up on regulating monopolistic behaviour and The Department of Labor has abdicated its responsibility of protecting workers from abusive employers. In this real world the only moral principle that anyone cares about is profit.
The wisdom of annoyances that increase profit-per-customer yet lose some customers all depends on if it results in a net gain or a loss.
The mobile game ecosystem (pay-to-win) and the dominant web content model (ads) both suggest that some degree of annoyance is the more popular path.
Imagine every time pumping at BP being asked if you need libricant oil for your plane (that you dont have but they keep asking every time).
Further the whole thing is a scam - wholefoods advertise Prime as get extra 10% off shopping but upon inqury I was told there are only some 60 items in the whole store that are Prime discounted. Thats far from literally their ad “take extra 10% off your shopoing with Prime”
(At least the ones in California and New Hampshire, so I assume everywhere in between.)
>Shoppers, however, have saved millions as a result of the shake-up.
This is why you're going to have a tough time getting sympathy from the public, and why I think (for better or worse) Amazon will win the PR battle. The average person now has access to healthier grocery / purchasing options as Whole Foods pricing has come down. If prices go up, they'll just switch to Walmart or some other cheaper option - leading to WF losses, and even more layoffs.
Because every other grocery store is selling poison? The average person doesn't even have a WF near them to shop at.
Time isn't a very good measure of distance
Seriously, ask how far something is in Tokyo and see the response is in time
Let's say you ask me where a store is, and I tell you it's only 500m away. "Great!", you think, "That's an easy walk!" No, it's not, because it's on the other side of a river, and there isn't a crossing particularly close. You'd much rather go to the store that's 1000m away because it's not across a river.
Now you're probably going to say, OK, so let's restrict it to actually allowable paths ... but again, something a few kilometers away that doesn't have good road connections (and the ones that do are full of traffic) is actually much farther away in every way that matters than something that's 10km away but is a straight shot on an empty highway. Urban environments are complicated, and distance doesn't tell you as much as travel time does.
WF's food is not any healthier than the food you find in other stores.
There are no phthalates in any of their beauty/wash products.
Obviously you can define health however yo want, and you can scan the shelves of other stores for these same things. Maybe you can find a couple phthalate-free shampoos in Target, read a bunch of articles and memorize the good brands and hope they don't change. Or you could shop at WF.
[0] http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Cost-of-livin...
I think this may be a case of "gluten free sugar".
(and as far as I know only chicken)
Got a good chuckle out of that because I’ve also never dared shop those aisles at WF either!
Which is how corporations win the war. Know why you couldn't afford whole foods before? Because too many people are selfish and shortsighted and would rather save 1 dollar than ensure anyone else makes an extra 2 bucks an hour. Corporations, lobbyists, and government policy have been decimating unions for decades and the results are very apparent when you look at any graph of actual wages. Executives skyrocket, workers are flat at best.
The scare tactics worked in much of the country; the federal minimum wage hasn't budged since 2009 and most states are at the same level. What did we get in exchange for that act of kindness towards the service sector? More self-checkout lanes and kiosks.
Yet employee and worker bodies causes discussion and debate as if somehow only this aspect of economic life should not seek to promote and protect their interests. Even billion dollar companies feel the need to form groups but individuals apparently do not benefit from association. This is a completely unrealistic position in the current economic context.
This is dissonance at work, to accept the logic of the former and see it work so effectively, and question the latter.
Just make sure that a large enough bloc conflate worker’s rights with the communism and then sit back and cash your checks. If the people get a little stroppy grow in something about race, abortion, or socialism and try not to smile too obviously all the way to the bank. If even thst fails punish the heretics amd reward the faithful, to the point that people desperate to keep their healthcare don’t even think of raising their heads.
I also dissent with the model of "everybody commits an act against society, why shouldnt anyone engage in the race to capture the spoils". Do not institutionalize robbery!
Maybe society is based upon competition?
Just wanted to point that out because it is so rare to read something that nearly instantly makes you think differently
Unions by comparison are highly political due to all of the special laws governing them. Federal laws like the NLRA are everyone's business so it's only to be expected that many people are going to put in their two cents.
Also, the nature of laws regarding unions is such that they can force many people, both employers and employees, to associate with a union whether they want to or not. This opens unions up to questions about their efficacy in a way that industry groups are not.
There are tons of special laws for businesses. Laws regarding businesses and employers affect everyone, whether they want them to or not.
It's a distinction I don't see.
I'm a software developer and I wished I had been in a union a couple of years ago. Back then I was working at a company in the middle of nowhere in England after finishing my degree. After several years the boss decided that we were all being paid too much and increased everyone's weekly working hours without additional compensation. I had no strong ties to the area, so practically straight away I quit and moved to London. Unfortunately for most of my colleagues they had family and friends there and this was the only real tech company in the area. It's an incredible feeling, being an educated professional and yet at the same time completely impotent.
Good luck Whole Foods workers.
While he is one of the richest people in the world, can't figure out how to spend it all. Literally throwing it away into a corporatefascist space program before he increases wages.
Unions should quite obviously have formed by now.
Including the eng team. But the problem with unions is that over time they are corrupted, and quickly become inefficient bureaucratic institutions. I agree with your sentiment, but the reality is far murkier than that.
While politics will be hard as always, instantly verifiable direct democracy is achievable with a distributed ledger + PGP...
In addition to that I personally think that jobs that require you to be on pager duty at all should be paying way more than they are, but everyone accepts it without batting an eye.
Ideally I'd love to even see multiple unions and some competition between them, that might be a better corruption control than anything people can think up.
My personal experience is they are a large net positive for workers, but every mistake gets heavily publicized.
Replace "unions" with "corporations" and the same is true.
Michels' classic Political Parties is a fascinating and depressing look at that problem. This stuff, problems with democracy, was fretted over 100 years ago, not so much nowadays, since democracy was redefined as what is called 'democracy' in the mid 20th C.[0]
"The iron law of oligarchy is a political theory, first developed by Michels in his 1911 book, Political Parties. It asserts that rule by an elite, or oligarchy, is inevitable as an "iron law" within any democratic organization as part of the "tactical and technical necessities" of organization.
Michels's theory states that all complex organizations, regardless of how democratic they are when started, eventually develop into oligarchies. Since no sufficiently large and complex organization can function purely as a direct democracy, power within an organization will always get delegated to individuals within that group, elected or otherwise.
Using anecdotes from political parties and trade unions struggling to operate democratically, Michels addressed the application of this law to representative democracy, stating "Who says organization, says oligarchy." ... "Historical evolution mocks all the prophylactic measures that have been adopted for the prevention of oligarchy."
All organizations eventually come to be run by a "leadership class", who often function as paid administrators, executives, spokespersons or political strategists for the organization. Far from being "servants of the masses", this "leadership class," rather than the organization's membership, will inevitably grow to dominate the organization's power structures. By controlling who has access to information, those in power can centralize their power successfully, often with little accountability, due to the apathy and non-participation most rank-and-file members have in relation to their organization's decision-making processes. Democratic attempts to hold leaders accountable fail, since with power comes the ability to reward loyalty, and the ability to both control information about the organization and what procedures the organization follows when making decisions. All of these mechanisms can be used to strongly influence the outcome of any decisions made 'democratically' by members." [1] (lightly abridged)
[0] see Michael Saward, Democracy [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy
I guess I'll start with... how is space exploration in itself fascist?
It's Amazon that's fascist, obviously not "space exploration" you pedant.
Antitrust laws are not being applied to them or Google, or FB, Uber. Etc.
I still think the term "fascist" is being waaay overused in politics, much less when describing a bullying, cheating behemoth.
Isn't it better to have some competition with the corporatefascist Musk Space and the corporatetourist Branson Space, than to not have it?
(And I am pro-union, FWIW...)
Perception wise, that seems like a direct line to "Amazon is a worse employer".
It reminded me of when our local co-op went out of business. Staples like bread & milk weren’t available.
What is the end game on this strategy? Cause wrt the coop it was “go away forever”.
When Whole Foods can't get produce that Smart and Final can, it tells me that they don't want to carry that produce.
Whole Foods in Chicago does a good job with meat, dairy, and beer. We more or less treat it as a specialty store for those three categories, and buy everything else from local stores. Produce, in particular, is always better at Mexican grocery stores.
> I'm not sure this shows things got quickly worse. It may just show enslaved Africans lost control they used to have.
Furthermore, after having talked to several employees of whole foods over the years... I think there’s higher satisfaction there than elsewhere. People enjoy doing things well, even if it is an every day thing.
Workers of any skill level are "owed" whatever they can get, because that's the same ethic employed by their employers.
E.g. wage negotiations.
I am doing what I can to remove my emotional reaction to your comment, which I find to cast a wide and unfounded net, from my response. I apologize if I didn't do a very good job.