hahaa this is a funny question. i have asked this numerous times in the past and everyone has a different answer.  I heard that it is by January 31 then I also heard it is by the middle of January.  One year my family was planning on doing a 10 day cruise towards the end on January.  It was a minor logistic nightmare figuring out if I could use vacation time or not.  Finally we say screw it and just went way early in the month.

Good luck on getting a clear accurate answer!

I was told I had until January 31st to use my last PH day, and this was by my department manager, so hopefully she was right?

department managers are not the smartest people in the world.  this sorta brings up a good time for me to speak more about Kroger and their brilliant department managers. I was sorta thinking about this earlier today as I was sucking down a beer and eating some buffalo wings. so here it goes.....

  Kroger has, as we all know, tons and tons of stores.  they need a bunch of people to work in them.  its retail and not the most glamorous profession in the world.  they would hire 10 year olds if they could but as of now this is illegal.  so they hire what they can - usually high school dropouts or people who never went to college or have much aspirations in the world.  or they get older folks who might be moms looking for supplemental income for the family and the whatnot.\

 anyways, they need managers for the departments.  they find what they consider the 'cream of the crop' workers that kinda are the go getter type. they are able to understand what needs to be done in that particular department and ready willing and able to step up and keep that part of the fleet afloat.  they get more pay which is nice and better hours so to speak and are allowed to "manage" and not really be in the trenches doing the grunt work.  so they draft up a schedule every week for all the lowlys in the department. 

here is where the problem lies.  the grunts are expected to perform particular tasks during the day and by ooohhh 11pm everything is done and perfect again and we all go home patting ourselves on the back for doing such great work and get drunk and come back in the next day to do it all over again.  this goes on ad infinitum till we all go madly insane and die a slow death here on earth.  the problem really falls on the shoulders of the department manager.  do they ever really delegate work to the crew or just assume we will do what we are supposed to do?  who here can say that they are actually pushed hard by the management?  Not me.  And nor are my fellow employees who, day in and day out, play dumb and just do the bare bone necessity to get by.