We're given a set amount of hours/dep./month to jockey around with. Think about it. If you had over fifty employees who's lives were in your hands and you had to make the call on how much food was going to go in their mouths, would you want that responsibility?
So, what happens is I deal between who has open availability, closed schedules and which ones of the latter I can convince to be flexible. Meanwhile, behind my back the deli is fkd on labor, the bakery has had no one there for three days and produce looks like it got hit with the zombie plague. Gets better: PRODUCE is now our disrict AND Regional's pet department!
But what I do, when somebody is a good, on time, dependable worker, is squeeze in some more hours for them. As I said before, I lump this under business needs. It's all about covering yourself now, where it used to be just working for the store and its people.
Sad but that's how it is. At least you haven't completely given up.
Produce is a mess in my store but hours were just cut.
Tangentially related, what has never made sense to me is why dept people who can fix things in the guns are always scheduled together. If there's a problem and it's not their hours, everybody is screwed.
We have an edict where keyrings are banned because we had too many. Because of that and the scheduling stupidity, whoever's in the depts tells the front end to ring up something that's the same price or brings them something that's the same price. That screws up BOH.
This week they didn't schedule any file clerks or help for our scan rite coordinator either. I think she's ready to give up.
That doesn't happen here. Except in emergencies, this week we had a deli person come down and help for a couple days, but overall, deli and bakery are two seperate departments with their own department head, etc. I know some stores combine them though.