Last Friday and Saturday were fine. We had enough people to get stuff done... with the help of all the people in other departments that were called up front to help open lanes and sack, and several supervisors and co-managers jumping on registers. That's fine. Things got taken care of.
Then there's today, Sunday. I come in at my shift, which was 10:30am - 6:00pm. I see Self-Checkout open, and two lanes being run by supervisors with no one to sack for them. It turns out I'm the first cashier in today. I open up on one of the express lanes by Self-Checkout, and the person at Self-Checkout mentions to me that the store messed up big time on scheduling this week, which is why there was no one to come in for the 7:30am - 3:30 pm shift, so until shortly before I came, every single customer had to go through Self-Checkout. Note again that this is labor day weekend.
I continue working, people from other departments are constantly having to be called up to the front to open lanes and to sack. We also end up having to get the Utility guy to do all the propane exchanges because we had no Courtesy Clerks. I'm pretty much having to race back and forth to do things like push carts out of the way that customers left on the front end, while trying to fill up my change thing on my express lane, while pulling customers with larger orders to my lane constantly due to how packed it was, etc. which is fine, I was doing well.
By 2:00pm, our 2nd cashier of the day comes in and relieves me for my 1st break. While on my break, I notice that the rest of the front end is being run solely by front-end supervisors (one of which who was having to work several hours overtime), co-managers, the store manager, our utility clerk, random people from different departments they were calling up to sack, and 1 Courtesy Clerk (which turned out to be the only Courtesy clerk we had for the whole day).
By now, you get the picture. We wound up having only 3 Cashiers and 1 Courtesy Clerk who were able to come in today due to schedule problems (the 3rd cashier came in near the end of my shift). All of us stayed 8 hour shifts, even when we were scheduled for less time (which, I mean, why would we turn down extra hours?). Other departments got behind on their stuff because of how often they had to be called up to the front. Basically, today wound up being one big mess. Oh, I forgot to mention that the register I was on messed up several times throughout the day until I finally decided to just stay on one of the other express lanes, which is almost never open because it has problems. I will say that I'm impressed with how well the front end was run with only 3 Cashiers and 1 Courtesy Clerk scheduled, but I really hope it doesn't happen again any time soon.
Oh, and I figured I'd also mention that my store isn't exactly a small Kroger.
Have any other stores had this problem? I'm assuming that with school having started recently that there are other stores with similar problems.
Wait, scratch that. I just remembered we actually had 2 Courtesy Clerks today, not just 1. They just wound up having to switch back and forth between doing Carts outside.
Last Friday and Saturday were fine. We had enough people to get stuff done... with the help of all the people in other departments that were called up front to help open lanes and sack, and several supervisors and co-managers jumping on registers. That's fine. Things got taken care of.
Management is not suppose to perform any work that can be performed by a regular union employee. It's against union rules and someone could file a grievance.
Last Friday and Saturday were fine. We had enough people to get stuff done... with the help of all the people in other departments that were called up front to help open lanes and sack, and several supervisors and co-managers jumping on registers. That's fine. Things got taken care of.
Management is not suppose to perform any work that can be performed by a regular union employee. It's against union rules and someone could file a grievance.
The contract authorizes it in emergencies so in this case, no they couldn't.
Last Friday and Saturday were fine. We had enough people to get stuff done... with the help of all the people in other departments that were called up front to help open lanes and sack, and several supervisors and co-managers jumping on registers. That's fine. Things got taken care of.
Management is not suppose to perform any work that can be performed by a regular union employee. It's against union rules and someone could file a grievance.
The contract authorizes it in emergencies so in this case, no they couldn't.
An emergency is if everyone calls in due to bad weather or if there's an epidemic. Not scheduling enough people because you want to save money is not an emergency.
An emergency is if everyone calls in due to bad weather or if there's an epidemic. Not scheduling enough people because you want to save money is not an emergency.
Having already read the first post, it quickly became obvious to me that the scheduling issue went far beyond "not scheduling enough people to save money." The first cashier not coming in until 10:30 would be ridiculous in a small store, and OP says their store is not a small one. It doesn't even have to be an emergency for this to be allowed contractually. The contract essentially states that this sort of thing is expected to happen occasionally. Management is simply not supposed to be scheduled to do the work of an hourly associate.
OP here. The problem isn't them not scheduling much to save hours, but rather that we wound up having a lot of people on the front end quit when school started, and then even more people quit after that because they knew that the rest of us there would be even busier, and that it meant they would no longer get to be lazy. We literally had half of our courtesy clerks quit within the past month, and so a lot of the checkers are now getting shifts for sacking and doing returns.
Unfortunately, with a lot of people getting sick lately too, we've also been having a lot of people call in too. So basically, we're just extremely short-staffed and I really hope they hire some more people for the front end soon.
Happened in our store. Poor scheduling to save money. But then they realized the err of their ways (for at least a week IF we're lucky), we had lines all mish-moshed. Couldn't even tell which was the actual line, what line went where, if it was a line or people waiting to pass through etc. plus people in depts were expected to literally drop what they were doing to check and or bag up front. In addition to getting their own work done.
We had manpower issues the day of the holiday, but they were more or less unavoidable. My store is a weekend store (ie ~35-40% of our sales are on sat and sun) so we are normally busy. With the holiday being on monday, we expected to be even busier than normal, but close to normal sales on mon, so we scheduled that way. Well, sat and sun, it rained and was dreary all day, so we were dead all day, but mon the weather cleared nicely. We were slammed. It was a nightmare. Next holiday after a weekend, you bet your ass we will be watching the weather forecasts much more closely.
