I'm a cashier. I do a good job, but lately there has been a cut in hours for me and several other part-timers after a brief raise in hours (I was getting 30-35 weekly, and some were getting 38 to start). I'm wondering how to get full-time so I can be one of those guys that works from the ghostly hour of 6am to 2pm. Is it seniority, because I haven't even worked here 1 year but went from drug/gm to bagger to cashier in that time, and the idea of waiting 5 years to have more seniority so I can make a decent paycheck makes me want to cash out my kroger check, so to speak.
They post bids and it's posted to every store in the district, so even if you're the next in line at your store, you might get passed up for someone at another store. It happened to a woman who I worked with; she'd been there for 3 years, she put in for the manager bid that opened up in our department, and it went to someone who literally had 3 months over her.
I don't know how much it is based on Seniority. I've only been with the department for about 7 months, and I just got offered full-time hours.. and meanwhile, there are others who have been there for years who don't get the same amount of hours as I do.
Put in the work to get noticed, offer to pick up shifts that they need covered, stay late, come in early, show you're reliable. The same thing happened when I was in another department before I transferred out. I was basically getting full-time hours (5 days/8 hours per day per week) for the same reason. Reliability and the capability of doing the job that was asked.
Maybe it's different at your store, but I seem to have no issue with getting full-time hours over people who have been there longer simply because they know I'll actually show up and put in the work that needs to be done.
You'll never get full time if you remain on the front end. Cashiers and baggers are too easily replaceable. I had to move to the bakery department before I was offered full time.
You'll never get full time if you remain on the front end. Cashiers and baggers are too easily replaceable. I had to move to the bakery department before I was offered full time.
I'm currently front-end, and have full-time hours. As does at least one other person, and neither of us are PICs.
You'll never get full time if you remain on the front end. Cashiers and baggers are too easily replaceable. I had to move to the bakery department before I was offered full time.
I'm currently front-end, and have full-time hours. As does at least one other person, and neither of us are PICs.
So that makes two people, not counting PICS, who have full time on the front end out of how many? How long have you worked for Kroger? There are full time people on the front end at my store too, but they've been there several years.
You'll never get full time if you remain on the front end. Cashiers and baggers are too easily replaceable. I had to move to the bakery department before I was offered full time.
I'm currently front-end, and have full-time hours. As does at least one other person, and neither of us are PICs.
So that makes two people, not counting PICS, who have full time on the front end out of how many? How long have you worked for Kroger? There are full time people on the front end at my store too, but they've been there several years.
1.5 years or so. Half the people in our Front-end department have been there much much longer.
Just telling this story to tell the story. It wouldn't relate to front end at all:
We have a person in our department that got full time by accident last year They were consistently given 36 hours each week, like many others in the department, but was working past their shift EVERY day by at least 30 minutes due to the fact that they are one of the slowest people I've ever seen and couldn't get all their work done.
There was a complete fury over this. People with more seniority raised hell and filed grievances... management wanted to fire her... department head and assistant caught all kinds of grief. The fact remained this person was working upwards around 40 hours each week for over 12 weeks, and NO ONE thought to check into it. (In this district, you have to average 38.5 hours for 12 weeks to get full time)
This led to a domino effect of sorts. Another person was given full time as sort of a peace offering, and then due to an extreme staffing shortage, 3 others have become full time just this year, myself included.
So now we have 5 full time people in our department not including dept heads, and it's still a mess... but that's a story for another time.
-- Edited by Turd Ferguson on Friday 31st of July 2015 04:39:57 AM
Just telling this story to tell the story. It wouldn't relate to front end at all:
We have a person in our department that got full time by accident last year They were consistently given 36 hours each week, like many others in the department, but was working past their shift EVERY day by at least 30 minutes due to the fact that they are one of the slowest people I've ever seen and couldn't get all their work done.
There was a complete fury over this. People with more seniority raised hell and filed grievances... management wanted to fire her... department head and assistant caught all kinds of grief. The fact remained this person was working upwards around 40 hours each week for over 12 weeks, and NO ONE thought to check into it. (In this district, you have to average 38.5 hours for 12 weeks to get full time)
This led to a domino effect of sorts. Another person was given full time as sort of a peace offering, and then due to an extreme staffing shortage, 3 others have become full time just this year, myself included.
So now we have 5 full time people in our department not including dept heads, and it's still a mess... but that's a story for another time.
-- Edited by Turd Ferguson on Friday 31st of July 2015 04:39:57 AM
Isn't that interesting...............In failing to correct one mistake, management inadvertently solved a whole gang of other problems. Life is funny some times.
Just telling this story to tell the story. It wouldn't relate to front end at all:
We have a person in our department that got full time by accident last year They were consistently given 36 hours each week, like many others in the department, but was working past their shift EVERY day by at least 30 minutes due to the fact that they are one of the slowest people I've ever seen and couldn't get all their work done.
There was a complete fury over this. People with more seniority raised hell and filed grievances... management wanted to fire her... department head and assistant caught all kinds of grief. The fact remained this person was working upwards around 40 hours each week for over 12 weeks, and NO ONE thought to check into it. (In this district, you have to average 38.5 hours for 12 weeks to get full time)
This led to a domino effect of sorts. Another person was given full time as sort of a peace offering, and then due to an extreme staffing shortage, 3 others have become full time just this year, myself included.
So now we have 5 full time people in our department not including dept heads, and it's still a mess... but that's a story for another time.
-- Edited by Turd Ferguson on Friday 31st of July 2015 04:39:57 AM
Isn't that interesting...............In failing to correct one mistake, management inadvertently solved a whole gang of other problems. Life is funny some times.
I'm sure management didn't see it that way, but it solved some problems for "us". For once, the people that actually work hard and are reliable were rewarded.
There's so much more to this. Back in the winter, we had a co-manager that cast a pretty wide net and fired 5 (maybe 6) people in our department... including the person whom inadvertently got full time status to begin with. The reasons varied, but could be best described as typical Kroger employee shenanigans. Give it a name... I'd say they were mostly deserved.
Well, it turned into this big class action type thing where the whole group got into union proceedings, and it looked like they fought pretty hard. All the while, we were incredibly short staffed, and everyone else got bumped up to 40 hours a week for the duration. I wouldn't call it "irony" exactly, but the only person that got their job back and made whole was the person that got full time by "mistake" in the first place. The rest were told to piss off, basically. Good riddance
I got my full time status the same week this other person came back. I'm omitting some details for brevity, but it apparently blew payroll out of the water.. Dept head wouldn't speak to me for weeks.
What kind of warped business plan is based on preventing employees from making a living?
How to get full-time
Find a department (talk to department heads) that is both shorthanded and has forty or more unfilled hours allocated to it each week. (Twelve consecutive weeks of 40 or more hours worked "locks" a person into full-time in some or all Southwest districts.)
What kind of warped business plan is based on preventing employees from making a living?
How to get full-time
Find a department (talk to department heads) that is both shorthanded and has forty or more unfilled hours allocated to it each week. (Twelve consecutive weeks of 40 or more hours worked "locks" a person into full-time in some or all Southwest districts.)
They don't get "locked in" under our contract. They then have to maintain those full time hours and if they fall below it they are reclassified as part time. Kroger has a way to prevent full time and if someone gets it, they have a way to take it away again.
What kind of warped business plan is based on preventing employees from making a living?
The point was that this person was working way over their scheduled times and allotted hours, due mostly to slow and/or poor work performance. Going by union contract and such, this person was actually rewarded for this, and it caused a furor... and rightly so. The whole clusterf#$% was compounded by the fact that no one in a supervisory role, nor management had any idea this was going on, let alone took the time to ever take a look at it until it was too late. It was a failure on many levels.
They don't get "locked in" under our contract. They then have to maintain those full time hours and if they fall below it they are reclassified as part time. Kroger has a way to prevent full time and if someone gets it, they have a way to take it away again.
You're locked in to a certain degree in that under full time, you're scheduled 40 hours, but if for some reason(s) your average falls under the required hours for full time, management can/will pull that status from you. They can't cut your hours, though.
-- Edited by Turd Ferguson on Friday 31st of July 2015 10:44:57 AM
They don't get "locked in" under our contract. They then have to maintain those full time hours and if they fall below it they are reclassified as part time. Kroger has a way to prevent full time and if someone gets it, they have a way to take it away again.
You're locked in to a certain degree in that under full time, you're scheduled 40 hours, but if for some reason(s) your average falls under the required hours for full time, management can/will pull that status from you. They can't cut your hours, though.
-- Edited by Turd Ferguson on Friday 31st of July 2015 08:57:42 AM
You're probably under a different contract than me.
They don't get "locked in" under our contract. They then have to maintain those full time hours and if they fall below it they are reclassified as part time. Kroger has a way to prevent full time and if someone gets it, they have a way to take it away again.
You're locked in to a certain degree in that under full time, you're scheduled 40 hours, but if for some reason(s) your average falls under the required hours for full time, management can/will pull that status from you. They can't cut your hours, though.
-- Edited by Turd Ferguson on Friday 31st of July 2015 08:57:42 AM
You're probably under a different contract than me.
You must be under a lousy contract then. If that's true, then what's to prevent management from taking away full time status from all its full time employees? In my division, and probably all others except yours, if you are full time, you are guaranteed 40 hours a week. They can't take away your full time status unless you decide you want to go back to part time.
OP again: would an influx of new cashiers be part of the reason why people are losing hours? I got 20 next week--what am I supposed to do with that? To a 16 year old bagger that is gold, but I'll be lucky to hit 100 on my check. Why are schedules so inconsistent week to week? It's not like I'm asking for a bunch of days off or that my availability is limited. Seems like the only alternative is to be that jerk who uses seniority and sucks other people's hours. The new manager said he wanted more hours up front when he joined the store and that would explain the increase people got (myself included) for his first month, but I don't know what is going on now. It is also annoying when Kroger calls me on the days they wanted me to be off. Why not just give me the hours to start with instead of people that keep calling off work, sometimes even on Sundays? I hope to get more hours by staying later which I am asked to do fairly regularly, but again, just give me more hours and quit relying on other people. I would love a second job but my schedule has a tendency to conflict with my availability, so that problem would likely keep happening and I'd be in coordination hell. A coworker quit after juggling two jobs because Kroger kept screwing up.
Erratic hours is one of several reasons why employees are not happy with Kroger and choose not to stay with the company. Combined with the poor pay rate and low raises, the result is a high turnover (which I believe the company secretly desires as that means fewer people stick around and build up vacation/person time and start hitting the higher raises that come with working an extended number of years).
Your hours and everyone else's likely will be unstable, with few periods of stability here and there, because your store manager actually doesn't have as much control over hours as you might think. Hours can be added/deducted based on what district/division coordinators/managers feel is appropriate. Not just that, but certain types of the year call for a reduction or an increase in hours. Summer is usually a time when you see hours go down because business tends to slow down somewhat due to families going on vacations with kids being out of school. Hours will pick up again in the autumn and even more so as Thanksgiving/Christmas nears.
The computer writes much of the schedule nowadays, but a good CSM will do needed touch-ups here and there, but your CSM's hands are tied to an extent because too much modifying of the schedule that deviates from what the computer produced lowers the CSM's e-Sked score and gets him/her in trouble with the front end coordinator that oversees your district.
There is also speculation that corporate doesn't want full time employees and the e-Sked software is partially written with the purpose to keep employees from obtaining full time status. Store managers are under pressure by corporate to keep hours down to boost profit and supposedly, limit the number of full time positions down to as few employees as possible.
If you want more hours on the front end, consider volunteering to learn self scan, customer care, run floors and, if you can, accounting, as well as file maintenance. The more you can do on the front end, the more hours you can pick up because people will call in/quit unexpectedly, and if you can "jump in" when this happens, management/your CSM will possibly come to you to help them fill in the gaps. Additionally, you can talk to management about being cross-trained and offer your time and work ethic to produce, floral, drug/gm, etc... so you can be scheduled across multiple departments.
The more short handed your store is, and the more involved and compassionate your management team is, the easier this will be.
The erratic hours is one of the main reasons why I quit. I was told that I'd get 28 max hours. My first week I got 39, but I was in training, so knew that wasn't going to last, and I had a consistent 26-28 hour week after that. Then they dropped me down to 14. For someone supporting a family, having 14 hours is not even enough to drive back and forth. I lived 45 minutes away from my location, so needless to say.
Then when I was pretty much forced to get a second job because they weren't even giving me even 24 hours a week, they told me that they won't work around my other job (which has consistently given me 37-39 hours since I've been there). I wanted to say that if they actually gave hours then I wouldn't have needed the second job, but I left it alone. I put in my notice a few days later, because the only solution that was given was to fix my availability in expresshr, and well...how do you fix a schedule that conflicts no matter what?
It wasn't like my department (deli) wasn't struggling; there would be 2 people from 6am to 2pm, then someone would come in at like 11 and they would be by themselves until the closers (or closer depending on if someone called out) came in. Then they bitched about how things weren't getting done in the time given, but it's not like you're only stocking shelves in the deli--you're also helping customers, cooking, trying to keep a safe environment free from spills (oil spills suck). So when the truck gets put on the backburner for a week (this happened), everyone got an earful. Hey, throw someone on the schedule only for doing truck if you must, but don't get mad because things don't get done. Kroger in general seems disinterested in retaining newer employees (and consequently, older ones move on). Hence why the hoops of fire you gotta jump over for full-time.
What kind of warped business plan is based on preventing employees from making a living?
How to get full-time
Find a department (talk to department heads) that is both shorthanded and has forty or more unfilled hours allocated to it each week. (Twelve consecutive weeks of 40 or more hours worked "locks" a person into full-time in some or all Southwest districts.)
I agree with your second paragraph. It's the most effective way to get on track to a career here. However, Kroger doesn't exist to give people a living. They exist to make a profit like every other business.
That's true, but Kroger takes it to the extreme in how they view and treat employees in their grasp for the almighty dollar.
It was so much fun working for a boss who looked at me as "you can quit and we'd be fine with it" because it was so easy to find another schmuck to fill the position.
This post is incorrect you may have been promoted to full time with less senority and if you were then kroger snuck you into the position, this usually happens to sycophants who attract the managers attention in a good way. Anyone employed by kroger could file a grievance against you and take the job away from you.
The only real way to achieve full time on the front end is to become a manager. Even if you manage to swindle enough hours, there's a very good chance they will ignore it and force you to go to the union. That's happened a few times at my store. If you are somehow successful (lol), there's the possibility that doing so will only make a slot for someone else.
At my store, I think that hours are monitored, so we get 12 hour weeks as soon as we get close.
The last time any cashier achieved full time around here was probably 8 years ago. LP went on a rampage and fired a large part of the front end. Whoever was left basically ended up getting it since hiring was slower and contracts were better.
