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24/7 Wall St.recently ranked the stores with the worst customer service, based on data from the American Customer Satisfaction Index. Clink on the link below for the results. (Slide show presentation).
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Nectarines are sorted at Eastern ProPak Farmers Cooperative in Glassboro, N.J.
The sheer volume of food wasted in the U.S. each year should cause us some shame, given how many people are hungry both in our own backyard and abroad.
Now the U.S. Department of Agriculture has provided us with a way to understand our flagrant annual waste in terms of calories, too. It’s pretty mind-boggling — 141 trillion calories down the drain, so to speak, or 1,249 calories per capita per day.
And if we could actually reduce this staggering quantity of food waste, the price of food worldwide might go down, according to a report from researchers at USDA’s Economic Research Service, Jean Buzby, Hodan Wells and Jeffrey Hyman.
To come up with these estimates of all the food that was harvested but never eaten, the team crunched the latest available data from 2010. This “lost” food encompasses all of the edible food available for consumption — including food that spoils or gets contaminated by mold or pests. It also includes the food that’s “wasted” — i.e. food discarded by retailers because it’s blemished, and the food left on our plates.
All told, 133 billion pounds of food was lost in 2010 — that’s 31 percent of the total food supply. And it was worth about $161.6 billion.
Of course, we are likely to waste some foods more than others. According to USDA, the top three food groups lost in 2010 were dairy products (25 billion pounds, or 19 percent of all the lost food); vegetables (25 billion pounds, or 19 percent); and grain products (18.5 billion pounds, or 14 percent).
On the upside, the USDA food economists report that there’s a growing interest in the food waste problem, and they offer three reasons why.
One is the growing awareness of the cost, and how much we’re squandering when good food gets tossed. Here, we’re talking money, but also precious nonrenewable resources, like water and fossil fuels.
Meanwhile, we’re also starting to realize that there are all kinds of other, unseen costs tied to food waste. For example, when we have to take food waste to a landfill, we either have to incinerate it or leave it to decompose, which both create their own greenhouse gas emissions.
And the third reason we’re starting to care more about food waste? We’ve finally connected the dots between all the hungry people now on Earth and all the food currently wasted that could be going their way instead.
Of course, some amount of food waste will always be inevitable, but the authors argue that there’s tremendous opportunity to prevent food loss. “Economic incentives and consumer behavior will be paramount in reducing food loss,” they write.
And, they tantalizingly suggest, “if food loss is prevented or reduced to the extent that less food is needed to feed people (i.e., the demand for food decreases), then this would likely reduce food prices in the United States and the rest of the world.”
Meanwhile, as we’ve reported, from the former CEO of Trader Joe’s to budding entrepreneurs, lots of people are starting to test promising business opportunities to capture and resell some of the food that is right now ending up in the trash
Mar
1
Red-tinted retail monster Target is having a hard time translating its popularity in the U.S. into foreign markets. Under the principle of kicking them while they’re down, we now bring you this former Target manager’s story of the “reprehensible” things he did in order to keep his job.
Though Walmart‘s shady business practices draw much of our attention, we’ve also carried many, many tales of Target’s own union-busting and terrible workplace conditions. The following email (which we received this week in response to our recent series of Walmart posts) comes from someone who has worked as a manager at Walmart, Target, and other retailers. Here is a peek inside the “dog and pony show” of retail management:
Retail management can be separated into tiers. The lower tier is made up of your Sears, Walmart, Kmart. The middle is made up of the Target, Macys, and Best Buys and the Upper tier is the Saks, Nordstrom, Nieman Marcus. The next step for me would be to move up to the middle tier. Target was one of the first retail Companys to recruit heavily from the Military and College, So many of the managers running the companies’ stores were doing so as a first job. On top of that it was highly known that Target would not hire you unless you were in your 20’s and “hot”; or as they called it Target Brand, a principle taken from Abercrombie and Fitch. The Target Managers from the outside looking in seemed like the popular kids this made it very appealing to me. I joined Target as an Executive Team Leader –Guest Experience a fancy title for a Customer Service Assistant Manager.
Target for being a retailer is a very high tech company, everything in the company was highly researched and metrics constantly developed to try and grow the company. So much so that the company at times cared more about the metrics than whether the stores made their sales goals. Stores we’re measured on very ridiculous things such as how many plastic bags were used, how long it took a team member to pick up a phone, if the store had to order more merchandise. All these plus many more caused the store teams to just cheat or make bad business decisions for fear of the metrics dropping below the goal.
The main focus of my job was to get people to sign up for Target Redcards. Why? Because Target made a killing off those that owned one of those cards. With that in mind Target established goals that every week 2% of the stores customers had to sign for a Card. That equaled about 150-200 Cards a week, if we did not reach the goal there would be consequences. The fear of being written up or possibly fired kept everyone on their toes so most us would cheat the system anyway we could. Some of these things included signing up homeless guys. Creating fake people with fake addresses and fake social securities, or even worse we would call the card a rewards card so that people with no credit or people with low income levels would sign up for the credit card. Looking back at it now the things we did just to reach a goal were terrible and beyond reprehensible but when confronted with keeping your job you do what you have to do especially if it felt like upper management subtly encouraged it. Of course actions like these would come back to hurt Target in the future. Another metric which belonged to my department was Guest Survey and Customer Complaints. Ouch! In retail this is by far one of the hardest things to control. People would complain about everything, the Starbucks coffee was too warm, to cold, not enough Caramel. The shopping carts were wet, the store to cold, an employee was following them, the bathroom was filled with shit etc. So what did we do, of course, we cheated, as the saying went if you weren’t cheating you weren’t trying.
Target regards its Human Resources among the best in retail, and I would have to say that like everything Target does, on paper it sounds great but the reality is a horror story. The company had an employee survey dubiously named “Best team Survey.” The month leading up to it every management team did everything in their power to influence results such as firing disgruntled or boisterous employees, buying the store lunch with our charge cards, being extremely nice anything to get a good result. Failing would result being put on the focus store list which meant more store visits from upper management. Target also had an “anonymous” employee line where employees could call and complain or tell an outside company if they were being mistreated. Once again this didn’t work, as the store managers would be contacted every time someone called and we could all figure out who called and the suggestion was always to find a way to either get rid of them or keep them from calling again.
Anyone who works in retail knows that store leadership visits are a joke. Actually a dog and pony show, the store usually looks like crap leading up the visit, and then the calvary gets called in 24hrs prior to the district manager showing up. The reason is due to limited payroll and if the district manager doesn’t see perfection expect someone to lose their job.
The reason why I wrote this wasn’t for sympathy or for attention but moreso to change the perception of the retail manager as some old guy who sits in a back office. These days’ retail managers are more than likely young to middle aged highly educated professionals stuck in retail due to the economy.
Source. Gawker.com
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