March 2014 - Page 5 of 25 - I Hate Working In Retail

Mar
27

By

‘Instacart’ App Does Your Boring, Weekend-Ruining Grocery Shopping For You

Category: Grocery Retail Tags: Leave a Comment

It’s not the morning commute, the climb to a fifth-floor walkup, or the pressure of being surrounded by the best and the brightest in the world. In New York City, what truly separates the weak from the strong is the weekly trip to the grocery store.

It doesn’t matter if you’re Team Whole Foods, Team Trader Joe’s, or Team I Travel An Hour To The Secret Target in Harlem, grocery shopping often involves being pushed by angry women in yoga pants who will be damned if you get the last bag of kale and standing behind men who just cannot decide which cheese to get.

So when someone else offers to do the grocery shopping for us, we’re quick to jump at the chance to avoid all that hassle. Enter Instacart.

The free iOS app, which got its start in San Francisco and made its NYC debut on March 26, lets customers select grocery items from their local stores. For a $7.99 fee, the order will be delivered within two hours (or at a time of the customer’s choosing).

instacart

Grocery delivery services are nothing new. After all, Fresh Direct and Max Delivery have been in the game for awhile now, as have services like Google Shopping Express, the same-day delivery service that has been gaining traction in San Francisco. Instacart offers customers a one-hour delivery option from their local store sans a minimum amount.

Another benefit? A personal touch.

At least that’s what Emma, my Instacart delivery person, told me.

“The difference is that it’s an actual personal shopper just for you,” she said. “Your food isn’t coming out of a warehouse and being put in a box and dropped on your doorstep.”

Having a personal shopper can make a bit of a difference. For example, the food delivered to the office (a bunch of bananas, a mango, and some strawberries) was ready to eat, just as if I had selected it from the grocery store myself. With the app, customers also have the option to select alternate items in case one of their original choices is of stock. (That was the case with that mango you see there.)

fruit

How do you like them bananas?

“The company’s motto is to just pick what you would eat,” Emma tells me. “Remember that it’s a person getting this food.”

While that seems like common sense, anyone who has had groceries delivered can vouch that it’s a risky business. You might open your box to a cracked egg, bruised apple, or smaller-than-expected eggplant.

The entire Instacart process was pleasant. The app is beautifully designed and easy to operate, the delivery was speedy (I ordered at 11:03 a.m., and it was delivered at exactly 12:03 p.m.), and my food was delivered in a cute tote (as opposed to a cardboard box) by a very friendly delivery person.

bag

We can’t lie; the bag is a nice touch.

The downside? Any grocery delivery is going to be significantly more expensive than just going to the store. Remember the indecisive and angry grocery shoppers? You’re paying someone to tackle those sorts of issues for you, and it’ll cost you. I paid $23 for the Instacart delivery (including tax and tip), but a quick trip down the street revealed those same items would’ve cost about $7 in-store.

Here’s a breakdown of what the items I bought from Instacart would cost if they were purchased elsewhere:

These prices reflect the purchase of 5-7 bananas, one mango, and one package of strawberries.

SERVICE COST OF PRODUCE DELIVERY FEE TOTAL COST
Instacart $ 13.02 $ 7.99 $ 23.01 (tip and tax included)
Fresh Direct $ 9.76 $ 14.99 + Fuel Surcharge of .68 $ 25.43
Max Delivery $ 10.17 *$ 4.95 *$ 15.12
Go to the grocery store (Gristedes) $ 6.67 – $ 6.67

*Max Delivery has a $20 minimum, so our very small order wouldn’t qualify.

Currently, Instacart is only available to Manhattanites living downtown (below 34th Street and excluding the Financial District), but it has plans to deliver to other neighborhoods in the near future.

“[We are] looking to aggressively expand to the rest of the city and surrounding areas in upcoming weeks as we scale our operations,” an Instacart representative told The Huffington Post.

Instacart also serves areas of Boston, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and Chicago

 

Sourced from the huffingtonpost.com

Fb-Button

Mar
27

By

Domino’s Franchisees Settle Wage Theft Investigation In New York For $448,000

Category: Domino's, Food Retail Tags: Leave a Comment

PIZZA
 The owners of 23 Domino’s Pizza locations in New York agreed Thursday to pay workers nearly half a million dollars to settle a wage-theft investigation by the office of state Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman.

Schneiderman’s office says it uncovered a raft of labor law violations that occurred between 2007 and 2013 at the stores, which are owned by six franchisees. Those include delivery workers being paid below the $5.65 tipped minimum wage they were entitled to, workers not being paid for overtime worked beyond 40 hours, and delivery drivers not being fully reimbursed for their auto expenses.

The $448,000 restitution fund will be divvied up among 750 current and former Domino’s workers, most of whom will get between $200 and $2,000. The settlement comes on the heels of a similar deal reached by Schneiderman’s office last week, when it settled an investigation bringing nearly $500,000 to McDonald’s workers in New York City who said they’d been shorted on pay.

“The violations in these cases demonstrate a statewide pattern of Domino’s franchisees flouting the law and illegally chiseling at the pay of minimum-wage workers, who struggle to survive,” Schneiderman said in a statement. “My office will be relentless in pursuing fast-food employers who underpay the hardworking people who are the backbone of their operations.”

The franchisees have admitted to the violations, according to Schneiderman’s office. The attorney general listed all of the franchisees and their restaurants, which span eight New York counties, on the state website.

None of the restaurants in the settlement were operated by Domino’s. A Domino’s spokesman said the company wasn’t aware of the lawsuit and wouldn’t comment on it.

Wage theft allegations are common in the fast-food industry, where most workers don’t earn much more than the minimum wage. The sector’s pay practices have become part of a broader national discussion on income inequality, thanks in large part to the strikes and protestsstaged by fast-food workers throughout the country over the past year.

Fast Food Forward, the union-backed group that helped organized those strikes, issued a statement calling the Domino’s franchise settlement a “huge victory.” Naquasia LeGrand, a Brooklyn KFC employee and member of the group, also criticized companies like McDonald’s and Domino’s for distancing themselves from their franchisees’ actions.

“[F]ast food corporations like Domino’s and McDonald’s cannot hide from their responsibility for these unlawful practices,” LeGrand said in the statement. “They’re the ones in control of the daily operations of their franchisees.”

As part of the settlement, the Domino’s franchisees will be required to establish a grievance procedure for workers, train managers on labor law and submit reports to Schneiderman’s office showing their compliance. Two franchisees who’d committed “the most egregious violations” will also have to submit to independent monitors who will make surprise visits to their stores.

Wednesday’s settlement wasn’t the first time Schneiderman’s office reached a deal with a Domino’s franchisee involving allegations of labor law violations. In December, a store owneragreed to rehire 25 employees who’d been fired after they said they were being paid below the minimum wage.

Sourced from thehuffingtonpost.com

 

 

Fb-Button

Mar
26

By

Retail Job Growth Illusion: More Workers, Fewer Hours

Category: Fashion Retail, Food Retail, Grocery Retail, Other Retail, Pharmacy Retail Tags: Leave a Comment

The rank-and-file retail workforce has never been through an employment drought like the kind seen in the past two years, outside of a recession or its immediate aftermath.

While retail-industry woes are a regular news staple, the sector’s addition of 308,000 nonmanagerial jobs from December 2011 to December 2013 — before severe winter weather began skewing economic data — has provided the appearance of a recovery in payrolls. Yet that increase was offset by a slide in the average workweek to 30 hours from 30.7 hours.

In fact, total hours clocked by nonsupervisors didn’t budge in that two-year span, Bureau of Labor Statistics data show. (They later took a weather-related dive to start 2014.)

Income Inequality Debate

“When you go into stores these days, it’s increasingly difficult to find service,” said Ken Perkins, president of Retail Metrics.

Companies have been adopting self-checkout machines and scanners to check prices, while shifting more of their investment to their online operations, he pointed out.

This recent, unusual period of stagnation is important to consider because no sector employs more low-wage workers, so none may be more central to the debate over how to narrow inequality.

The retail industry encompasses 13.1 million nonsupervisory workers who earn, on average, just over $14 an hour. And the number making less than $10 an hour tops 5 million.

The key question is how retail-sector employment of low-wage workers, currently at a standstill, will hold up if employers are mandated to take on more responsibility for health care coverage and pay a substantially higher minimum wage.

Meanwhile, most retailers are already suffering from consumers still hobbled by an incomplete jobs recovery, aggressive price competition, and the ongoing shift to online sales.

And while Washington is debating an online sales tax to help brick-and-mortar retailers compete, ObamaCare and minimum-wage mandates could encourage low-labor online business models and make expansion plans somewhat riskier.

Brick-and-mortar retail is “a shrinking industry” that’s looking to cut costs, Perkins said. “For them to be able to generate additional revenue to cover the additional cost of health care and a higher minimum wage is going to be very difficult.”

Warning Sign?

The decline in the average workweek in 2013 came as anecdotes piled up about retailers cutting work schedules below ObamaCare’s full-time threshold of 30 hours per week and offers a possible warning sign that the industry won’t take on such mandates without a hitch.

In the long-troubled office supplies sector, Staples (SPLS) began enforcing a limit of 25 hours per week for part-timers in January, not long before it announced plans to close 225 stores.

Among general merchandise retailers (department stores and discounters) and clothing stores, their 3.7 million nonmanagerial workers are down a little more than 2% over the past two years, while the total number of hours they work has tumbled more than 9%.

Florida-based Bealls Department Stores and David’s Bridal are among retailers in these categories restructuring their workforces to limit the number of employees above the 30-hours-per-week threshold.

Even as nonmanagers have been losing jobs at clothing and general merchandise stores, the number of managers has been rising in both of these groups and in the retail industry as a whole — by nearly 100,000 in the past year. Yet those gains seemed to peter out in the past three months as store-closing announcements picked up.

RadioShack (RSH), J.C. Penney (JCP) and Children’s Place (PLCE) are among other retailers that have announced plans to close stores recently.

Many economists make the argument that better-paid employees can have positive effects on a firm’s bottom line due to better morale, higher productivity and lower turnover. A rise in the minimum wage also could support higher demand, though a need to raise prices could have the opposite effect.

The Congressional Budget Office’s recent analysis of the Democratic proposal to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour was widely reported to result in a loss of 500,000 jobs.

Yet that estimate didn’t account for the ObamaCare employer mandate. The nonpartisan scorekeeper said that combining a minimum-wage hike with ObamaCare’s employer penalties would likely cause deeper job losses than a wage hike alone.

ObamaCare’s extra cost “boosts the likelihood that employers’ savings from reducing the size of their workforces would exceed their adjustment costs” necessary to retool for those job cuts, such as installing labor-saving equipment, the budget agency said.

Yet it’s possible that the employer mandate wouldn’t magnify job losses due to a higher minimum wage, but rather intensify pressure on low-wage employers to keep work schedules below 30 hours.

Read More At Investor’s Business Daily: http://news.investors.com

 

Fb-Button
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »