After merging with Kroger, the store began to decline rapidly. Employees who were once happy and enjoyed (usually) coming to work became exhausted and miserable. Corporate cared about nothing but the bottom line.
- The pay sucks, but I don't think it's uniquely bad among retail
- Terrible benefits, but again, seem pretty par for the course
- Managers were unqualified, incompetent, and generally terrible. Some of them were genuinely stupid people who I think were only appointed due to open availability and their willingness to acquiesce completely to the corporate machine. Hey, they have to make a living.
- Once Kroger took over, the name of the game was cutting hours. Cut hours, cut hours, cut hours. It's all they ever talked about after a while. I would come in sometimes on, say, a Friday at 3:00 (prime time for us) and there would be one cashier scheduled. Management are all standing around like a deer in headlights. No thought of, oh, I don't know, getting on a register and helping. Nope. They are up front staring at the schedule like it's going to produce a trained employee out of thin air. The store was in a perpetual state of being short-staffed. There were never, and I mean never, enough people working. There were lines 80% of the day. Customers noticed and did not like it at all. We were expected to run a cash register and the front desk while meeting impossible goals (like greeting customers within 10 seconds of them approaching the desk - hard to do when I am running a cash register). I could go on, but suffice it to say it was bad. Managers would try to get people to stay over to help. They would ask college students on a Friday night to stay until 10pm to help out. How do you think that went? It started to become normal to simply not even have someone scheduled to close. There was just no one on the schedule. We were expected to just figure it out, while making $11/hour.
- Corporate interference was atrocious. Periodically, we would have corporate department managers drop by and tell us some of the dumbest things I have ever heard a human being say, but in complete seriousness. "Hey, I know we are cutting hours and making this job terrible, but customers are complaining about wait times. How can we fix it?" Gee, I don't know. I am so glad you were hired to make 3x my salary and your job is to come ask me that question. They would frequently implement terrible policies that employees and customers hated equally with zero input from either party. If I had to guess, I would say that several people had jobs whose sole function was to produce a new idea every few months. So they just pumped out whatever they could think of, and that's what we went with.
Not much else to say. Like so many companies shackled by the chains of capitalism and wearing the blinders of the illusion of perpetual growth, this company thinks it just keep cutting hours, keep making services worse, keep stripping benefits, and keep paying poverty wages and it will all work out in the end. Customers are not stupid. Actually they are in most cases, but my point is that they notice when things are getting worse. Employees notice too. Harris Teeter will, for the foreseeable future, be staffed by college students and miserable, exhausted, and largely incompetent adults who have no motivation to be good at their jobs.
