Crummy Retail Jobs Are a Corporate Choice, Not a Law of Nature

http://blog.zeynepton.com/2012/10/crummy-retail-jobs-are-corporate-choice.html

Let me give an example that is related to part-time work. As Greenhouse’s article mentions, some retailers operate with 85% part-time workers. Their excuse is that they need that much “flexibility.” Sure, some flexibility is needed in retail. The nature of most service industries is that customer traffic varies greatly. Sometimes the store is crowded, sometimes not. But flexibility for 85% of the employees? That’s just ridiculous!

How do I know it’s ridiculous? Mercadona, Spain’s largest supermarket chain, offers the lowest prices in the country and it does so with over 85% of its employees full-time and even salaried, with very predictable schedules that are provided one month in advance. Yes, these are the same employees—cashiers, people bringing bananas out from the stockroom—that other companies need to be so “flexible” with.

Don’t Mercadona customers visit the stores at different times? Don’t the stores need flexibility? You bet they do. Go into a Mercadona store in the afternoon and it’s almost empty. It’s the siesta time, I guess. Go back in the evening and it’s full of people. But pretty much the same number of workers are there throughout the day.

How does Mercadona get away with this? It invested in its employees. Mercadona spends about €5,000 per new employee in a four-week training program which includes cross-training. So when traffic is high, employees help customers and when traffic is low, those same employees shelve goods and order merchandise. There’s always something productive to do and pretty much any employee has been trained to do it well. That’s Mercadona’s idea of flexibility.

And by the way, Mercadona doesn’t do this for charity. It’s highly profitable. At a time when Spain is struggling (to put it mildly), Mercadona is thriving!