I am posting here today because for a several months, I have felt really conflicted with feelings of disgust while working at my job, and I'm not sure what I should do.
I work at a major retail store. Like most retailers within the recent decade or so, this retailer has discovered that there is a market for opening up a grocery section of the store. I specifically specialize in the refrigerator and frozen areas.
The store I work brings in a lot of revenue; I guess we rank near the top in the US. We are always crowded with shoppers. Because of this, we end up getting a lot of product shipped in each night, but the store's design is flawed in that the focus of its construction was on floor space and the backroom is EXTREMELY limited.
What this is means is that we get a ton of frozen and refrigerated product that sits out on a pallet, in room temperature, sometimes for hours. The overnight workers and managers also really don't give a fuck and with the occasional overnight shifts that I have picked up with them, I learned that they end up dividing all the boxes of product up to sit on the sales floor before unboxing the product. At least, this is an efficient system. But technically, we are supposed to trash the food as it thaws for more than 30 minutes, sometimes we go casually over at an hour... but I know for a fact that food thaws and they just sell it anyways.
Another problem is that our store is incredibly short-staffed, so there isn't enough people to work the product/manage the cooler and freezer storage, ect. While talking to management and a young intern who is my age, I've racked up different explanations of why that is. The highest of managers and the intern put the blame on corporate policy, like there is some maximum amount of hours we can have, but my direct supervisor always mentions how strict his boss is with the payroll, which makes me really suspicious that the store staffs way shorter than it needs to in order to preserve that high revenue and ranking.
This is so sketchy, and I can't imagine it is legal that they endure their costs in this way. It was obvious to me that the quality of the food would be poor (ice cream no longer is ice cream after a while), but last night, I stuck up for prioritizing food safety again (like I was trained to!) only to frustrate my managers. When I got home, I did a little bit of googling and read about foodbourne illness, and how bacteria can form and increase while that food is thawed. This made me nervous. I talked to someone who works low level customer service in the store about this, and she thinks someone should report them. Some co-workers in my department, meanwhile, deny that its any big deal. They specifically mention that the frozen food will hold better while its still all condensed on a pallet.
If someone reads this, what do you think? I have thought about resigning to not be apart of it, I have tried transfering but that takes a while and has been a very political process since I have learned that the grocery managers figure it to be easier to keep me locked in grocery instead of hiring someone new. I'd prefer though, that I don't quit... mostly because I'm studying computer science which gives me potential to get a great job higher up, where I can pay off my over $100k in student loans. They also have a lot of other great benefits, like tuition coverage if I wanted to continue education with a new degree or grad school.
I'm morally opposed and disappointed that the store does this, and yet, it sort of seems like the economics/available space ect. sort of puts the managers in a place to make hard choices. Does anyone have ideas of what I should do?
Submitted December 16, 2015 at 03:42AM by Throw_Away_Bad_Food http://ift.tt/1No7ULO self
No comments:
Post a Comment