Retail work at the grocery job during Thanksgiving Covid 2.0 was intense. Out of all my years at the company since 2013, this was the hardest Thanksgiving that I've ever worked since I started working retail back in 2009 back home. What made it so different from every other year? Not enough staff, not enough baggers, management constantly mismanaging employee breaks, no social distancing, no limit or cap on number of customers or any of the items they buy. In short, it was a circus show. But that's okay, that's life, that's work. But is it though? Is it something we, as workers have to become accustomed to?
Covid has unquestionably made an eternal impact upon the world of retail grocery. It cannot go back to the way it was before-albeit still poorly mismanaged by upper and lower management, but Covid has unveiled something much more menacing-the dark heart of human nature in the workplace. I can always take time to look at what's truly there but hidden, the dark side of human nature.
As bad as Covid in the workplace has been for us at my store, what has arguably become much worse is the attitude and mentality of customers, and lower and upper management. I've increasingly seen over these some ten years that they are the ones hurting the employees the most.
Now that Covid has been raging for two years, the customers at my store have become more unruly than ever. This might be the height of American retail ignorance, the worst I've ever seen. They aren't willing to listen or take other considerations, instead their go to is to become aggressive and/or start yelling like a child when they don't get what they want.
On the opposite spectrum lower and upper management have become so cold to employees to the point where it's become obvious that they don't give a shit about what's going on, what's really going on behind the scenes. They aren't ignorant, rather they're negligent, unforgiving, and just generally don't care.
I work for the Local Union 770 and I can tell you this much, our union doesn't do much to help the morale of the average UFCW worker. These employees are left to fend for themselves, fighting for scraps of whatever little hours they can get per week. The sad irony is that in the past these jobs used to count for something because they were reliable and were supported by a much stronger more influential union. What we have today is a shell of that stable job and strong influential union. However, I must admit that I'm pro labor union and pro employees despite what may be written here.
Going back to this Thanksgiving week. This has been one of the most brutal holiday work experiences in my lifetime. During the first year of Covid it wasn't this bad. Which goes to our original question, how did things deteriorate to this level? The easy quick answer is antipathy, utter lack of care from management, which begs the question, will work become a lesser entity within our lives as Covid progresses through its many stages and mutations? Will work not even matter at some point? Will money become a much more valuable commodity because less people will be working and/or quit working these types of jobs? In the end if everybody stops caring about work, will the quality of work and jobs in the different fields naturally deteriorate to a low base level?
The value of work and labor is up for grabs. When you see the working conditions at my store you will very easily be able to understand why most of the staff have quit, why they can't get people to stay at the store and continue to work for very long, in essence why they can't pay someone enough to even care about anything that goes on there. They can't pay them enough to even care.
Which makes it very easy to see why record numbers of Americans quit their jobs in October. In addition, even office workers are getting fed up because under Covid conditions they're expected to be on the clock 24/7, even installing apps on their phones so that their upper management can keep tabs on them and force them to keep undergoing training modules.
Is this the future of labor in America? If so, America has ultimately failed its citizens and my entire generation. It's no wonder that Americans have become fools, getting wasted on alcohol, drugs, wild parties, hazing, fast cars and fast women, growing fat off the bourgeois comforts of America, not caring about their jobs or quality of work, only to realize that the abyss is staring at them in the morning as they head off to work or clock in at home.
