I work for a big retail pharmaceutical company. When covid hit last year we were very short staffed. Lots of our employees either were scared to come to work or contracted covid themselves. During that time customers seemed to have a level of patience not seen before as they understood retailers were dealing with Staffing shortages because of the pandemic. Fast forward to the current situation. I keep seeing that all these different companies across the board are facing staffing issues but at the same time I keep seeing people posting looking for jobs. I personally went to AAA branch today that had signs up asking for patience ad their office was severely understaffed. I looked up job openings in the area and it showed nothing. The light bulb went off. We have had signs up in our windows for the past 6 months saying we are hiring but in fact the company I work for has done nothing but cut hours. We have hired nobody. I'm starting to think these big corporations are playing on our covid understanding and expecting us to have patience because they are understaffed, not because they're actually understaffed but because they realized they could run their company on fewer employees and make more profit.