Greetings!
(Part 3 here : https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/t8sozq/work_limbo_part_3/ )
I've had “the chat” and…it was a pre-probation-ending performance review thing.
Managed to air my grievances against one of the managers, how seriously that will be taken remains to be seen.
Unfortunately, the other end of the talk, what my boss wanted, kind of solidifies that I'm not going to stay with this company very long, one way or another.
From the first week, I've heard about these performance targets that I'm…just legitimately not sure how people expect others to hit. My section might actually be the first. I usually work the freezers. Now imagine a big, dumb (literally) fridge. Tall, heavy, FULL of boxes of foods, anything from pas to pizzas to fish pies to actual fish to…right?
Now, they want you to empty those in 20 minutes.
20 minutes to grab a box, open it to know what's in it, bring it over to where you're meant to stock it, and stock it. That can mean either reaching into tightly packed boxes to individually stock up a literal line of goods (Arrange them as such), or tossing bags up into a high shelf for customers, or dumping mostly bags (some times boxes) into a waist level freezer.
And then you have an empty cardboard box, which they want you to “flat-pack” (Seriously?). This is way harder than it sounds because the boxes range from “basically wet paper” and so easy to “These vegetable boxes are popeye on steroids” and do not bend. You're possibly *meant* to use your safety knife to help do this but uh. I don't do this. And I'm already *FAR* from the target time they want, without taking breaks or being slow, so, you know. That cardboard box then needs to go into an empty metal trolley to be collected until it's too high and dumped into a baling machine, which takes about a minute if nothing gets in you way.
Also, for some bizarre reason, they're bringing back scan targets. You must scan X items within Y seconds (Generally done X within 1 minute). For comparison, a competitor in the UK has https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/whats-on/shopping/aldi-checkouts-fast-staff-scan-15864582 instituted a roughly 1 item per 3.27 seconds, which is already …you know, a bit weird, if you get non-compliant items (Shit barcode, barcode sticker fell off ,scrunched, awkward item in general). It ignores things like angry customers when your SHIT app doesn't work, or refunds…
Company might be profitable, but it's run by idiots with questionable policies.
The final straw for confirming my decision was my hated cleaning shifts. Again. I had one yesterday, and I asked to be given space doing it (As opposed to the last one where I was singled out despite *everyone* still working). It didn't help. I started earlier on the cleaning and knew what I was doing a bit better and *took the longest amount of time I have ever taken* because there was always more and more and MORE shit to do. As my partner put it, blood from a stone at this point.
I have moved actually, literally TEN TONS in ten minutes – getting compost and some other crap back inside – pallets with 1.2 to 2.4 tons of the stuff. Bags of 20, 24, or 27 liters (And thus, kilograms) of stuff piled high, and this is just a small part of it. I ran through my long list and I had new stuff tacked on that nobody ever told me about!
The honest truth for the cleaning is, you are not paying me enough. I was officially in till 22:30. guess what. I clocked out at 23:09, and while I *will* be paid for my time, I feel jerked around and lied to. You tell me I'm working till X, do your damn best to make sure that's the case. But immediate coworkers and even immediate management can't because of shit targets with no sense of realism or flexibility. There can't be an extra worker or two to help us for just a single hour and the company is *mad cheap* and refuses to hire cleaners to save costs. Except I signed up to be a “customer assistant”, so why am I doing this cleaning shit on basic pay because you're a cheapskate? I'm literally owed an extra 10 pounds an hour when I clean – I wouldn't go faster, but it would be the correct thing to do when you ask someone to do TWO JOBS AT ONCE.
Shame. I enjoyed most of the work at the company otherwise. But they're not flexible, and I suspect because they can't be on my level. It's been pointed out to them that I'm amazing with customers – speedy, polite, efficient. They just kind of nod and agree and move on to problems in areas I have * for weeks*asked them to consider not putting me on. But “everyone does it” , and “it's part of the job” and they still complain when you're tired or too slow, so….there you go. With how important it is – internally – to leave a good customer impression, you'd think they'd care more about the biggest Face the branch has in my entire area (Not being a smug shit, I swear), but nah. Targets and robots.
Current plan : Grit teeth, survive and extract money through badly organized work until I can or I inevitably fail the un-meetable targets and get booted. Got a ten hour shift on sunday (will work on reducing this as it includes cleaning. Naturally.) and a seven hour one the next week, with easier ones between the two sundays.
I can at least touch up my CV with experience and known strengths and target the other, closer, *better* supermarket as soon as an opening comes up.