LET 👏 RETAIL 👏 EMPLOYEES 👏 SIT 👏
The only major chain retail store that I know of that allows their cashiers to sit is the Aldi grocery store, a German chain. Their starting pay is also $12 an hour chain-wide.
The interior of the store looks like this so they save money on the annoying shelf restocking. Products remain in their boxes until being removed by customers. No unboxing and putting stuff on shelves, and constantly having to rearrange it. Also, the boxes make inventory a breeze as a sealed box has a defined number of items in it.
Typical American grocery stores have shelves like this
Every item has to be unboxed and neatly stacked on the shelves. If they get messed up by the customers, everything has to be rearranged back to specific rigid order. When you have to verify the inventory, every item has to be removed from the shelves to be counted and put back. Aldi’s also do not have plastic bags. You can buy reusable bags or simply use the empty cardboard boxes that are available.
Last is the carts. Most grocery stores have their carts strewn across the parking lots, rolling around and hitting cars until a store employee is sent out to collect them, after being yelled at by the manager when they were told to do other tasks in the meantime. Aldi’s chains those carts together and you have to put a Quarter in to release it. When you are done, you plug the chain back in and get your Quarter back. If others are lazy, you can collect and return the loose carts and collect the Quarters.
It stops this…
Then the employees have to do this
reblogging this because I love Alidis
With the exception of the shelf stacking, all of this is totally normal in every single supermarket chain in the UK… what the heck America
Same for Germany… why would you make it any more complicated than that. Just. Why not let them sit??
They’re not normal for no reason. The right to sit during work seems normal for most retail workers in these countries because they are it is part of the labor rights that have been won by unions. Sometimes the right to sit was won in an agreement with the store and sometimes it was put down in national laws.
For example, in the UK your employer legally has to provide you with a comfortable seat if you do work that can be done while seating. In the Netherlands you have to be provided a seat if you work at a cash register for more than 4 hours a day or for more than 1 hour uninterrupted.
Unionize.
America’s Unions got killed.
Also the reason they don’t let us sit is they keep telling us it makes us look “unproductive” because the average American has been trained since birth to spot and correct perceived laziness.
Save us.
