Prep foods and bakery will be one. Whole Body and grocery will be one. Meat and seafood will be one. Front end and produce will be separate for now. Specialty depends on sales and size. They may stay as one or will combine with prepfoods/bakery. All teams will reduce supervisors to one person.
17 replies (most recent on top)
Gainsharing is a thing of the past, bonuses for STL's however...
I'm not talking about the rare understaffed team during the holidays. I'm talking about team leaders that consistently understaff and overwork so you can get a massive gainshare equivalent to a whole paycheck for most other TMs. When your wb or speciality team always needs help fronting at end of the night but their TL refuses to hire then someone needs to clamp down on that. Your high gainshare tells all - you need to hire up.
It is a three round process because the unemployment office does not want all off these"cases" at once at Whole Foods and any restructuring process calls for phases.
And you know this how?
Whatever they do, regardless of volume, region, or team, they need to do it as consistently as possible. The only way to truly make consistent changes across the company would be if MOST stores (if not ALL) are structured the same way. We can reinvent the wheel all the time, but eventually we need to just decide and do it. And then we need to keep it. If we are going to be a national player we need to negotiate things at a national level. Think of how much wasted effort if this giant body had fewer heads; we need to have a lighter apparatus.
The region I came from was known for gainsharing of like $15 or so. This was a result of continually moving the goal posts so that no matter what you could never achieve the desired target. At one store's bakery department, due primarily to the ineptitude of regional and an incompetent TL who left soon after launch, the got so far in the hole during the initial six months after launch that no one in the department was ever going to be eligible for gainsharing. Several TMs who were hired 6, 12, 18 months later told me that only AFTER they were hired were they told that it would basically impossible to get any of the promised gainsharing. The entire program is a way of making YOU do all the work to compensate for all the bad decisions and conditions your team has been saddled with. The concept is in my view a total farce.
Time to get my bowl of popcorn and wait for Jan 4th... lots of talk that this is the date of the next layoff event. 2xic- do you know why this restructuring is a three-layer process? It kind of makes sense, but I would think that after 2 rounds, everyone would be so haggard and worn-down that there wouldn't be anyone left for a round 3.
Alot of people are in denial about the teams combining, they say it's not going to happen at this store, or that store, but it is happening at most regions already. Some team members say ,well we are a high sales store, but what they don't know is that if your store makes less than 1, 200,00 a week, the teams will be combined thats one million two hundred thousand a week. If your store makes less it's going to happen. There are team members that say we are done, that's it no more layoffs, alot of people took packages, but anyone who has been at several of these closed door meetings in the past knows that there are several phases to the restructuring, three to be exact, and it is a slick way to dump high paid Tls and Atls, like hey we are combining, sorry nothing personal, if you don't believe it then keep drinking the Kool aid.
My store is switching most of bakery to a self serve situation. A takeover by prep foods would make perfect sense in my mind. We are a big store, but what is another 30 people on a team of 200?!
If you get $600 gainsharing during the holiday with a crew of 4-5 people you deserve every penny of that. Your team is also likely understaffed, even as such you got massive sales with minimal labor. It also sounds like their labor pool was maxed out too, so they were getting 100%. Don't be jealous of an efficient team.
This makes sense at stores that don't bring in that much revenue. Combine departments and give them a labor budget that allows for a decent gain share but let's be real - when some stores departments like wb or speciality rake in $600+ in gain share around the holidays with a team of about 4-5 people your budget is too inflated for the amount you staff to begin with and needs to be combined with another department.
Yes they say they aren't doing it now in the NE but have said that before- they just don't want to be the first to try- Management is driving down the stock price so they can take it private and continue to ruin what was a once great and respected company- who said greed doesn't exist at WFM
This is not true, every region is doing things differently across the company. For regions that are low in volume this is true, but for larger volume store say in the NE doing over 1 million in sales per week this is not happening. i guess depending n your region this may be true for you, but after confirming this is not happening in the NE region for ure
Combining teams is not a bad idea at slower stores. The sales that some seafood and WB teams have do not justify them having their own separate leadership...roll them into meat and grocery, respectively, and eliminate that TL. And keep them as separate teams where their sales justify it.
And here in the FL region, eliminating the entire bakery team from top to bottom makes sense, too. Why have a separate department that does so little sales?
Since I am on a roll, let's look at the bloated and huge waste of money they call specialty at regional. And the large footprint and payroll in the stores? That team could be split between grocery and prepared foods.
Savings like I have described above would allow us to lower prices across the store and still remain a highly profitable company.
Specialty is classed as Non-Perishable, so it would more likely combine with Grocery, Front End, and Whole Body.
What about TLs Ana ASTLs?
Well at our bakery it won't change the quality of anything. They scoop cookie dough out of a bucket sent over from some regional industrial kitchen. Highest quality? Baked right here? Not really. More like "heated right here." They come out flat, tasteless and sickly sweet. Oh, and expensive. So....instead of a Bakery manager telling a part time team member to scoop the cookie dough onto baking sheets, a Prep Foods manager will tell the part time employee to scoop the cookie dough onto the baking sheets. BTW our cookies are delicious with a cup of cold Allegro coffee that's been sitting in a vacuum bottle for 2 hours along with no half-and-half because the carafe is empty again, since they won't hire enough people to properly staff the coffee bar.