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Author Topic: The Co-op cop Frank Cox Film God Posts: 2234 From: Melville Saskatchewan Canada Registered: Apr 2011 posted 08-14-2018 11:33 AM                        quote: Frank Angel I sure hope they gave him a hefty pay increase with this new hat he has to wear or as somehow my gut is telling me, they still paying him what he's always been paid...you know, not much above minimum wage. He needs to find a union. I don't think they're unionized, but it's my understanding that working at the local Co-op is one of the most desirable jobs in town for people without higher education. The pay is fair, the hours are reasonable, and there's even a pension plan. There seem to be two kinds of people working there: school kids and lifers. Most of the people who work at the other local stores and gas stations seem to aspire to work at the Co-op. There's a Co-op lumberyard, grocery store and gas station here and they're all big operations (relative to the size of this town; they would be pretty small in the context of the rest of the world).  |  IP: Logged Dave Bird Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 777 From: Perth, Ontario, Canada Registered: Jun 2000 posted 08-15-2018 09:03 AM                        As a former owner who dealt with a large food store union in North America in one of our locations, I can tell you it wouldn't do anything for your pal. They're just growing their business, and use shady tactics to do it. In our case, when we said we'd have trouble affording all these new costs in our small, small town location, they flat-out advised us to lay off all the full-time staff we could and replace with part time kids at the lowest pay rate. They promised kids Nike shoes every year if they signed cards just to get certified, meantime never even asked for it at the bargaining table. We had provided the highest retail wages with medical/dental and pension matching plan to EVERY employee prior to unionization. They flat-out refused to include it in our contracts, would never agree that our department managers should be salaried and retain their quarterly performance bonus (so they became hourly "clerks" in their system, imagine, no produce, bakery or deli manager at all). Couldn't give raises to them or performance bonuses (though we often did, in cash, quietly). The big grocery union in North America is a racket, complete and utter joke.  |  IP: Logged Leo Enticknap Film God Posts: 7474 From: Loma Linda, CA Registered: Jul 2000 posted 08-15-2018 12:57 PM                        quote: Lyle Romer There's another advantage Amazon has over brick and mortar retail. There are no members of the public with access to shoplift. Online retailing has its own set of security issues, fraudulent credit card use and porch piracy being the big ones. I've noticed that Amazon delivery drivers now take a pic of stuff that they've put on your porch and email a link to the photo with the delivery confirmation email. A co-worker told me that when a $300 item was not on his doorstep when he got home after receiving a delivery confirmation email, Amazon would not refund him until he could produce a police report showing that he'd reported the theft. Therefore, I am guessing that people dishonestly claiming that items weren't delivered when they were has gotten to be a big enough problem that Amazon is now taking prevention measures. My local supermarket took to placing small, light, high value and/or heavily stolen items (e.g. razor blades and baby formula) into a locked cabinet by the checkout. If you want any of these items, you have to ask for them at the checkout, whereupon the clerk goes directly to the cabinet, gets them, and rings them up immediately. A few weeks later, they were sued by an individual (with the ACLU paying the legal costs) who claimed that because some types of canned food that are bought primarily by African-Americans went in the cabinet, the store was being racist. In response, the store produced very convincing documentary proof that most of the items that left the store could not be accounted for as having been legitimately sold before they went in the locked cabinet (after which the unexplained losses dropped to zero), and therefore their choice of items to put in the locked cabinet was based on actual theft loss figures, not racial profiling. Even then, the lawsuit was not dropped. I believe that the case will be coming to court in the next few months. In the meantime, the entire chain has simply stopped carrying the items in question.  |  IP: Logged Frank Cox Film God Posts: 2234 From: Melville Saskatchewan Canada Registered: Apr 2011 posted 08-15-2018 06:08 PM                        I just ordered a vacuum cleaner for my mother from Costco which was to be delivered directly to her house (in a town almost 300 miles from where I live). She phoned me to say that she had received a mysterious phone call from someone who said that they had found her vacuum on their back step, nowhere near her house. When I checked the online delivery status page it said that the package had been left on the back step of her house. But it had been left on the back step of a random house in that town, not on the back step of her house. Luckily the person who found it on their step was honest enough to phone her and say that they had her vacuum cleaner at their house. They could have easily kept it and nobody would have been the wiser.  |  IP: Logged Marcel Birgelen Film God Posts: 3357 From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands Registered: Feb 2012 posted 08-16-2018 05:45 AM                     In many cases, those delivery couriers get paid more for the packets they can deliver than that they cannot. So, there is a perverse incentive to deliver the package to "somewhere", no matter what. I'm still trying to convince one of those crappy delivery companies that when I'm not home they should not simply dump the box in the garden and be gone, but better deliver it to a local depot instead. I've actually lost equipment this way, which was delivered while we were a few days away and the stuff was just left there in the freezing cold and rain...  |  IP: Logged Mike Blakesley Film God Posts: 12767 From: Forsyth, Montana Registered: Jun 99 posted 08-16-2018 01:48 PM                        UPS's newest "policy" is, a signature is not required unless the package is insured for over $100. So much for being able to prove who accepted a package that has gone missing. We used to operate a "customer counter" for people to ship UPS packages out. We used it more as a traffic builder for the store, and it did bring in a lot of people who wouldn't ever come in otherwise. In recent years, though, two things have happened: First, UPS increased the use of "RS" pre-printed labels, meaning people could print their own labels at home and then just drop the box off, thereby bypassing our service. So we went from shipping dozens of packages a week (or over a thousand during the Christmas rush) to just a handful a week. Then they started tacking on extra fees, surcharges and such for everything under the sun - box size, delivery area, what the box was made of, one side being too long, etc. In the current UPS manual, there are FOUR PAGES of these extra charges. The fees made more than one person decide "the hell with it" and take their package to the post office to ship. Plus the fees became next to impossible to keep up with. We finally had our fill with the "Address Correction Charge." That's when an address label has any kind of mistake, they'll attempt to correct it to make the delivery. Which is a reasonable thing to have a fee for, but they take it to extremes: One time we had a guy ship five boxes to an apartment in Seattle...he had the apartment number wrong. The correction fee was $11.50, but UPS charged us $11.50 per box on ALL FIVE boxes, for a total of $57.50, even though they were all delivered by the same guy on the same day. Finally, we told them to take this job and shove it, since offering the service to the public was not worth the work, confusion, and ever-increasing expense.  |  IP: Logged Marcel Birgelen Film God Posts: 3357 From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands Registered: Feb 2012 posted 08-17-2018 05:53 PM                     quote: Mike Blakesley UPS's newest "policy" is, a signature is not required unless the package is insured for over $100. So much for being able to prove who accepted a package that has gone missing. That seems to be a global trend across all shipping companies and I guess the change is simply to save some seconds per delivery and hence some costs. I don't know when they started to implement those changes, but roughly 5 years ago, anything that came inside a box required a signature for receipt. Usually it was just a "digital" signature, totally unrecognizable on some of their totally worn-out terminals, but at least someone singed for it... UPS used to be one of the best if not the best shipping company around here, but that time has long been gone. The last time I've tried to use them was when I needed an express shipment from here to Disney in L.A., it was an item for an exhibition, so I was willing to pay premium for it. Since it had to go on another account, I didn't book it under my normal customer number, but I booked it on-line and pre-paid a sum of roughly $450 for "day definitive" shipment. The on-line booking also confirmed a pickup-window, but just to be sure, I called them on their horrible local customer service, where you talk to a computer who will guide you trough 10 levels of nonsense questions, while not being able to understand you 3 out of 4 times. They confirmed the pickup time... The end of the pickup window came and went and nobody came... I called them again and I was assured they would still come for pickup before 6pm. You guessed it, nobody ever came to pick it up. I called again and their contact center was closed... I ended up spending 750 euros on DHL, for the most expensive express shipment they had, to get the item in L.A. and express-custom-cleared, in time for the exhibition. The administrative branch of UPS was so incompetent, I gave up after the second try. I eventually managed to get my money back via the credit card company. After that they even sent me angry letters and reminders. The case only got settled after my lawyer dumped a big claim on their desk. I've since vowed to never use their services again, whenever possible,  |  IP: Logged

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