re: #350 Cannadian Club Akbar

When I worked for a restaurant I was only supposed to work 50 hours a week. I worked 70. I could have sued but didn’t.

I am starting to learn about the little “quirks” at the supermarket and the way they manage cost, hours and salaries. We have a system called ELMS (which I can’t get anyone to tell me the meaning of the acronym), which is basically a production loading system for the cashiers. Even finding out exactly what they are measuring as far as metrics, and how, it’s hard to get the info from management. But part of it works like this.

The company gives the front end a certain weekly budget, lets say they can schedule the 25 cashiers up to a total of 168 hours of coverage. If your production loading scores on ELMS are high, this automatically adds hours to the weekly budget, so managers can schedule part timers a few more hours than what they are contracted for.

Of course, if you are a full timer, or low in seniority, you don’t get the added hours, it works out best for the cashiers in the middle of both hours and seniority.

So, even if you don’t get more hours (I’m at the bottom of the seniority ladder), you’re job performance can effect others on your team. Personally, I really don’t want more than a part time schedule.

I still can’t get management to go over the actual metrics and parameters that are collected and weighted in order to calculate my ELMS score. I’m not sure why, but it’s almost like they don’t want to take the responsibility of trying to train you on how to improve your performance.

I gather that it’s a catch 22. Improve speed can also cut down on your customer service, since you have to find ways to hurry the customer.