A faltering business model: Profit on cheap, abused labor and cheap goods

NYT: Paige Murdock, a manager, went weeks without getting a day off or seeing her family but, as a salaried employee, did not receive overtime pay. The company limited the hours she could give to her staff, she said, which often meant she was running the store short-handed. 

When a manager said Ms. Murdock, 44, couldn’t take her previously approved vacation week to help her daughter, who is in the military, move to Texas, she decided to quit. “If you look at my résumé, I am a very loyal employee,” Ms. Murdock said. 

“I will work my heart out. .... I don’t ask for much.”

Oh yeah, you asked for too much, so bugger off, you lazy ingrate. 

As the Donald would say, YOU'RE FIRED!!

By now, it is clear to anyone paying any attention that as a general rule capitalism does not care about anything except profit. Perks are necessary public relations (propaganda) measures needed to retain employees. Concerns such as human misery, environmental degradation, and low worker wages with non-existent benefits, or nearly non-existent, do not amount to things that lead to significant improvement. Sometimes those things lead to campaign contributions and fees to public relations companies (professional deceivers and liars) for corporate protection. They do not lead to protection for customers. 

That's just business as usual for most companies, most of the time, in most places. 

The New York Times writes:

Sandra Beadling was fed up with the 70-hour workweeks, the delivery trucks running days behind schedule, and the wear and tear on her knees from all the stooping to restock the bottom shelves.

The manager of the Dollar General store in Wells, Maine, Ms. Beadling, 54, had tried to hire more help. But that was a tough sell when Walmart was offering $16 an hour and her store was paying $12.

Ms. Beadling had spent long stretches this summer as one of only a few workers in the store, tending to the register and trying to help shoppers. She had pleaded with her managers to allow the store’s part-time workers to have more hours, but to no avail.

Dollar stores, which pay among the lowest wages in the retail industry and often operate in areas where there is little competition, are stumbling in the later stages of the pandemic.

Sales are slowing and some measures of profit are shrinking as the industry struggles with a confluence of challenges. They include burned-out workers, pressure to increase wages, supply chain problems and a growing number of cities and towns that are rejecting new dollar stores because, they say, the business model harms their communities.

The troubles follow a year of soaring profits and a period of staggering growth in the industry. Roughly one in every three stores that have been announced to open in the United States this year is a dollar store, according to Coresight Research, a retail advisory firm, a sign of how well the industry did in 2020.

The business model, which relies on relatively cheap labor and inexpensive goods, is designed to flourish even when its core customers are hurting financially. The strategy was honed during the high unemployment and wage stagnation of the Great Recession of 2008.  

In a statement, Dollar General said, “We pay competitive wages, which are determined based on several factors including the relevant labor market.” The company added that “our operating standards are designed to provide stores with sufficient labor hours, and it is not our expectation that store managers should work 70 to 80 hours per week.” 

Part-time workers sometimes encounter the opposite problem of not having enough work. As a store manager, Ms. Beadling said, she was constantly trying to find additional hours to give to her employees who needed the money, including one worker who was living in a tent because she couldn’t afford rent.

But the allotted hours for the store were limited by higher-up managers, she said.

This summer, social media buzzed with photos of dollar stores, from Lincoln, Neb., to Pittsburgh and beyond, where employees had taped up signs in the front door announcing that they had walked off the job.

“Capitalism will destroy this country,” read one sign in the window of a Dollar General in Eliot, Maine, this spring. “If you don’t pay people enough to live their lives, why should they slave away for you?”

DG's statement that it is not a “corporate expectation” that store managers should work 70 to 80 hours per week is public relations (a lie). Regular people's real world expectation that such a statement is corporate bullshit, a/k/a/ public relations, a/k/a lies and deceit.

a/k/a/ = “also known as” in legal jargon

A hungry lizard, poor thing, just looking for food

in its natural environment and being harassed by cruel 

cowboys with guns 

Eons ago in August of 2019, back when cowboys with six-shooters were wrangling grumpy but emaciated T. rex lizards on the prairies (and elsewhere) in defense of rich people and campaign donors (tied for first and second), God third, nation fourth and average people maybe 7th or 8th, I posted a discussion about an alleged nascent social consciousness among major corporations. At the time I dismissed that squeak of corporate moral concern like this: 

That is aspirational, but vague to the point of being meaningless.

Other people also questioned the motives of a strange corporate burp of social conscience, as discussed here last August: 

“But do people like [USB Bank chairman Axel] Weber really believe this stuff? .... The idea that banks were selling ESG [environmental, sustainability, green, etc.] products seemed a little like priests in the medieval Catholic church selling ‘indulgences’ .... the noise in the system was concealing a more important area of silence.

The issue at stake revolved around risk management. If you listened to the noise around ESG, it seemed that the movement was all about activism: vocal campaigners were calling for social and environmental change, and companies and financial groups were shouting about what they were doing to support this. But if you looked more closely at ESG, with an anthropologist’s lens, it was clear that there was a second factor at work that was less openly discussed: self-interest.

So, once again, money talks and real people, the environment and everything else, e.g., democracy, and civil liberties walks. Unless ignoring those disgusting non-profit things ding profits too much, they get ignored, denied, or spun into faux realities by public relations professionals, a/k/a dividers, liars, and/or deceivers. 

Questions: Are low paid American workers just spoiled whining wuss? Does pay reflect what the market will bear and if you don't like, quit and get a better job? Is this yet another bucket of worms where American government is neutered and unable to respond so that uncaring market forces, i.e., insatiable profit lust, are in control? How meaningful are civil liberties if you are so poor and tied to your job that you are generally unable to exercise them, e.g., insufficient time to vote or become informed, insufficient time to get vaccinated, etc?