Supermarkets are cutting costs as they try to protect profits while keeping prices down for customers. Top executives talk about “efficiencies”, but retail workers say that in practice that can mean chilly stores, cutbacks on cleaning and reductions in staff hours on spurious grounds.
The UK’s biggest supermarket, Tesco, for example, has handed out high-profile hourly pay increases for shop workers, but is cutting back the number of hours they can work, according to some staff. Meanwhile, the lowest-paid salaried staff such as team managers say they are having to do more while enduring a real-terms pay cut, with rises of just 3% falling well short of the current 11.1% inflation rate.
One Tesco manager spoke to the Guardian under the condition of anonymity to give their view from the shopfloor.
“It’s just snatching back money”
I am terrified about what Christmas might look like in Tesco given the amount of hours we are provided with to run our stores. We cut, cut, cut on the pretext of our strategic aim to “save to invest”, but the reality is the cuts destroy shops and management don’t reinvest in anything.
Cleaning is one area that is a constant focus for cuts. Every single year we get fewer and fewer hours for cleaning. Our contract cleaning is done by third parties, who bid every couple of years for contracts, but what they effectively sign up to is incredibly hard to achieve on the money that Tesco gives them.
This results in the shops very rarely being cleaned properly, with our shopfloor staff regularly having to pick up the work themselves. There are rumours that in the new year we will also be losing half of our daytime cleaning hours for checking toilets, cleaning up spillages and emptying bins as well – with these tasks having to be picked up by Tesco staff.
There are numerous other ‘investment projects’ that are always trumpeted as simplifying the business and therefore a justified way of removing hours. Unless the instruction is to stop work – such as when they closed the fresh fish and meat and bakery counters – such changes almost always result in a reduction in staff hours with no tangible benefit.
One “saving” was around the blue tokens given to customers so they can vote for which local good cause they want Tesco to reward. It was decided that these tokens should be put in a cup at the checkout for customers to take instead of being handed them. This was deemed to save a few hours a week, but the reality was that customers always asked for tokens, meaning staff continued to hand them out - so there was a cut without any actual time saving.
We have also had hundreds of staffing hours a week removed for “inflation”. Tesco claims that because prices are up on average 10%, we have to work less hard to take the same sales. The idea is that now we only need to sell, say three or four packs of butter to make £10 of sales instead of five or six. Management have regularly cut back hours for this reason over the years but never add back hours when we have a price-cutting campaign that makes it harder to take the same money.
We lost about 10 to 15 staff hours per store depending on size after the introduction of card-only tills. The checkouts lost hours as transactions would supposedly become quicker and the cash office lost hours as supposedly they would be handling less cash – but that didn’t happen.
The reality was that customers never saw the signage and had to be told it was card-only to get them to move tills. This actually took more time and caused more annoyance, so definitely wasn’t a saving. Most stores just stopped checkouts being card-only as it caused so much hassle.
One other area being tested out is turning store temperatures down by 1C. This is apparently to help the planet. There is widespread scepticism; it actually will save a huge amount of money. Tesco staff always complain quite rightly that our shops are too cold in the winter months, but it’s never addressed and colleagues end up having to wrap up in many layers to keep warm. They also have lower set temperatures for staff at night.
Recently, Tesco cut about 20 hours from some large stores for “service in the warehouse”, which it was claimed had been wrongly given to stores. The reality is that stores are run so incredibly tight and are under so much pressure, they certainly don’t have the capacity to remove them! It’s just snatching back money as always, putting more and more pressure on Tesco staff.
When asked to respond to the manager’s account, Tesco admitted that it had turned down the temperature in some stores, but said that was within a code of practice and workers were provided with adequate clothing if working in colder areas.
The retailer said warehouse hours had been cut by three hours per store after a miscalculation and it had looked at using cleaning hours differently across a working day, but its investment in cleaning had not changed. Tesco said it continually reviewed shopfloor operations as customer habits changed, but said that in practice this has meant shifting hours around rather than reducing them.
A spokesperson said: “This account is not an accurate representation of how we run our stores and we refute any suggestion that we’re lowering standards of cleanliness or levels of customer service in our stores.
“Our Save to Invest programme has allowed us to significantly invest in our competitive colleague reward package, with two pay increases this year, and in delivering great value to our customers. While we always look to deliver efficiencies where we can, this is never at the expense of the customer experience or the business in the long-term.”
