May Tuesday Morning finds

I'm sure that for part time workers, they pay minimum wage. It's what we did at my retail store (part of a corporate chain) where I was the assistant manager. Rarely, if someone had a lot of experience, we'd bring them in at 50 cents or $1 more than minimum wage, but it didn't happen often. (Not to say that I agree with the practice, but it was how the stores were run.) Not sure where you guys are located, but in California, minimum wage is now $12, so I can't imagine companies paying much more than that. When I worked part time retail in Utah in the mid 2000s, I was also started at minimum wage, which was then $6. Merit raises were few and far between. Instead, part timers got yearly raises, which usually were around 25 cents or so I think.

These practices are part of why I never want to work for a large corporation again. I understand that staffing costs are expensive, but I also think that if you invest in your employees, you get better results. Costco is a prime example of this, as they pay much higher than minimum wage and bring on more people as full-timers, which means employees stay, do their best work and are loyal to the company. Also, the corporation I worked for calculated payroll by dollars, not hours, so we weren't given (for example, these are not actual numbers) 800 hours a week to run the store, we were given 10% of the weekly sales budget in payroll dollars to run the store. This incentivizes managers to keep employee wages down, because even though seasoned workers perform better, there's a limit to how much one person can do and every single week was a struggle to staff the store for customers AND get tasks like stocking and resets done. Managers get in trouble if they exceed payroll costs, to the point of being written up and eventually losing their job, so it's not just a matter of wanting to look good to the higher-ups, it's literal job protection. Additionally, at least in the company I worked for, if we were missing our sales goals for the week, we had to cut hours because we could only use 10% of how much we actually made for the week, so if we made $5,000 less that week than we were supposed to, we had to cut $500 in payroll dollars. $500/$12 per hour is 41.6 hours, which is five 8-hour shifts. That's a HUGE amount to cut. Also, if we DID end up going over one week, we were expected to pay it back the next week.

Okay, sorry, that's a bit of a tangent, but this subject gets me worked up! I loved so many aspects of working retail, but it was ALWAYS stressful because we were basically performing miracles with limited supplies. I absolutely, completely get it when people complain about stores that have long lines (no one likes waiting in line), but I also know what it's like from the other end, where you need to empty out your small back room before you get another huge truck that you don't have the room to unload or the manpower to stock, but since you've had to cut hours, the managers are the ones running the registers and the store is getting trashed by customers faster than it can be cleaned up. My main point is, with some exceptions, retail is a super stressful job that doesn't pay nearly enough.