I wouldn’t hold it against him. His boss should not call him a “waste of time” and management should not ignore such complaints. He toughed it out over a year-and-a-half. These retailers are becoming harder to work for with increasing micromanagement, higher metrics and decreasing hours.
Just a couple days ago at my business were talking about how they must only maintain the checklanes because of holiday shopping. The rest of the year they sit idle and mock both the customers wanting more open lanes and the employees who know they don’t have hours or labor to open them.
They want everyone going through self checkout, scanning as they shop or ordering for pickup. Millennials have allowed retailers like Walmart and Kroger to shift the checkout burden to them as shoppers. Customer service is not valued as much as cutting labor costs. I make it a point to shop elsewhere when I can because I value the service provided.
“...Customer service is not valued as much as cutting labor costs. “
Reminds me of wisdom I saw posted in a very rural Virginia gas station decades ago. “Quality, service, price - Pick any two.”
My daughter just quit as a department manager (children’s) for a Barnes and Noble branch.
Many people said that they would come to the store specifically so she could help them buy books. Kids would ask their mom to go to the bookstore to see her and buy books.
Yet, they kept putting her on the cash register or pouring coffee instead of doing her job, selling more books, often more books than the customer had planned on purchasing.
A friend that worked at a large chain retailer described how management would keep hours to a minimum for customer-service types due to budgets, and he’d be sent home even as the store was filling with customers (knowing his co-workers would suffer). These jobs aren’t just unfit to raise a family; they are predicated on the assumption of high turnover in a race to find the workers with the lowest expectations/highest pain tolerance. When you spend time working there with little to show for it afterwards (this is NJ, a high-cost state) then it is no wonder young people walk away from these jobs.
This idiot has a problem because a Google search by a future employer will reveal what he did; not smart.