Retail Labor Question

Short answer is they have used too many hours on the schedule and have none left so have to cut back.

what about those who are part time like 30 hours a week?

I'm a retail manager.....

At my company, about twice a year, we're told to figure out a labor number - figure out how much every shift SHOULD cost.... multiply it out for the week.... so say you figure out all your employees wages for each shift worked comes out to be $22,000 per week - we're then held accountable to that number, it's called a forecast.

And if one week your payroll expenses come in at $24,000 - then you're in trouble and you need to make cuts & save like $2000 the following week to make up for it.... if that makes sense.... and sometimes those numbers are dictated by taxes, and higher benefits - sometimes it is out of your control. Other times, if people called off, and overtime is used with other employees to fill those jobs - that also makes your labor costs go up too.

The problem I find is that since labor expenses rise every year - people generally get increases, even if they're small, & full timers have health benefits, which generally rise every year - especially this year, with "Obamacare" - corporate still expects us to cut labor every year to balance those costs....

I find that after a few years of cutting labor - there's nowhere left to cut! This is why you go to the grocery store and there's only 1 register open at times! It's crazy...

Is that a Union Job?

I worked at a Dominicks which is owned by Safeway. Dominicks was a Union Job, they couldnt cut hrs on Full Timers.

It figures they would cut hrs this time of year. For grocery stores Thanksgiving is the busiest hoilday and then business just dies off till just before Christmas.

Your store prob had lots of customers/income in the days leading up to thanksgiving and now it's prob dead as far as customers. So obviously they'll cut hrs.

Pretty much what they do is they look at what the sales were from the week from last year. They use that to decide, "Well last year we did X amount of sales, so we have X amount of payroll dollars to be able to cover the store this year."

Obviously it doesn't always work. Weather is a factor. So if it rained one week and sales were down, you can get screwed when it's bright and sunny this year and they don't have the payroll to support the business.