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user-inactivated  ·  2504 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Amazon Says It Will Buy Whole Foods In $13.7 Billion Deal : The Two-Way : NPR

Dude. Amazon and Wal-Mart are fucking winning. Their market share makes them fucking goliaths and other companies are trying their best to follow their examples from everything from employee management to distribution.

Speaking of, Wal-Mart gets a rating of 3.1. If there's a baseline for retail/grocery, I'd call it that. Between you and me, I'd call that generous.

Retail and grocery often has a high turnover rate these days when it comes to grunt workers, so you don't have a lot of people who know how things have changed. You talk to people in a lot of companies that have been there for a while and they'll say "Oh yeah, about five years ago, we had 6 managers in our store. Now we have three. We also have a third of the number of full time employees now because they don't want to pay for our healthcare" or "Oh yeah, every year they give us less and less bankable hours. We're down to about 45% of the alloted labor that we had six years ago" or "My health insurance wasn't great, but it was alright. Now it's a joke" or "Before Obamacare, I used to be able to work 35+ hours a week but now I'm lucky to get 15 and I haven't seen overtime in years."

Go to a Wal-Mart Worker in an at-will state. Dare them to walk by their boss and whisper the word "union." They won't fucking do it. They have a better chance of losing their job than you do of spitting into an olympic sized swimming pool and hitting water.

People are getting laid off, hours are getting cut, everyone is losing their healthcare, wages are going down, stores are closing, and it's all because these companies are worried about short term profits and short term share values and they don't give two shits about the lives that get ruined over in the process.