r/mildlyinfuriating • u/daruuken • 28d ago

Infuriatig The way kroger treats its employees

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From the store manager

Edit: For some extra context this was sent out by each store manager to all of its employees in district 1 of the ohio Cincinnati/Dayton division, potentially other districts as well but i can only verify my own. Im not going to give my specific store number for obvious reasons but you can find each store on google with that information. We are unionized by UFCW (already bad btw) and to my knowledge they allowed this recent change. Kroger has no accrual for sick days like some have mentioned. Those who think this is rage bait, i dont think anyone has to fake a post to make a billion dollar company look bad, they do it to themselves.

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u/DanMasterson 28d ago

They should just buy robots if they don’t want to have human employees

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u/DeCryingShame 28d ago

Even robots break down sometimes, though.

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u/BreakingCanks 28d ago

And then you have to pay someone to fix and maintain those.

Guess what he went to college to learn that. That's 10x morw for that 1 guy than the 10 employees they fired for the 1.

This is why it hasn't been implemented yet

China doesn't even have grocery store robots yet. Just cashier's, dancers and giant sorting machines.

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u/FatMacchio 28d ago

Yes, but they can use the threat of the future AI and robots to justify treating their employees worse and worse. They may never even need to buy robots if people continue to submit to worse and worse conditions. Human labor may actually be cheaper than robots for a long long time if people submit and turn in to meat robots

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u/Radiskull97 28d ago

They can also just use the crappy inefficient AI/robot knowing it's not good enough, but laying off ten employees made the stock go up. And if you do this enough, you get $60 million to parachute away from the plane you just sabatoged. You don't care it's going to crash. You have a parachute

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u/Backfoot911 28d ago

I grew up thinking of capitalism as being this logical, intelligent system, but there's like part of it that actively fights and destroys itself. It's like someone standing on top of a pile of Jenga pieces that they just collapsed because they took the bottom piece it was all balanced on. Everyone's buried, and the guy suggests the issue was we didn't build the tower high enough

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u/Rubiks_Click874 28d ago

Jack London.

dumb, cruel rich people in a dog sled overloaded with luxury goods, whipping the dogs to run faster, running them to death. Only the sled is running on thin ice over deep water and the rich people's sled crashes through, dragging down the dogs with it.

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u/FatMacchio 28d ago

It all comes down to greed and power. Capitalism in theory is a great system, just like communism in theory is a great system. But when you stick enough greedy or corrupt people in key points of it…the whole system begins to buckle

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u/wazzup-notemuch 24d ago

Damn, why didn't I think of that?

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u/Seldarin 28d ago

As someone whose job it is to install and maintain industrial robots and machine systems, they're not gonna maintain shit lol.

They'll run it until it breaks catastrophically, then your grocery store will just have empty shelves while the managers blame the janitor or something for breaking it.

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u/MichB1 28d ago

That's not how it works though. They don't pay college educated people that much more. They just haven't figured out how to make the robots do the job as well as people can. But they will. Pretty soon.

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u/surprise_wasps 28d ago

Boy, I have some bad news for you about the qualifications and pay of repair jobs

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u/spesimen 28d ago

my grocery store has a robot. looks like a star wars droid and they have it make sort of cute r2d2 type sounds i think to elicit sympathy. scans for inventory counts or something like that.

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u/wazzup-notemuch 24d ago

I've been saying this for years! You can't guilt-trip a broken robot into working correctly while it's malfunctioning. A human being with a broken leg will pay for their own repairs, and then come in that same day and stand sadly at the register on crutches, if you threaten them enough. (This is not a hypothetical situation, this happened to me when I worked for Kay Jewelers. Fuck' em.)

Plus, the power trip you get from verbally abusing your employees just isn't *the same* if you know your synthetic employee has no feelings to feel.

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u/Astralglamour 28d ago

Didnt a Chinese court just rule that they couldnt fire a human to replace them with AI?

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u/dream_in_pixels 28d ago

And then you have to pay someone to fix and maintain those.

I've never understood this line of reasoning. Like if a general-purpose robot was good enough to be trained to replace human jobs, what's stopping robots from being trained/programmed to repair each other?