Supermarket folk, in ere.

[McPhee]

Just wondering if any other OCUK users working for a supermarket have had the joyous redundancy news over the past couple of days

Sainsbury's manager here, checking out.

 

[McPhee]

Sorry to hear the news...one place I would have always thought a safe haven was the Supermarkets however I guess with Aldi & Lidl putting the squeeze on it does affect the bottom line.

Have you got a plan B in mind?

I was planning to leave this year anyway; just trying to decide what to do next. Either back in to catering, in a restaurant or on my own as a street trader, or in to web development. Got some work lined up for the summer already, so I've got plenty of time to make my mind up yet. I definitely want out of retail, out of management.

I'd had enough of Sainsbury's by about October. The direction of the business is changing, and it's not a journey I wish to be part of. Hopefully it works out in the long-run, but all I'm seeing is exasperated, increasingly demotivated staff, year after year of mediocre results, and a share price that hasn't recovered since the previous CEO announced his departure.

I don't think anything is much of a safe haven these days!

I don't know of Sainsburys employment structure, but the way the news articles are playing it is that it's mainly managers that they're getting rid of? Which makes it sound like they've maybe recruited one too many managers over the years, and they're now an easy target to cut costs.

I work for a large IT company, and at one stage we had something like 350k employees globally. Between my role and the CEO, was about a dozen layers of management and senior management. They've stripped about half of them out now, and things run much smoother.

The structure for a supermarket is generally: Store Manager -> Deputy Store Manager -> Department Manager (maybe 6-11 per store) -> Team Leaders (maybe 15-30 per store). Everyone below the Store Manager had their role axed on Tuesday. The new structure basically removes the Team Leader role and rebrands Deputy Store Manager and Department Manager (with less of both in the business), with just enough changes to the roles to stop anyone having a right to them under "suitable alternative employment".

This restructure is quite big. The press haven't had the information.

In stores, it's (by my rough calculations) almost 22,000 jobs at risk (±2000). With about 8000 replacement roles (±500). Then there's the online fulfilment centre and a few other roles. And this comes straight after thousands of redundancies last year.

Over twelve months, it must be close to 10% of the workforce who have had their notice.

To be honest, I can see that the changes need to be made. Much of the internal unrest could have been avoided if the current executives had the first clue on how to handle people. The presentation was basically "We will restructure the business as follows [...]. By doing this, we will save £X per year, helping us achieve our goal of saving £Y per year by year Z. Oh, by the way, this does mean you may not have a job".

Girlfriend got signed off as team leader Monday then made redundant Tuesday. Good times.

Sorry to hear that.

There's a lot of people in that same boat. At least she'll get paid at full T/L rate and if she leaves her redundancy will be at that rate. There's a lot of people who would have been signed off if not for Christmas, who now have to spend months in limbo being paid training rate for doing the full job, followed by possible redundancy at the training rate. Combined, that will easily be thousands of pounds of missed earnings.

There's a chap in a store I used to work in who had literally been a Team Leader in Training for a week, as of Tuesday. Had he failed the interview, his job would have been safe.

 

[McPhee]

Supermarkets have a substantial turnover of staff (e.g. students finishing courses) so when someone says there will be no jobs lost all they have to do is hire less for a while if they want to have less basic staff.

It's not a lie but it's not all the truth either.

The wording the press have had says the "headcount will remain the same". Which implies no job losses. But what it actually means is "we'll recruit the same number of people we lay off". There's also a huge opportunity to cut down worked hours. 13,000 employees on full-time hours would be 500,000 hours per week. 13,000 employees on 12 hour contracts is only 156,000 hours. Obviously that's the extreme scenario, but it demonstrates the potential saving (and how deceptive "no reduction in headcount" is).

 

[McPhee]

Heard a rumour that the store managers will be next.

The logic being some stores are not considered worth having a dedicated store manager for and one might oversee two.

I'm going to ignore rumours from now on.

The rumour leading up to this culling was that departments would be merged, the number of department managers halved, with Team Leaders taking on more responsibility to fill the void. We had Regional Managers telling their Store Managers to upskill Team Leaders to take on extra responsibility. Many stores recruited extra Team Leaders in anticipation of the change.

Turns out the assumed changes were about as wrong as it's possible to get. For Team Leaders the choice is move up, move down, or move out. There is no alternative role. In most stores, unless you want to go on Night Shift, the only "move up" choice comes with a near 50% increase in salary compared to current Team Leader wages, with the responsibilities to match.

 

[McPhee]

I guess you are one of the lucky ones, this push could actually give you the opportunity to do the things you really want and assuming a decent redundancy may even help you out!

Good luck, street traders are very popular at the minute give that a go first as if you get back into employment you may not get another chance to do it!

Yeah, that's the direction I'm leaning in. Going to test the water by setting up at some markets over the summer. That should give me an idea whether or not it's worth a go, without spending thousands on a van etc.