• Guess whose learning how to cheat you? OK Wallmart.

    From BOB KLAHN@1:123/140 to ALL on Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970


    Ok, I knew Wallmart was screwing us, but wait till you get to
    the part about Wallmart hiring people to help their employees
    apply for medicaid.

    On top of that, the company is suffering bad word of mouth, and
    weaker profits, because they are trying to evade Obamacare.
    Looks like they may be backing off on that.

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    Forbes <http://www.forbes.com/>

    9/25/2013 @ 9:45AM |47,081 views

    Wal-Mart Returning To Full-Time Workers-Obamacare Not Such A Job
    Killer After All?

    Wal-Mart, the nation's largest employer, announced Monday that
    35,000 part-time employees will soon be moved to /full-time
    status/, entitling them to the full healthcare benefits that
    were scheduled to be denied them as a result of Wal-Mart's
    efforts to avoid the requirements of Obamacare.

    While some analysts believe that the move comes as Wal-Mart is
    attempting to deal with the negative view many Americans have
    of its worker benefits program, a closer look reveals the real
    reason for the shift -

    Wal-Mart's business is going south due to the company's
    penchant for putting politics and the squeeze on Wal-Mart
    employees ahead of the kind of customer satisfaction that
    produces prosperity over the long-term.

    In fact, Wal-Mart's unwillingness to pay most of their workers
    a livable wage, while avoiding enough full-time employees to
    properly run a retail outlet, has led to the company placing
    dead last among department and discount stores in the most
    recent American Customer Satisfaction Index - a position that
    should now be all too familiar to the nation's largest retailer
    given that Wal-Mart has either held or shared the bottom spot on
    the index for six years running.

    For anyone who has not been following the Wal-Mart saga, sales
    have been sinking dramatically at the retailer as the company
    has turned to hiring mostly temporary workers (those who must
    reapply for a job every 180 days) to staff their stores while
    cutting full-time employees' hours down to part-time status in
    order to avoid providing workers with healthcare benefits.

    The result?

    Empty shelves, ridiculously long check-out lines, helpless
    customers wandering through the electronics section and general
    disorganization at Wal-Mart store locations.

    This is hardly a recipe for success.

    A recent description of a Wal-Mart store in Newark, New Jersey
    published by Bloomberg, says it all - "Three days earlier, about
    10 people waited in a customer service line at a Wal-Mart in
    Secaucus, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from New York, the
    nation's largest city. Twelve of 30 registers were open and the
    lines were about five deep. There were empty spaces on shelves
    large enough for a grown man to lie down, and a woman wandered
    around vainly seeking a frying pan."

    The description pretty much sums up what you will find at the
    typical Wal-Mart store in the United States these days.

    While the company's trend toward temporary employees has
    allowed the retailer to avoid its responsibilities under the
    Affordable Care Act - a law that Wal-Mart publicly supported
    only to turn around after passage and work to avoid providing
    health care benefits to employees - they've managed to tank
    their store sales in the process.

    Who would have guessed that a well-staffed store filled with
    competent and reasonably paid employees might actually have an
    impact on the success of a company?

    Home Depot - that's who.

    According to Zeynep Ton, a retail researcher and associate
    professor of operations management at the MIT Sloan School of
    Management, in the early 2000s, Home Depot's CEO, Robert
    Nardelli, moved to cut full-time staffing levels while
    increasing part-time employees in an effort to boost profits by
    trimming the expense that comes with employing full-time
    workers. It worked for a short while. However, as Ton notes,
    eventually customer service declined - and with it, customer
    satisfaction - leading to a severe decline of same-store sales.

    Wal-Mart's penny wise-pound foolish approach to its business was
    further well documented inthe Bloomberg article referenced
    earlier where they told the story of Margaret Hancock, a retired
    accountant from Newark, Delaware, who has always viewed Wal-Mart
    as her "one stop shopping destination".

    While Ms. Hancock had, for years, been able to get everything
    she needed at her local Wal-Mart store, recent visits resulted
    in her failing to locate numerous items as the products were
    simply were not out on the shelves and available for purchase.

    As Hancock explained it, "If it's not on the shelf, I can't buy
    it. You hate to see a company self-destruct, but there are other
    places to go."

    And go is exactly what Ms. Hancock did - no doubt to Wal-Mart's
    competitor, Costco, a company that experienced a 19 percent
    increase in profits in Q2 2013 while paying its employees 40
    percent more on average (the average Costco wage is $21.96 per
    hour) than what a Wal-Mart worker can earn. In that same
    quarter, Wal-Mart numbers revealed the company is going nowhere
    fast given its current state of operations.

    So, where /is /all that product that once filled Wal-Mart
    shelves?

    Oh, the goods are in the store - either in the back room or in
    the unopened boxes lining the aisles as they await the
    availability of a store clerk to get to the rather critical job
    of moving the merchandise from the box to the shelf where a
    customer can actually purchase it. But when there are
    insufficient numbers of store clerks available - due to
    Wal-Mart's commitment to using temporary workers or busting its
    full-time employees down to part-time so as to avoid worker
    benefit - the products Wal-Mart sells stay off the shelves and
    unavailable for customers to purchase.

    Of course, Wal-Mart's efforts to keep its workers from earning
    a decent living while achieving health care benefits has created
    some full-time work for some.

    The company now hires people to work with its employees to help
    them sign up for Medicaid, the government program that makes
    healthcare available to Americans who neither get coverage at
    work or are able to afford it without public assistance.

    What that means is that you and I are subsidizing Wal-Mart's
    poor treatment of its employees as we pay for their workers
    health care coverage with our tax dollars and all so Wal-Mart
    can feather and mask its sinking profits by allowing you and I
    to pay to pay for their responsibilities, whether we shop at
    Wal-Mart or not.

    The moral to the story?

    Wal-Mart is finally learning what all American businesses who
    seek to avoid their health care responsibilities to employees
    will soon learn.

    It may be a clever enough dodge to cut employees below the 30
    hours per week in order to avoid the expectations of Obamacare,
    but the move comes at a substantial price to be paid in lost
    revenue and profits. Given that the entire point of business is
    to show a profit, it is only a matter of time before employers
    learn what Home Depot learned some years ago and what Wal-Mart
    is slowly beginning to figure out - you get what you pay for.

    Cut back on employees and you will, eventually, cut back on
    your profits as the savings a business creates by cutting worker
    hours leads to greatly decreased sales as customer satisfaction
    disappears.

    While there are no shortage of Americans who enjoy deriding the
    Affordable Care Act as a ΓÇÿjob killer', what will soon emerge
    - and sooner than you may think - is an understanding that the
    losses experienced by businesses that cut worker hours will far
    exceed whatever is gained by avoiding giving employees the
    healthcare benefits their families so badly require.

    Don't believe it?

    Just ask Wal-Mart. ------------------------------------------------------------------------
    *This article is available online at:
    http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2013/09/25/
    wal-mart-returning-to-full-time-workers-obamacare-not-such-a-
    job-killer-after-all/*







    BOB KLAHN bob.klahn@sev.org http://home.toltbbs.com/bobklahn

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  • From Earl Croasmun@1:261/38 to All on Fri Aug 5 15:26:04 2033
    Who would have guessed that a well-staffed store filled with
    competent and reasonably paid employees might actually have an
    impact on the success of a company?
    Home Depot - that's who.

    In case anyone missed the news about Home Depot: "Other retailers, such as Trader Joe's and Home Depot have said they will no longer provide medical coverage for part-time employees, and will shift them instead to the public healthcare exchanges

    --- BBBS/Li6 v4.10 Dada-1
    * Origin: Prism bbs (1:261/38)
  • From BOB KLAHN@1:123/140 to EARL CROASMUN on Sun Sep 27 15:26:44 1992

    Who would have guessed that a well-staffed store filled with
    competent and reasonably paid employees might actually have an
    impact on the success of a company?
    Home Depot - that's who.

    In case anyone missed the news about Home Depot: "Other
    retailers, such as Trader Joe's and Home Depot have said
    they will no longer provide medical coverage for part-time
    employees, and will shift them instead to the public
    healthcare exchanges

    And on the exchanges they can still subsidize the insurance. So,
    if they did not want to have their workers insured they would
    not have insured them in the first place.

    In looking that up I found three companies focused on,
    Walgreens, Trader Joe's and Home Depot. All three had very poor
    coverage for those part time workers. Overall they will get
    better coverage on the exchanges than they had, the companies
    will still be subsidizing their coverage, the employees were
    paying the rest themselves before, and the cost will be around
    the same or less.

    The relatively few who will be paying more live in republican
    controlled states that have chosen not to expand medicaid, and
    even don't have state fun exchanges. IOW, they would be eligible
    for medicaid, but won't be because the republicans chose it to
    be so.

    If you read up on it at all, you already knew this, which means
    you chose to be deceptive. If you didn't, you chose willful
    ignorance.



    BOB KLAHN bob.klahn@sev.org http://home.toltbbs.com/bobklahn

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