hero pay
Last night was a bit of an errand night. Shobhit got off work at 6:00, and I walked over to the Central District PCC to meet him at around 6:30 to do some shopping there. Several promotions on items I buy frequently (Blue Diamond Almond Breeze, Zevia Soda, Stash Tea) are ending today, and so we went there to stock up on items on sale that my 15% employee discount gets applied on top of. It was a pretty hefty price tag, $148 or so for everything, but that was after a savings of roughly $57. So basically I got an overall discount of 27%. Not too shabby.
We then went across the street to Tacos Chukis and got takeout for dinner, something we almost never do but decided to yesterday. Their menu options are limited in number and small in size, but available in vegetarian versions and very tasty. Shobhit ordered like four items and we split each of then in half to eat after we got home.
As soon as I was done eating, though, I drove to the office to swap out paperwork, listening to Tracy Chapman's 2000 album Telling Stories on the way there and back. It was about 8 p.m. when I got there, and only Marianne was still in the office this time, and it looked like she left by the time I was done with my roughly ten or fifteen minutes there. There's a box of disposable masks at the front desk and I snatched a handful, so I could wear one of those under my cloth mask the next few times I go out, instead of having to double up on cloth ones. I probably wasn't supposed to do that, so . . . don’t tell anybody.
There's a little bit of controversy going on with PCC right now, and it has to do with Seattle's passage of an ordinance obligating all grocery chains with 500 or more employees worldwide to pay an extra $4 an hour as "hazard pay" to store staff, through at least April, and possibly extended after that. PCC has very publicly pushed back against this, and while many of their points are valid (I was even pretty firmly on PCC's side at first), I can't say it has been a particularly good PR move.
The only place online that I can find where the public has been able to offer comments and reaction are at this West Seattle Blog post about it from four days ago, and unsurprisingly, the overwhelming majority of the reaction is that customers and staff alike are very disappointed in PCC. This was a pretty predictable reaction, I think, and while I appreciate PCC being forthright about their position, I don't think they've done quite enough to mitigate these effects. Store staff feel betrayed by this, and honestly I don't blame them.
That said, $4 an hour for over maybe 1000 employees (specifically stores within Seattle city limits) for three months . . . that's a lot of money, and I think it actually is fair to note that PCC is hardly in the same position to absorb those costs as national grocery chains that happen to have stores here. There's no disputing that the staff deserve it, however, and there's no getting around how this looks from their perspective, which is going to affect morale, and put our brand new CEO in a position of having gotten off on the wrong foot with way too many of our employees. Also, upon further reflection, even though our leadership is saying they don't know yet how this will get paid for, I have a hard time believing that it can't be. It just means some other things we planned to spend money on will have to be postponed or perhaps even sacrificed.
The many new stores we have been opening in recent years (a rapid rate of expansion that has had me nervous from the start) was also brought up in the feedback, and it's true that taking this position while opening expensive new stores is also not a good look. Granted, right now we're talking about contracts that are long since signed so it's not like we can just suddenly pull out necessarily, but that's hardly a convincing argument to staff at the bottom of the totem pole.
As a side note, I went to PCC's social media accounts to see if anyone posted anything about this, and thus see how people reacted there. But not only has PCC not shared their press release anywhere but on the website itself (as if members and shoppers go there very much), but I was surprised to discover PCC's Facebook and Twitter accounts have had hardly any content posted at all since September. Clearly something has changed with PCC's approach to social media. But, the comment section on that West Seattle Blog post alone is a pretty good indicator of general reactions.
There's a long-planned virtual Board "meet and greet" at 4:30 today that I have planned to attend since long before any of this came up. But I absolutely expect this to come up in the conversation now, and I think the meeting is going to be a lot more interesting because of all this.
[posted 1:21 pm]