Hi Meat Cutters, please give your best assessments of how much time you spend cleaning and sanitizing your meat department "including trash removal" . Lets keep it simple and lets use a 40 hour work week.
Example: In a 40 hour working week if you use 3 hours to clean, sanitize and remove trash! That equates to 8% of your
I am doing some research for a post I intend to write for the members. Thank you very much.
When I was in the trade, I would say it was much more than that. In a 24 hour shop, easily 6 hours a day blitzing the cutting room, plus of course breaking down, cleaning and sanitizing the grinder and blender after every single grind which was every 4 hours so I'd say the total was about 12-14 hours of every day at least at my shop. My highest priority was compliance with company policy because contradicting that could get you fired, union or not.
Morning JH, your reply was the one I was waiting for as it reinforces my other post! "Are We Proud To Be Meatcutters. Yes we are skilled tradespeople and we can perform and execute and be more efficient in our labors that will benefit every person that works in the store. If they would only realize that they should be using unskilled workers to perform the unskilled work meat cutters are presently doing!! When in God's name will The Powers To Be" realize that the only skilled tradesperson in their stores are meat cutters? The answer to that is no: THEY CARE LESS EVERY YEAR!"
Sure I understand "team work" and that every employee in a store counts, but tell me how much skill does it take to "put out produce, fill up dairy compartments, order groceries, (with hand held scanners), check out customers, (more scanners). Jim Henry I will say it again " EVERY MEAT CUTTER MEMBER, needs to get-up off their "poor me" butts and begin to "make statements". Every-movement in this world we live in "begins" with "words". If we as meat cutters stay silent and harbor bitter resentments, then meat cutters practicing their trade are left unsupported.
WHERE ARE THE UNIONS ON THIS ISSUE?
Right now as I write this post, McDonalds is experiencing with totally automated stores. Why? The "talk" has been so fierce concerning raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour. When the minimum wage is raised to $15 what happens to the meat cutter trade? It gets knocked down to clerk status for sure because as you said we are so far behind as it is. All it will take is "one just one supermarket chain" to implements (total pre-packaged fresh meat") the die will be cast for our profession. Kroger is more than 75% there as we speak.
The goal of the big chain stores is to have "one possibly two cutters on duty" in each store depending on store size and if they have a (fresh service meat case) just to make the customers believe that meat is still being cut by a "real live meatcutters". Supermarket chains are so envious of Walmart because they did what the chains could only dream about.
The ever changing move towards butcher shops and or direct farm selling of fresh meat will only be able to absorb a limited amount of skilled cutters. Today the gap between the hourly rate of a factory meat cutter vs. a retail meat cutters has shrunk immensely. The reason for this shrinking gap is that packers now have a "new" category which I call "factory meat cutters". No doubt they make more per hour than a beef boner doing one task. The factory meat cutter probably does more than one task but I wouldn't put them in the same category as retail meat cutters performing multi-task.
Great evaluation, As to the minimum wage killing the job.... I have run my own shop now for 18 years. 18 years ago I was making $18.00/ hour on an all male cutting line(99 men & 2 women) Do I believe I am making 18/ hour now in my own business? No way, but I am doing what I love & hopefully helping prevent the demise of the butchery art in my home town.... Would my hands be keeping up to 1800 sides per shift... No way, But in my shop I can probably keep going for another 10 years til retirement..( like it or not)
As to the sanitization question... It is a constant, I will have to pay attention in the next week to break it down! Regards Your Bitchy Butcher P.s. Worst thing I ever did was buy a shiny new glass and stainless counter... Not just sanitation but window cleaning constantly...LOL
I think it is much higher or should be.. I work and consult the workings at the cutting room. To improve, Product out put is to have a Clean in "Washer" as part of the processing room. Different color for each animal. I"t's all about SQ. Foot cost. LEAN MANGEMENT
we have a excellent cleaning station, we spent about a hour and half a day on clean up, most days the crew before leaving will take their last ten or so mins to scrap down the blocks and get the trash ready to take out, that helps a lot
Not 100% related, but here is the technology coming to retail stores:
http://www.oasis24seven.com/
Actually, the concept is pretty close to Mickey D's from what I can see. Incidentally they have started serving breakfast all day here in North Augusta, S.C.. How about where you live? I suppose they need more sales so the stock doesn't slump!
You know, there is one school of thought that believes as the minimum wage is pushed up, that the folks who make higher than the current minimum wage will also have their wages increased. For the sake of my brethren still in the trade I hope that is what happens.
As to automating retail stores we already see that happening and if the Dems succeed in getting the minimum wage to $15/hour you will see convenience stores turned into giant vending machines like in the link I posted, but also you will see more and more of that technology in supermarkets.
Coalcracker wrote:
jimhenry2000 wrote:
Not 100% related, but here is the technology coming to retail stores:
http://www.oasis24seven.com/
Actually, the concept is pretty close to Mickey D's from what I can see. Incidentally they have started serving breakfast all day here in North Augusta, S.C.. How about where you live? I suppose they need more sales so the stock doesn't slump!
That is kind of tricky because the more you cut the more trash you get because of the trash and trim created. We not only clean sanitize and organize trim in order to keep from cross contaminating we also have to log all this down in order to track what cut came from what lot and what was cleaned and when etc. My guess is between 10-15%
