I think the Supermarket Gods are taking their notes from the Post Office. They are running the veterans out and manning the delivery trucks and clerks with part-time help. You know guys (and I am speaking as a beef packing man for a minute). The beef packers just sit back and watch this ever ending saga of increased sales per man hour or worst yet, cutting hours and man-power in the supermarket business.

Packers, and I mean all packers just  sit back and keep their volumes up and their is no such thing as dollars per man hour. They work on straight through-put. And they get bigger and bigger every year, and supermarkets have to come-to-their-table. 

I was in our local Food Lion today, and let me tell you it is a sad, sad sight to see. You could shoot a cannon ball through the holes in the case, moral is low, the men are literally breaking their backs. Hours cut to the bone. You look in the meat case (and I can't even say the words anymore). There not meat cases any more, they are "show cases"  filled with so much junk, but the junk covers the iron.  From stuffed jalapeno peppers, to sweet potato slices, to bacon wrapped water chestnuts, breaded fish, vacuum packed cow beef steaks with a fancy name and enough pre-packaged ground turkey to feed an army.  The amount of beef in the cases wouldn't be enough to physic-a-woodpecker.

What I see is "dead-store-walking". Just like A & P and the other 200 supermarket companies that have gone belly up over the last 25 years.

Very well said fdarn.

Today everything is turn up-side down from how it used to be. Take chicken for example. Chicken consumption has soared to record highs, now nearly at 100 lbs. per person annually in the U.S.A. alone. And what does the supermarkets do? Contract the business out to ,Tyson Foods, Inc.
Annual sales: $33.3 billion: Foster Farms $3 billion in sales; Purdue, $6 billion in sales; Pilgrims $8 billion just to name a few.

Why? Well lets see! Sanitation issues, to much labor involved, to much packaging cost,  can't see a $20 per hour meat cutter cutting up a .99 cent chicken.

So what do they do instead? Well lets see, they expand deli's (did you ever see the waste of good man hours waiting to get a 1/4 pound of baloney sliced)? One day I went to a Publix deli a really sharp store. I ordered 1/4 pound of 4 different items including cheese sliced. I timed it. Twenty minutes to get a pound of cold cuts valued at $8.00. In Twenty minutes a good cutter can cut up a 60 lb. case of chickens valued at $95.00 or more.

Lets see what other labor intensive departments supermarkets created since they got rid of fresh cut chickens. Oh yes, sea food. Wow!  some of the sea food departments are gorgeous. And if you put all the fish you can name together it only amounts to 15 lbs. per person annually.

What about the bakery department next to the deli department! baked goods consumption is about 8 lbs. per person.

Look Fdarn you really got me going at 1:33 in the morning. I tell you supermarket top management is their own worst enemy. You hit the nail on the head! No more "creativity per store".

Why should supermarkets want to get a piece of every commodity item know to man-kind and in doing so grind the meat department skilled labor into the ground. Here are the real stats that everyone reading this should understand.

Estimated Sales by department category, 2016.

Floral dept. ---------.02% of store sales-----------labor intensive

Pharmacy dept.-----3% of store sales

In store bakery------2% of store sales-------------labor intensive

Service deli----------3.4% of store sales-----------labor intensive

Packaged deli meats--- 2.5% of store sales ( 50% less labor than the service deli) LOL>LOL>LOL.

Seafood ---------------- 1.75 % of store sales ( labor intensive)

Meat & poultry ---------12.50% ( and they keep taking away the help)

I personally believe that the reason supermarkets today are on the decline is that they are greedy thus going after every penny of the consumers food spending dollar. They all want to be mini-Walmart's or mini Mijers, or mini Coscos, or mini Sam's clubs. They want it all and right under their noses they let an Aldi's come in to their markets offering just food, and now in our area another foreign just food company   called Lidl.

One more thing. Lets not forget the "gas pumps"  Yea, one more thing they can squeeze out of the consumer on the way to buy food for her family!!

Toby I didn't quite understand those numbers. Bakery gets $2000 in labor per $10,000 in store sales and likewise meat gets $598 labor dollars per $10,000 in sales? Am I correct in assuming this? 

Wow! Is there no shame with these companies! Does any of them ever talk about customer service in the same sentence when they give you your hours for the week? Have they ever head about the "silent customers"?

The average silent customer may tell 8 to 15 people about how dissatisfied they are concerning your department or store either in service or availability of product. Some may even talk to more than that if you take into consideration "social media" today. The sad part about it is that the personnel in the store won't even know about the silent customer and go on about their duties. Then wonder why the slack times last longer than they use to.

On a national scale look at Comcast. When they were a small to medium size company their service was stellar. Today, now that they are nearly a conglomerate service has slid backwards. I am sure you can site your own examples of what I am talking about.

There is nothing worse than the cost of  "negative word of mouth". And in our meat departments there is nothing worst than sales per man hour. When supermarket meat gurus begin to look at pounds per man hour sold out the door then things may change. A simple example is a pound of regular ground beef;

When ground beef was selling for $2.50 per lb. and everyone was making money on it, a 100 pounds sold would amount to $250. Two years later the same meat is selling for $3.50 per pound and your making the same money on it  and 100 pounds sold is $350 dollars. Wow what an increase in sales about 40%. But let me ask you, did you sell any more ground beef? Multiply this times all of the meat items and maybe you can see what I am talking about. Sales can go up but likewise meat tonnage can stay the same or worst  yet go down. 

When you talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place. That little vacuum between the rock and the hard place that the average meat cutter can't see (is the difference between sales dollars and tonnage). As sophisticated and technical supermarkets are today, they can't see the trees for the forest. In the example above (and if all things were equal like that example) the only way you could increase your tonnage is to get more customers to by more ground beef. But the meat gods use the sales dollars to schedule meat department hours therefore if you did get an onslaught of new customers you could not deliver the product to them because of the man power restrictions.

This is a vicious circle and I see it all the time in meat departments. Look at Rumproast situation 170 hours. Lets just say that for what ever reason the sale items in the week he got his 170 hours motivated customers to come in more than they would normally do  to grab up those specials. Or some other potential opportunity like a snow storm or something happens in your competitor store. He already laid his work schedule out for 170 hours so what happens? The specials get sold out fast, and other items too because of the extra volume of customers. Rumproast looses the opportunity to increase tonnage because he is tied-in and he is committed to make 170 hours work. So basically the meat gods who are suppose to be their to help set up Rumproast and failed him. He failed to add extra tonnage which equates to extra profits for the store because the labor distribution for his department was generated by a computer model rather than someone that knows how to run a meat department business. They actually put a cap on their own sales growth!

The sad part about all of this is that all the top meat gods, including the V.P of perishables, division managers, field supervisors are afraid to speak up about the situation at senio department levels. They are too busy playing (C. Y. A.) They make big bucks with great benefits and some don't even know the difference between a pork chop and a chicken leg. Not all, there are a few meat guys in their ranks but very few and they are out numbered by those educated guys. Trust me, they know, they sit around at their meetings and it is the grocery guys that tell them what is going to happen at store level.

And when the meat buyers over-buy, they have something they call "forced distribution". You will get it whether you want it or not. And if the meat buyers under buy, then its the meat department guys that have to face the customers, not them. There was a time when it wasn't like this, there was a time when meat was truly the center of the plate for supermarkets and upper meat management had a voice and they used it. Yes, there was a time when "beef was king".

"You know Fdan there are solutions to this dilemma meat cutters face day in and day out in regards to labor scheduling, and no it isn't  union involvement." It is company involvement. The involvement must come from the chain of command (top down) the "meat division hierarchy" (MDH) for short. MDH get paid to look at the "big picture", and their jobs can turn into "hot seats". Here is a short list of their responsibilities; supply chain management, sales and profit growth, meat department operations, meat department advertising, safety and sanitation and so on. They get paid "big" bucks but their responsibilities are big as well.

It is not the responsibility for MDH  to focus "in the trenches" so to speak. That's up to the traveling meat supervisors or in todays lingo (DM's). They get their "operation details" (good or bad) second and third hand. By that I mean  from store managers who get their details from the meat department manager. Possibly as the DM walks the store they may pick up some details from employees. Then the (DM) deciphers the info and sends it up to (MDH). Even if the operation details are severe, by the time it reaches (MDH) it has become diluted and the sense of urgency sometimes is lost. No doubt the MDH are inundated with all kinds of computer generated reports but their isn't one report that can tie everything together for them to know what is really going on at meat department level when payroll is cut.  

With todays technology supermarkets have all the data necessary to achieve greatness but until the MDH  sits down with their companies top computer gurus to design a program that will link meat department "payroll reduction" (sales per man hour scheduling) to specific sales profit and operational tasks nothing at meat department level will change.

For instance, when we either increase or decrease meat department labor what will the impact be on; high, low or no inventory (missed opportunity sales); pounds sold per item; product mix movement; ( cents per pound profit by item (from low to high profit); meat sales transaction per customer; shrink loss which includes, rework, donations, pilferage, and spoiled meat; proper safety (injuries); proper sanitation (water usage); and to some degree customer service. I am sure there are other task I left out that suffer due to payroll cuts.

Once a report like this is created and reviewed by MDH they will be able to see the operational details like meat department managers see it, first hand. They will see the "pronounced effects" when the company reduces meat department payroll based only on sales-dips. Only then can MDH be able to sit down with the company decision makers and succinctly explain that "there is a better way". Only then will it get better for meat cutters and consumers.

Somebody once said; "insanity is repeating the same mistake and expecting different results". 

I believe they do care but the ego-politics at the top sometime are unmovable. The massive supermarket industry is incredibly competitive not only in price, customer experience, and retail technology. The leaders in our industry have to be innovative because the supermarket business is a low-margin industry, with an average net profit margin of between 1 and 2 percent. Actually it is a cut-throat business. That being said smaller more efficient natural or gourmet type stores can reach a net profit margin of 3 to 4 percent.

So what happens is that the conventional supermarket wants to get a piece of that and they try very hard to do a kind of quasi metamorphosis to grab some extra margin. Thus they open Chinese food take out  or pizza take out  or scratch bakeries, and sushi-bars, flora dept. and so on. And when all that doesn't live up to expectation they go to the only other thing they know how to do to get quick cash flowing to the bottom line.  Payroll reduction or as you and I call it, sales per man hour.

Thanks fdarn, I just read a preview of this book and its something I would be interest in. I'll drop a hint to my supervisor; maybe she will buy if for me since I got very little for Christmas. Well not according to her, I needed a new mattress so that was my one big thing LOL>