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from the happy-employees-make-happy-customers dept.
Wegmans is a family-owned grocery store chain. NYTimes noted it can actually claim a "cult following".
The Center for American Progress reports
It manages to have a huge selection while offering prices that can compete with Walmart, but that it does it while treating its employees well.
The perks start with pay, which for hourly store employees is a little more than $33,000 a year on average. By contrast, Walmart has admitted that more than half of its employees make less than $25,000 a year.
[...]but that's not what makes the company famous for employee satisfaction, landing it on Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For list every year since the list began. It also offers generous benefits. It pays about 85 percent of the costs of health care coverage, including dental, for its full-time employees and offers insurance to part-time workers who put in 30 hours a week. It offers 401(k) plans with a salary match of up to 3 percent of an employee's contribution.
And it has a scholarship program[...]
Wegmans also offers more work/life balance than most retail jobs.[...]
These benefits aren't just altruistic. The company generates $7.1 billion in revenue and is profitable. "When you think about employees first, the bottom line is better," the company's vice-president for human resources has said. The company boasts a 5 percent turnover rate among full-time employees, compared to a 27 percent[paywall] rate for the industry. That comes with a cost, as it often eats up about 20 percent of a worker's salary to replace him.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 16 2015, @06:59PM
This is one of those invisible issues that managers have to deal with. It isn't just that person's pay that needs to be considered. HR and their expensive salaries need to be involved and their cost for advertising and screening. Insurance paperwork needs to be filled out by another expensive person. Tax forms, accounting, and so on also have costs associated. After that a low-level manager needs to take time out of their day, again making much more than the lowly checkout clerk, probably for several days at minimum to spend time with a new hire. After that the new hire is "apprenticed" out to an established employee for specific training. That established employee also costs more money than the new hire and their productivity takes a hit. The new hire themselves has to get up to par for output which will take some time adding on to the wasted revenue compared to just keeping a well-performing employee. Finally when that person quits there is a gap that needs to be filled in the work that needs to be done, thus is likely to cause employees that make more to have to fill in for the lost person. Worse case scenario some overtime might be needed.
So yes, in whole 20% or 5k is a reasonable cost to replace an unskilled* worker.
*a misnomer. There is no such thing as unskilled work or we could skip hiring a human and have a $40 goat do it for its entire life.
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Sunday May 17 2015, @12:43AM
Sweet! Where do they sell goats for $40?
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Sunday May 17 2015, @07:43AM
I'm going to bet that a checker's job is actually quite a bit more complicated than any of us who've never done it imagine.
My basis for this assumption, comes from looking at what goes on in my small business. An assistant just quit last week. They just answer phones, enter info about calls/correspondence, file papers, scan papers, shred papers, mail and fax things, schedule things on the calendar, and run some errands. And yet, it isn't so simple. It takes about 6 months before a person gets competent at the job. I know that sounds crazy, and my knee jerk reaction is WTF, but I've been hiring assistants for more than a decade and that's the experience. And my knee jerk reaction is properly wrong because when I really start to think about it, there are things about the job that make it much more complicated than the job description would make it sound. Most of my assistants have been objectively very bright and I'm definitely not blaming on them the time it takes to become competent. Secondly, the task of hiring someone is ... I don't know how to explain it other than to say that I'd rather do really complicated tax forms in a foreign language I've never even heard of, and which doesn't use the Roman alphabet or Arabic numbers, than sort through a steaming pile of resumes. Fucking hell, this sucks. Again.