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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: 3, Informative) by GungnirSniper on Saturday May 16 2015, @05:12PM
That's true. The two stores compete for different market segments though. Market Basket is the no-frills, no website, newsprint-only advertisement company. They're known for their low prices. Wegmans' does the typical advertising, including a website and social media presence, and is upmarket. They do have house-brand goods that compete with Market Basket on price, but most of their brand name stuff is more expensive by 25% or so. They also have full bakeries, sushi counters, and even pizza and sub shops inside.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 16 2015, @05:23PM
Market basket has full bakeries and the best supermarket sushi I've ever had. Better than whole foods (which actually has kind of gone in the crapper the last couple of years).
(Score: 3, Informative) by M. Baranczak on Saturday May 16 2015, @06:15PM
They do have house-brand goods that compete with Market Basket on price, but most of their brand name stuff is more expensive by 25% or so.
The brand-name items at Wegmans* are 25% more than generic items? That seems typical for a supermarket. Or did you mean that the same brand-name items cost 25% more in Wegmans than in Market Basket? That seems like an unrealistically wide margin.
Never been to Market Basket, but there's a Wegmans near my house. In my experience, people think that Wegmans is expensive because it looks expensive - the produce is fresh, the employees are friendly and the whole place doesn't smell like old meat - and also because they have some higher-end items that the competition doesn't. But if you compare prices for equivalent items, Wegmans is about the same as the competition.
- * Yes, the name is "Wegmans", no apostrophe.
(Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Sunday May 17 2015, @03:14AM
The latter. It may not be 25% on all items but it is at least 15% typically.
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