I’m very certain. I’ve had a lot of jobs in the past (cart pusher, milkman, carpenter, soldier, garbage truck washer, avionics engineer).
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That’s weird. Every supermarket where I live except the bag your own discount stores have staff whose primary responsibility is to wrangle carts. It is a necessary function, not busy work. You don’t think carts just miraculously move from the parking lot to the store entrance do you?
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FFS, I worked as a stocker during school. It is the sole thing I was hired to do. Vendors stocked beer, chips, soda, and bread. I think you are generalizing your experience to the entire US.
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So like I said I’m actively right now involved as a rep servicing 8 or so different grocery operations from single location independent places, to national chains. You can add about 6 more from my last sales territory. Through our breweries we negotiate at the national level for placements and volume, and we do it a lot more directly for regional chains in our home market.
Placements are heavily determined by the level of “merchandising” you can provide. That is the number of people you can send by at a time, and how often you can send them by to pack out product and set up displays. We’re actually about to get locked out of our most important supermarket chain, as it was bought by a German company and we can’t hit their expected merchandising level.
And I talk to the employees at these stores, most of whom have worked for their respective companies in multiple states. I’ve met their union reps and talked to them about exactly this (cause they’re pissed). I talk to the other vendors. I have friends in the beverage business up and down the east and west coast (though few enough in the middle), and family members who do this for deli and bread companies in a bunch of different places. I’m told its practically the same everywhere.
And its basically the same across industries (though not that deli guy). Cause there’s a beer guy, and a chip guy, and a diaper guy, and a soup guy, and a rice guy, and a fucking greeting card guy. Outside of meat, produce, deli/food prep and to a lesser extent Dairy it all runs the same. The vendors do the regular inventory, they put in the orders, they unpack the trucks, they break down the pallets, they put the product on the shelves and into back stock. They come by repeatedly to restock shelves.
That’s not to say that the store employees never stock shelves. But its entirely down to the particular company, and the management in the particular store. And it tends to be limited to high volume staples like dairy, bread, rice, beans, flour, and canned goods (weirdly mostly soup?). Beer will almost never get touched by an employee, barring the very best run stores.
How much the vendors do and in what categories is almost entirely down to how big the company is. National or international grocery concern? Vendors are doing almost all of it. Little high end 5 location chain? Beer, bread and chip vendors do their own pack outs, and pitch products on a per store basis. But everything else is on the store level. Very small coop operations like an IGA? We do practically nothing at a lot of them. Hispanic supermarkets especially tend to handle all of it themselves.
How long has it been since you worked in a super market? Cause today’s grocery business isn’t the grocery business from even five years ago. The union guys I’ve met are flaming pissed. Because pushing work onto vendors is primarily about undercutting the unions. And the amount vendors are doing is escalating as grocery consolidates, and companies push back on the unions.
I think you misunderstood. It’s not that it’s noone’s duty. I’ve just never heard of a super market advertising for “parking lot supervisors” or a person who lists “cart wrangler” on their tax return. While it falls to particular people, and at a given store may be the responsibility of a particular person on a given shift. Or even a single person’s regularly (see my list above). For the most part this is the sort of thing that seems to be covered by the low man on the totem pole, or an occasional rotating duty of cleaning or stock staff. I’ve never seen a store anywhere in the world that had a person who’s job was to stand around and only organize carts.
So if organizing carts became less of a thing. The people who currently do it would stay employed and spend more time on the other shit they do. Kind of like if I didn’t have to deal with the super markets, its not my primary thing. It’s not on my business card. So if it went away I’d just have time to do the rest of my job.
I’d rather trust the opinions of the guy who collects the carts.
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Vendors in Texas do not have anywhere near the impact on a store that you are describing.
But all of this is beside the point. Don’t be an asshole and justify your behavior as providing “busy work”.
I think you lost the thread there. I’m not leaving shit anywhere. I started out complaining about the damage that behavior does to my car.
Some states apparently limit this sort of thing. Mostly in the Midwest from what I’m told. Also when and how big a store is are determining factors. Maybe it didn’t look like that when ever. But it might very well now.
And it’s not about “vendor impact”. It’s about corporations undermining labor. They outsource work to vendors to undermine unions.
I’m guessing that “if you can’t spend sixty seconds of your time to treat a shopping cart properly I hate to think of children depending on you.” is considered a bad-attitude retort to that answer.
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