How to Lose Friends and Influncer People

I'm writing the beginning of this on a Thursday night walk after a fairly long day away. After a very fall-like spell of weather last week, we seem to have reached a point of Indian Summer. Unfortunately, it’s been more like a Mumbai, Indian Summer- with temperatures in the upper 80s and humidity not much below that. We drove home from poetry Wednesday night in a laser light show of thunderstorms, which kept up most of the night, and  then with rain that continued on and off throughout the day. It’s finally gotten a little cooler as we headed out on the dog's belated daily constitutional, and I am hoping this week's patch will be the end of the beastly hot weather.

In my travels last week and again today, I’ve come to have even more disappointment and frustration about a business that we have long been among the biggest cheerleaders for. Wegmans was Eleanor‘s employer for more than 15 years, and a past client of mine as well. (Actually, I don’t think I was ever fired from representing them but there hasn’t been all that much bankruptcy work for me to do involving customers of theirs over the last several years.)

So for now, we’re just customers of Wegmans ourselves, and not particularly happy ones after changes we’ve seen in the past few weeks. I’ve written previously about the seemingly endless process that they refer to as “reset,“ a very intrusive shuffling and removal of many products and store sections. Their two stores closest to home, including the one Eleanor used to work at, have both been going through significant reset efforts over the past few months. Sheridan seems to have settled down, but their Alberta Drive location- across a parking lot from their original location there that brought me my first discovery of the Wegmans magic over 40 years ago- continues to have major changes implemented. Months ago, they replaced the cash registers in that store's café area, previously staffed by human beings, with a row of checkout kiosks that only accept credit card payments. They’re also making a big push in that store to test out the latest version of their “scan and go" system, replacing a smartphone based one that was largely interpreted by customers as “don’t scan and steal.” Coincidentally or not to this rollout, they are also ripping out a significant number of the main cash register lanes staffed by humans, to add more self-checkout stations and many more speedy ones for the scan-and-hopefully-don't steal users. It is probably the way of the future, but it seems to be coming too much too fast for even my liking, so I can just imagine what the real old fogeys think about it.

Occasionally I will visit one of their other locations in this area or in Rochester, and almost every one of them these days has one of these signs as you enter the main vestibule:



But wait, there’s more! This sign was waiting just inside the vestibule:



So they’re also doing a Buzz kill. “The Buzz” is, apparently soon to be WAS, the branding of their in-store coffee bars.  Eleanor told me this was not just Flo from Alice slinging a Mr. Coffee carafe at you. Those employees were trained and tested on more than 300 brewed drink recipes- full fledged baristas only without the piercings, or the Starbucks union.

What other “areas of the company” are they gonna go to? They’re ripping out registers left and right, dropping whole product lines and they already closed the in-store pubs they'd experimented with in several stores. So unless Danny gets his wine deal from Albany, I can’t think of  how they’ll repurpose them except to clean up the litter from the W-Kcups. Or, just as likely, they'll be spending their time fixing those stupid machines. Which they will, if they’re designed anything at all like the ones they put in their café area to dispense soft drinks-



- which the employees and customers alike hate, because they're constantly jamming and otherwise breaking. The cashiers working in the café area are often older people on restricted duty- Eleanor was down there quite a bit during disability periods where she couldn't lift heavy items- and they're now going to be lifting panels and crawling around connections when this new gizmo fails.

The other aspect of the "fail" is, again, the human element. Those coffee bars were an important part of morning employees' daily interaction with their fellow workers. On the occasions I'd stop for a cuppa and a breakfast sammich there, the queue was mostly their own employees getting ready to face the day. The mood was kind and optimistic, despite the parade of Karens they were likely about to do battle with. I even wonder a little whether that reference above to the "Starbucks union" might be prescient.

Wegmans has always been (with the exception of one group of Teamsters truck drivers) famously, and I think fairly, non-union. They've always treated their employees well enough, consistently ranking high and even sometimes first in Top Places to Work rankings, to not ever have to deal with a groundswell of unionizing efforts.  Any action they ever did take to limit it- such as banning placards, picketing and solicitation on their property- was well within the bounds of what federal and state laws have allowed them to do.  Those laws, long tilted in favor of employers by Republican and even Democratic appointees to the National Labor Relations Board, may now be shifting. Trump had left a GOP majority on the Board by not filling vacancies, and Joe has now filled enough of them to give Democratic appointees a current majority. They've already made some worker-friendly rulings, as this piece notes. What it also notes, though, is that New York's Guv, Buffalo Gal Kathy Hochul has just

signed a bill that will make it illegal for companies to punish workers who refuse to attend “captive audience” meetings, in which they are forced to listen to their employers’ political or religious views or risk losing their job. These meetings have long been a popular union-busting tactic, with employers paying tens of thousands of dollars to union-busting firms that come to workplaces to tell workers how great they have it and how the company will probably implode if they start a union and their boss has to pay them fairly. “This legislation will help to ensure that all New Yorkers receive the benefits and protections that allow them to work with dignity,” Governor Hochul said in a statement on Wednesday. “My administration is committed to making our state the most worker-friendly state in the nation, and I thank the bill sponsors for their partnership in our mission to establish the strongest and most robust protections right here in New York.”

I don't recall Eleanor ever being asked to attend such meetings, other than rah-rah sessions for United Way campaigns and that sort.  Presumably their happy, mostly-paid-insurance employees didn't need to be subjected to them. Now, though? With so many cashiers and specialty area workers and baristas being shoveled around like 2-liter pop bottles, they may not want to have a convenient water-coolerish area for their workers to congregate at. 

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One sign of Coming Attractions in this chain is happening at what the minions in the galactic outposts like Buffalo call the Wegmans "mother ship"-



When we lived in Brighton for eightish years, their Pittsford Plaza store was nothing more special than any other, but after we left, they tore it down, realigned  and expanded its footprint on a bigger piece of the property, and turned it into the flagship of the entire operation. That "Food Bar" off to the side was originally a high-end white-tablecloth restaurant called "Next Door" that still exists, though oddly across Monroe Avenue rather than "next door." (Apparently people don't want to dress up and be served adjacent to where they shop- a variant, perhaps on you don't shit where you eat.) All The Things are in there, though, from the subs to the sushi to the aisle after aisle of chef-created heat-and-eat options.  Not there, anymore, though? Human beings to take your money in the cafe area, and The Buzz has also been killed there as well.

I couldn't even get a Buzz in the parking lot the previous week.  I'd been there all day with Eleanor's plug-in hybrid, and after logging my 20th and final mile on my August gym effort, I saw they had an EV charging station there.  I'd seen one at Alberta Drive near home but there's no point using that one close to home; a more remote Buffalo store to us (also being reset, of course:P) also has one, provided by National Grid, which is free to use.  Not this one, though:



I got through the first two steps, anyway: scanning the QR code installed an app on my phone, which then required permissions to charge (heh) me 38 cents a kWh for use of their juice.  Except it wound up being a bill for 0.00, on account of that low-hanging oval part of the schlong on the bottom of the charging cable. That doesn't fit our car's cooter, which only holds the round one above it.  This one is apparently something called a CCS connector, unlike the earlier standard that all our electrics have come with, that charge slowly just through a standard 110 outlet like we do at home overnight or faster at free dedicated stations like the National Grid one at their other store. (It's also unlike the even faster-but-Muskier Tesla version that is being forced on us because of Elon's ransom demands.)

So in the end, I couldn't use the damn thing, but at least I didn't have to pay to not use it. They'll probably work on one or the other of those during the next reset:P