Sainsbury’s only made a piffling £720million in profits last year. That’s barely enough to give every one of its 34,000 front line workers a £22,000 pay rise.
Won’t someone think of the poor shareholders?
Incidentally that is actually a misleading headline. Argos is part of Sainsburys these days and I understand that their workers, despite working alongside the Sainsburys workers (throughout the Pandemic), are receiving less per hour. £9.50 from April!
As someone who works at Sainsburys I find it very difficult to hold my tongue when their name comes up on social media. I’m not going to slag off the company in any way as I’m grateful they have kept me employed for the past decade and in general have been a good place to work.
However,
From someone on the inside, to me pay isn’t really the issue with Sainsburys and it might well be the same as a lot of other supermarkets. To me there are a couple issues.
We’re understaffed. Heavily understaffed. The funny thing is a lot of people who have been there for a while have seen it coming ever since they decided to make team leaders redundant. And I get it that to stay competitive they have to make changes but it’s almost as if choices are being made without thinking about the consequences of how it might affect the day to day running of the stores. Cutting team leaders and giving other workers a pay rise sounds good on paper but that work has to be picked up by someone else, which I think managers are feeling the brunt of.
Another is sales targets. Yes sure Sainsburys has made 700 odd million in profits, but the circumstances of how and what we’ve had to do and work with shows the resilience of our workers. It makes me laugh that we are classed as unskilled workers, yet, we need to be able to perform manual labour, great customer services, remember where everything is in the supermarket that is constantly changing on a monthly basis (sometimes without being told), multi skilled actions from being able to swap from working on a till to being able to help a customer choose a type of wine, to rotating yogurts to organising a walk in freezer (sometimes all in the same shift).
The thing and main point I think is that supermarkets have stayed the same for the past 20ish years and have never evolved. We’re always 2 steps behind of the curve and have no identity of what makes us unique. Same designs, layouts everything.
A lot of my colleagues might not agree but give us more staff and create a dynamic fun working environment rather than focus on just giving us a pay rise and people will flood to our stores.
minimum wage jobs. “i want to use slaves, but pesky laws prevent it”.
Time and time again these corporations have been advised, urged, asked, encouraged to raise wages but they seldom do and if they do it’s a pittance immediately lost to cost of living increases or has been such a long time coming it makes no difference. Fuck the softly softly approach it aint fucking working, make them all pay it; join a union and vote for governments willing to raise the minimum wage to an amount it’s possible to live off.
If the business can’t survive with its workers being paid a liveable wage under reasonable conditions then that business is shite and shouldn’t survive.
ALL companies should do it. They won’t unless it’s legally required. P&O saw a sketchy as fuck way to attempt to get out of paying the NMW and it seems to be somewhat working for them.
what’s the point in sainsbury putting up prices to then have to pay staff more, why not lower prices to combat inflation, take less profit, get much more custom. If all companies did this it may work, every year prices go up, if your lucky wages go up a bit, all completely pointless.
or am I naive 🤣
This gets glossed over every time a big number is thrown around, but when you divide it down it’s an inevitable result of scale.
This £720m profit they made, divided up between all 1400 of its stores means that each store made a profit of about £514k in a year, or £1400 a day.
I’m not really sure what supermarket overheads are like, but they are not likely to be cheap, so that £1400 every day is probably a pretty thin margin.
As someone who used to work for Sainsbury’s, let me just tell you that this ain’t ever gonna happen.
Bit mad really. Supermarket staff get a discount card (or they did when I worked there) so staff essentially shop at the same shop they work for. Supermarkets could raise wages to keep a happy workforce and not be actually that much worse off because they would recoup a fair bit of the money they spend on wages.
Sainsbury’s is actively working on implementing walk in, walk out systems, just like Amazon Fresh (as I’m sure every supermarket probably is, but sainsbury’s I know for a fact). In time this will eliminate checkouts entirely, hugely reducing their staff requirements. Hopefully they pass some of the savings to the store staff they still need.
Eventually though they’ll probably automate the entire store, but that’s a long long way down the road
Hold on I thought bank of england said that nobody should ask for a pay rise due to inflation concerns
12 comments
Sainsbury’s only made a piffling £720million in profits last year. That’s barely enough to give every one of its 34,000 front line workers a £22,000 pay rise.
Won’t someone think of the poor shareholders?
Incidentally that is actually a misleading headline. Argos is part of Sainsburys these days and I understand that their workers, despite working alongside the Sainsburys workers (throughout the Pandemic), are receiving less per hour. £9.50 from April!
As someone who works at Sainsburys I find it very difficult to hold my tongue when their name comes up on social media. I’m not going to slag off the company in any way as I’m grateful they have kept me employed for the past decade and in general have been a good place to work.
However,
From someone on the inside, to me pay isn’t really the issue with Sainsburys and it might well be the same as a lot of other supermarkets. To me there are a couple issues.
We’re understaffed. Heavily understaffed. The funny thing is a lot of people who have been there for a while have seen it coming ever since they decided to make team leaders redundant. And I get it that to stay competitive they have to make changes but it’s almost as if choices are being made without thinking about the consequences of how it might affect the day to day running of the stores. Cutting team leaders and giving other workers a pay rise sounds good on paper but that work has to be picked up by someone else, which I think managers are feeling the brunt of.
Another is sales targets. Yes sure Sainsburys has made 700 odd million in profits, but the circumstances of how and what we’ve had to do and work with shows the resilience of our workers. It makes me laugh that we are classed as unskilled workers, yet, we need to be able to perform manual labour, great customer services, remember where everything is in the supermarket that is constantly changing on a monthly basis (sometimes without being told), multi skilled actions from being able to swap from working on a till to being able to help a customer choose a type of wine, to rotating yogurts to organising a walk in freezer (sometimes all in the same shift).
The thing and main point I think is that supermarkets have stayed the same for the past 20ish years and have never evolved. We’re always 2 steps behind of the curve and have no identity of what makes us unique. Same designs, layouts everything.
A lot of my colleagues might not agree but give us more staff and create a dynamic fun working environment rather than focus on just giving us a pay rise and people will flood to our stores.
minimum wage jobs. “i want to use slaves, but pesky laws prevent it”.
Time and time again these corporations have been advised, urged, asked, encouraged to raise wages but they seldom do and if they do it’s a pittance immediately lost to cost of living increases or has been such a long time coming it makes no difference. Fuck the softly softly approach it aint fucking working, make them all pay it; join a union and vote for governments willing to raise the minimum wage to an amount it’s possible to live off.
If the business can’t survive with its workers being paid a liveable wage under reasonable conditions then that business is shite and shouldn’t survive.
ALL companies should do it. They won’t unless it’s legally required. P&O saw a sketchy as fuck way to attempt to get out of paying the NMW and it seems to be somewhat working for them.
what’s the point in sainsbury putting up prices to then have to pay staff more, why not lower prices to combat inflation, take less profit, get much more custom. If all companies did this it may work, every year prices go up, if your lucky wages go up a bit, all completely pointless.
or am I naive 🤣
This gets glossed over every time a big number is thrown around, but when you divide it down it’s an inevitable result of scale.
This £720m profit they made, divided up between all 1400 of its stores means that each store made a profit of about £514k in a year, or £1400 a day.
I’m not really sure what supermarket overheads are like, but they are not likely to be cheap, so that £1400 every day is probably a pretty thin margin.
As someone who used to work for Sainsbury’s, let me just tell you that this ain’t ever gonna happen.
Bit mad really. Supermarket staff get a discount card (or they did when I worked there) so staff essentially shop at the same shop they work for. Supermarkets could raise wages to keep a happy workforce and not be actually that much worse off because they would recoup a fair bit of the money they spend on wages.
Sainsbury’s is actively working on implementing walk in, walk out systems, just like Amazon Fresh (as I’m sure every supermarket probably is, but sainsbury’s I know for a fact). In time this will eliminate checkouts entirely, hugely reducing their staff requirements. Hopefully they pass some of the savings to the store staff they still need.
Eventually though they’ll probably automate the entire store, but that’s a long long way down the road
Hold on I thought bank of england said that nobody should ask for a pay rise due to inflation concerns