The only major chain retail store that I know of that allows their cashiers to sit is the Aldi grocery store, a German chain. Their starting pay is also $12 an hour chain-wide.
The interior of the store looks like this so they save money on the annoying shelf restocking. Products remain in their boxes until being removed by customers. No unboxing and putting stuff on shelves, and constantly having to rearrange it. Also, the boxes make inventory a breeze as a sealed box has a defined number of items in it.
Typical American grocery stores have shelves like this
Every item has to be unboxed and neatly stacked on the shelves. If they get messed up by the customers, everything has to be rearranged back to specific rigid order. When you have to verify the inventory, every item has to be removed from the shelves to be counted and put back. Aldi’s also do not have plastic bags. You can buy reusable bags or simply use the empty cardboard boxes that are available.
Last is the carts. Most grocery stores have their carts strewn across the parking lots, rolling around and hitting cars until a store employee is sent out to collect them, after being yelled at by the manager when they were told to do other tasks in the meantime. Aldi’s chains those carts together and you have to put a Quarter in to release it. When you are done, you plug the chain back in and get your Quarter back. If others are lazy, you can collect and return the loose carts and collect the Quarters.
It stops this…
Then the employees have to do this
WAIT you don’t have chained carts in the US? WHAT?
I knew about retail employees needing to stand, but I didn’t know about those poor untethered carts. Wow.
There are plastic bags, you pay ten cents each if you want them
direct action in the us: steal the fucking carts
(seriously tho shopping carts are so useful how come ppl don’t just steal them)
The shopping carts often have wheels that lock if brought outside of the parking lot.
Though shopping carts are stolen from the stores that dont have them, particularly by houseless people who need something to transport their belongings in.
Back in the 90′s there was a huge grocery store (and I mean huge, it was as big as a Wal-Mart Supercenter, but exclusively for groceries) in Baton Rouge called National, which had the “insert quarter to get a buggy” practice. It was a really good idea, and I don’t understand why other retailers didn’t use it.
I guess they did, just not in the US.
Also, allowing cashiers to sit would be a huge benefit for people like me, who can only stand for limited amounts of time. It’s frankly cruel that they don’t do this to begin with.
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