Nearly everything involved in this job was unnecessarily terrible. Words cannot describe how incompetent the managers at my store were. Kroger is still in the dark ages. They would constantly put themselves on the pedestal and told us to support the Kroger company (ie: don't shop elsewhere) since they were the only ones with "decent wages and benefits". All the while, I knew quite well that even walmart hired workers in at a higher wage than I made after four years as a good employee and two promotions. After 7 years, I still hadn't received a single benefit and had received raises amounting to less than the increase in federal minimum wage. I was supervising the entire sales floor for 8.90, a whopping 1.50 over minimum wage. No benefits, and union dues for a union that allowed a company to pay so little, provide no benefits and keep employees "part time" at 38 hours a week almost indefinitely. It was a union that did in fact mean a lot to full timers, but to part time employees, full time seemed to be offered after a decade of service, and from what I saw, it was given to a few employees when a manager was transferred to another store or was leaving the company. Kroger shifts managers around so fast you barely learn their name before they're gone. Truly a poorly managed company that cannot justify their own high prices and has kept innovation to a minimum, except when it involves replacing service with self checkout robotics.
