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    Why Coupons Are Harder to Find Than Ever

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    Jill Cataldo is a master of coupons.She began cutting them out to save a dollar here and 50 cents there in the Great Recession, when she had two children in diapers and money was tight. Starting with a training session at the library in her Chicago suburb, she shared what she learned with others, and now has a syndicated column and a website where she writes about coupon deals and other ways to spend less.The pandemic, however, upended Ms. Cataldo’s world. Paper coupon inserts in the Sunday newspaper seemed flimsier. Even increasingly popular digital coupons were hard to come by.“There are brands that I’ve followed for over a decade that are just not issuing a lot of coupons right now,” Ms. Cataldo said. “It’s kind of frustrating, because it’s something we came to count on for a long time.”Now the steepest rise in the cost of living in four decades is making bargains even more coveted. “With inflation, this is what should go up tremendously as a tool to help customers,” said Sanjay Dhar, a marketing professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.But that tool is getting ever harder to come by. In 2021, Kantar Media estimates, 168 billion circulated, across both print and digital formats. That was down from about 294 billion in 2015.The shrinking coupon market includes not just the number of coupons distributed but also the share turned in at checkout. Redemption rates declined to 0.5 percent of all print and digital coupons in 2020 from about 3.5 percent in the early 1980s, according to a paper by economists at Harvard University, Georgetown University and Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf.The economists see a larger phenomenon: Increasingly time-strapped consumers don’t want to deal with even small hassles to save a few dollars on toothpaste.“The declining use of coupons and the declining redemption rates indicate a fundamental shift in consumer shopping behavior,” the authors wrote. They added, “We view this as additional evidence that declining price sensitivity reflects a longer-run secular trend.”At the same time, mobile phones have made all kinds of other incentives possible, including cash-back rewards, points that can be redeemed for store credit and contest prizes.“Practitioners often want to get discounts to consumers in a seamless manner,” said Eric Anderson, a professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. “It’s not clear that traditional coupons do this.”That explanation offers little consolation to people who’ve come to depend on coupons to keep their grocery costs down, like Ms. Cataldo’s readers.“I don’t think from the consumer perspective that they’re like, ‘Oh, we don’t care.’ We do care,” Ms. Cataldo said. “It’s just that we have fewer tools right now to play the game.”A Venerable IncentiveThe couponing industry as we know it started in the early 1970s when a Michigan printing company, Valassis Communications, began distributing booklets of discounts on particular products that could be redeemed at any store.Valassis would total up the slips of paper, and the manufacturer reimbursed the retailer for the discount. Soon, grocers saw the value of coupons in driving traffic to their own stores, and began newspaper inserts of their own. The number of print coupons distributed peaked in 1999 at 340 billion, as newspaper circulation also crested, according to Inmar Intelligence, the other large coupon settlement company, alongside Valassis.But a slide in redemption rates had already begun. It’s difficult to pin down why, but people close to the industry believe it’s related to the rise of the two-income household, as more women entered the work force. Ms. Cataldo remembers growing up in the 1980s, when, she said, her mother used coupons enthusiastically.“Back then it was a little bit of a different culture because we had so many stay-at-home parents who had time to do this,” she said. “It’s time that pays well, but you have to have that time, and if you are working eight hours a day, you probably don’t.”Coupon use enjoyed a resurgence during the recession of 2007-9, which left millions of people out of work much longer and with much less financial assistance than they would receive during the pandemic recession a decade later. “Couponing” became a widely used verb courtesy of the reality show “Extreme Couponing,” which brought people into the practice with promises of stackable discounts that could bring the cost of a shopping cart’s worth of purchases close to zero.But what delighted serious couponers dismayed manufacturers, which are focused on getting people to buy things they wouldn’t otherwise, not giving discounts to people who’d buy the product anyway. That’s why brands started pulling back on promotions and limiting the number of coupons that could be used in a given trip.At the same time, grocers and big-box stores were coming under pressure from e-commerce platforms like Amazon. They responded by beefing up their store brand offerings as well as asking companies like Procter & Gamble to lower prices on name-brand items.“They want to get the best deals so they are competitive at the shelf,” said Aimee Englert, who directs client strategy for consumer packaged goods companies at Valassis, now part of a company called Vericast. “What that ends up doing is constricting the budgets that manufacturers have to pull levers, like to provide a coupon.”As their wiggle room on discounts shrank, brands wanted to make sure they were squeezing as many extra purchases as possible out of their promotion dollars. The average value of coupons shrank, as did the time over which they could be used. And the rise of smartphones provided an opportunity that seemed far superior to blanketing neighborhoods with newsprint: Offers could be personalized and aimed at specific demographic profiles. Coupons could be linked to a supermarket loyalty card, which gave retailers data on whether the coupons prompted a shopper to switch brands.Greg Parks is another coupon blogger who got started in the wake of the Great Recession, looking to stretch his income to feed three children. Although he began with newspaper clippings all over his floor, he now does instructional videos exclusively using digital coupons, which can be used nationwide rather than in a single distribution area.Greg Parks is on the high end of coupon user sophistication.Luke Sharrett for The New York TimesMr. Parks at a CVS store where he often films videos on couponing.Luke Sharrett for The New York Times“I like to say that I’m a lazy couponer now,” Mr. Parks said. Plus, he has noticed that digital coupons cut down on dirty looks from cashiers when they have to process a stack of paper.“Some of them act like we’re stealing, or taking something from them,” Mr. Parks said. “They don’t want to deal with all those paper coupons, they’re such a headache. With digital, everything just automatically comes off.” (While only 5 percent of coupons distributed are digital, they represent about a third of all coupons redeemed, according to Inmar.)Mr. Parks, however, is on the high end of coupon user sophistication. Many people who depended most on print coupons — older shoppers on fixed incomes — may not have the computer or smartphone literacy to adopt the digital version. Dr. Dhar, the University of Chicago professor, said the switch to digital hit the wrong demographic.“That’s not the coupon-using population — they don’t use digital media very much,” said Dr. Dhar, who remembers surviving on coupons 30 years ago as a graduate student in Los Angeles. “A lot of this isn’t driven by the response to coupons. It’s driven by coupons not reaching the right people.”To be sure, manufacturers have not abandoned the pure reach of physical coupons. The free-standing insert still works as an advertising vehicle: In fact, the ideal outcome for a manufacturer is that a shopper sees a coupon and then goes to the store to buy the item without redeeming it.A Sudden Shake-UpIf coupons had been slowly dying for years, the pandemic delivered a sharp blow.Seemingly overnight, roiling supply chains and the lurch from office to home left consumers desperate to buy anything they could get their hands on; brand preferences went out the window. When inflation started to spike last year, not only did retailers have trouble keeping shelves stocked, they weren’t even sure they could maintain stable prices until the coupons expired.“The last thing those manufacturers want to do is put more incentives on those because it’s going to spike demand up even more,” said Spencer Baird, Inmar’s interim chief executive. “This is what we very consistently hear: ‘We’ve got a budget, we’re ready to go, but until we get my fill rate where it needs to be, I don’t want to mess up my supply chain.’”Use of even digital coupons sank in 2020, for the first time, before rebounding. While most of those are tethered to a specific retailer, the coupon industry is working on a universal standard that will allow shoppers to redeem digital coupons at any retailer that signs up.But there’s no guarantee that retailers will stick with coupons, when other incentives are gaining in popularity.Lisa Thompson works for Quotient, a company formerly known as Coupons.com, which started in 1998 as a website where you could print coupons rather than clipping them. The company is phasing out printable coupons, and the Coupons.com app already mostly offers cash-back promotions instead.“Honestly, it’s a dying form of savings, and we know that,” Ms. Thompson said. “A lot of my work has been working with the marketing team to make ‘coupon’ sound sexy.”Plenty of dedicated couponers still prefer the old-fashioned way.“I agree, it’s going down, and at some point it will die,” Ms. Cataldo said. “I’m not looking forward to that. But it’s not happening nearly as quickly as they thought it would.” More

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    Trader Joe’s Workers File to Hold Company’s First Union Election

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    The workers, at a store in western Massachusetts, cited health and safety concerns and cuts to benefits at the grocery chain.In a sign that service industry workers continue to have a strong interest in unionizing after successful votes at Starbucks, REI and Amazon, employees at a Trader Joe’s in western Massachusetts have filed for a union election. If they win, they will create the only union at Trader Joe’s, which has more than 500 locations and 50,000 employees nationwide.The filing with the National Labor Relations Board late Tuesday seeks an election involving about 85 employees who would form an independent union, Trader Joe’s United, rather than affiliate with an established labor organization. That echoes the independent union created by Amazon workers on Staten Island and the worker-led organizing at Starbucks.“Over the past however many years, changes have been happening without our consent,” said Maeg Yosef, an 18-year employee of the store who is a leader of the union campaign. “We wanted to be in charge of the whole process, to be our own union. So we decided to go independent.”Ms. Yosef said the union had support from over 50 percent of workers at the store, known as crew members.“We have always said we welcome a fair vote and are prepared to hold a vote if more than 30 percent of the crew wants one,” said a company spokeswoman, Nakia Rohde, alluding to the N.L.R.B. threshold for an election. “We are not interested in delaying the process in any way.”The company shared a similar statement with workers after they announced their intention to unionize in mid-May.In explaining their decision, Ms. Yosef and four colleagues, all of whom have been with the company for at least eight years, cited changes that had made their benefits less generous over time, as well as health and safety concerns, many of which were magnified during the pandemic.“This is probably where we get to all of these things coming together,” said Tony Falco, another worker involved in the union campaign, alluding to Covid-19.Mr. Falco said the store, in Hadley, took several reassuring steps during the first 12 to 15 months of the pandemic. Management enforced masking requirements and restrictions on the number of customers who could be in the store at once. It allowed workers to take leaves of absence while continuing to receive health insurance and gave workers additional “thank you” pay as high as $4 per hour.But Mr. Falco and others said the company was too quick to roll back many of these measures — including additional pay — as vaccines became widely available last year, and noted that the store had suffered Covid outbreaks in the past several weeks after masking became laxer. The store followed the policy of the local health board, which altered its mask mandate at various points, lifting it most recently in March.Some employees were also upset that the company did not inform them that the state had passed a law requiring employers to provide up to five paid days off for workers who missed work because of Covid.“It was in effect seven months, and they never announced it,” Ms. Yosef said. “I figured that out at the end of December, early January.”Ms. Rohde, the spokeswoman, said this account was incorrect, but four other employees who support the union also said the company had not told them of the policy.A Trader Joe’s store in New York. Early in the pandemic, the chief executive wrote that union advocates “clearly believe that now is a moment when they can create some sort of wedge in our company.”Benjamin Norman for The New York TimesTrader Joe’s has generally resisted unionization over the years, including earlier in the pandemic. In March 2020, the chief executive, Dan Bane, sent employees a letter referring to “the current barrage of union activity that has been directed at Trader Joe’s” and complaining that union advocates “clearly believe that now is a moment when they can create some sort of wedge in our company through which they can drive discontent.”The company’s response to the current campaign appears somewhat less hostile, though union organizers have recently filed charges of unfair labor practices, such as asking employees to remove pro-union pins.Several employees said a broader issue was underlying their frustrations: what they saw as the company’s evolution from a niche outlet known for pampering customers and treating employees generously to an industrial-scale chain that is more focused on the bottom line.The company’s employee handbook urges workers to provide a “Wow customer experience,” which it defines as “the feelings a customer gets about our delight that they are shopping with us.” But longtime employees say the company, which is privately held, has gradually become stingier with workers.For years, the company offered health care widely to part-timers. In the early 2010s, the company raised the average weekly hours that employees needed to qualify for full health coverage to 30 from roughly 20, informing those who no longer qualified that they could receive coverage under the federal Affordable Care Act instead. (The company dropped the threshold to 28 hours more recently.)“It was done under the guise of ‘You can get these plans, they’re the same plans,’ but they were not the same plans,” said Sarah Yosef, the Hadley store’s manager at the time, who later stepped back from the role and is now a frontline worker there.“I had to sit there individually with crew members saying you’re going to be losing health insurance,” added Ms. Yosef, who is married to Maeg Yosef.Retirement benefits have followed a similar trajectory: Around the same time, Trader Joe’s lowered its retirement contribution to 10 percent of an employee’s earnings from about 15 percent, for employees 30 and older. Beginning with last year’s benefit, the company lowered the percentage again for many workers, who saw the contribution fall to 5 percent. The company is no longer specifying any set amount.Tony Falco and Sarah Yosef at the Trader Joe’s store in Hadley. She said, “I had to sit there individually with crew members saying you’re going to be losing health insurance.”Holly Lynton for The New York TimesMs. Rohde, the spokeswoman, said the change was partly a response to indications from many workers that they would prefer a bonus to a retirement contribution.Workers said the company’s determination to provide an intimate shopping experience had often come at their expense amid a rapid increase in business over the past decade, and then again with the resurgence of business as pandemic restrictions lifted.For example, Trader Joe’s doesn’t have conveyor belts at checkout lines and instructs cashiers to reach into customers’ carts or baskets to unload items. This can appear to personalize the service but takes a physical toll on workers, who typically bend over hundreds of times during a shift.(The company asks workers to perform different tasks throughout the day so they are not constantly ringing up customers.)Maeg Yosef and her co-workers began discussing the union campaign over the winter, angry over the store’s failure to publicize the state-mandated paid leave benefit and the change in retirement benefits, and some have drawn inspiration from the successful union elections at Starbucks, Amazon and REI.Their union campaign may also benefit from the same leverage that workers at those companies enjoyed as a result of the relatively tight job market.“People just keep leaving — I know they want to hire people now,” Maeg Yosef said. “It’s hard to keep people around.” More

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    Business Booms at Kroger-Owned Grocery Stores, but Workers Are Left Behind

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    A number of the stores’ nearly 500,000 employees have reported being homeless, receiving government food stamps or relying on food banks.When Enrique Romero Jr. finishes his shift fulfilling online orders at a Fred Meyer grocery store in Bellingham, Wash., he often walks to a nearby plasma donation center. There, he has his blood drained, and a hydrating solution is pumped into his veins, a process that leaves him tired and cold.Mr. Romero, 30, said selling his plasma made him feel “like cattle.” But the income he earns from it — roughly $500 a month — is more reliable than his wages at Fred Meyer, which is owned by the grocery giant Kroger. His part-time hours often fluctuate, and he struggles to find enough money to cover his rent, his groceries and the regular repairs required to keep his 2007 Chevy Aveo on the road.“The economy we have is grueling,” he said.Business has boomed during the pandemic for Kroger, the biggest supermarket chain in the United States and the fourth-largest employer in the Fortune 500. It owns more than 2,700 locations, and its brands include Harris Teeter, Fred Meyer, Ralphs, Smith’s, Pick ’n Save and even Murray’s Cheese in New York City. The company, which is based in Cincinnati, said in December that it was expecting sales growth of at least 13.7 percent over two years. The company’s stock has risen about 36 percent over the past year.But that success has not trickled down to its vast work force of nearly 500,000 employees, a number of whom have reported being homeless, receiving government food stamps or relying on food banks to feed their families. A brief strike in Colorado last month by workers, represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, at dozens of Kroger-owned King Soopers locations brought renewed scrutiny to the issues of pay and working conditions for grocery workers, who have been on the front lines throughout the pandemic.Because his part-time hours are not guaranteed, Mr. Romero said he struggled to pay rent.Jovelle Tamayo for The New York TimesThe Economic Roundtable, a nonprofit research group that surveyed more than 10,000 Kroger workers in Washington, Colorado and Southern California about their working conditions for a report commissioned by four units of the food workers union, found that about 75 percent of Kroger workers said they were food insecure, meaning they lacked consistent access to enough food for an active, healthy life. About 14 percent said they were homeless or had been homeless in the previous year, and 63 percent said they did not earn enough money to pay for basic expenses every month.“There is a race to the bottom that’s been going on for a while with Walmart and other large retail stores, and also restaurants, and to reverse that trend is not easy,” said Daniel Flaming, president of the Economic Roundtable.Kroger was the sole employer for 86 percent of those surveyed, partly because more than half had schedules that changed at least every week, making it difficult to commit to another employer. About two-thirds said they were part-time workers, even though they wanted more hours. Keeping workers part time is a strategy employers use to encourage turnover and reduce costs.Kristal Howard, a spokeswoman for Kroger, said the report was “one-dimensional and does not tell the complete story.”“Kroger has provided an incredible number of people with their first job, second chances and lifelong careers, and we’re proud to play this role in our communities,” she said. Ms. Howard added that the company had raised its national average hourly rate of pay to $16.68 from $13.66 in 2017, a 22 percent increase, and that its benefits package included health care, retirement savings, tuition assistance and on-demand access to mental health assistance.Some of the workers said that even though other retailers and fast food restaurants had started offering higher starting wages than Kroger, the company’s health insurance and retirement benefits, which the union negotiated, were more generous than what other employers offered. Other part-time Kroger workers say they stay on the job because they don’t want to lose their seniority and the chance for a full-time role.Despite some of the wage increases and benefits, working at a grocery store no longer provides the stable income and middle-class lifestyle that it did 30 years ago, workers say. The Economic Roundtable report studied contracts dating back to 1990 and said the most experienced clerks — known as journeymen — in Southern California made roughly $28 per hour in today’s dollars while working full-time schedules. Wages for top-paid clerks today are 22 percent lower, and those workers are far more likely to be working part-time hours.Ashley Manning, a 32-year-old floral manager at a Ralphs in San Pedro, Calif., works full time but is regularly strapped for cash. Ms. Manning, the single mother of a 12-year-old, said she had worked at Ralphs for nine years and earned $18.25 an hour. It took her four years to reach full-time status, which guarantees 40 hours per week and comes with an annual bonus ranging from $500 to $3,000.It took Ashley Manning four years to become a full-time worker at Ralphs, and even now she struggles to pay for basic living expenses. Philip Cheung for The New York TimesShe said she struggled to pay rent and moved into her grandmother’s house after being evicted last spring. She has needed help from her family to help pay for a car. She has tried to make extra money through a party planning and decorating business, but demand for those services dried up in the pandemic.“I would think, ‘I have a good job and make decent money,’ and I don’t,” Ms. Manning said. “I’m still on the poverty level.”During the pandemic, grocery store workers have been recognized as essential to keeping society going, but they have also faced health risks. At least 50,600 grocery workers around the country have been infected with or exposed to the coronavirus, and at least 213 have died from the virus, according to the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union.Ms. Manning was hospitalized for Covid-19 last summer. She blames herself for her grandmother’s subsequent death from the virus in August.“She was one of the people that would help me the most, if I was short on a bill or needed help, to pick my daughter up from school,” she said. But when her grandmother was in critical condition, Ms. Manning said, she was told that she couldn’t take more time off after being sick with Covid-19.The illness and the company’s response were jarring, given that corporate workers had the flexibility to work from home, she said, adding that she ultimately took disability leave for a stretch.Kroger has one of the country’s starkest gaps between a chief executive’s compensation and that of the median employee. Rodney McMullen, Kroger’s chief executive since 2014, earned $22.4 million in 2020, while the median employee earned $24,617 — a ratio of 909 to 1. The average C.E.O.-to-worker pay ratio in the S&P 500 is 299 to 1, with grocery chains like Costco (193 to 1) and Publix (153 to 1) lower than that.These disparities have fomented outrage among employees, who are also dealing with issues like fights over masks and theft and violence in stores.King Soopers grocery store workers in Denver went on a strike last month over wages and working conditions.Michael Ciaglo/Getty ImagesIn Colorado, more than 8,000 workers at the Kroger-owned King Soopers chain walked off the job last month when union contract negotiations broke down over wages, employee safety issues and scheduling.Around the time of the strike, a nonprofit publication, A More Perfect Union, published an internal Kroger document in which the company acknowledged that one in five of its employees received government assistance in 2017. The document also included research showing that employee turnover was lower in places where it raised wages.In response, Kroger said it had developed an improvement plan after the analysis, which included the wage increase and steps to improve tuition assistance and retirement benefits. The company commissioned its own study that stated last month that Kroger’s average pay and benefits in Colorado and three other Western states were higher than those of other retailers.After more than a week of picketing, the union — Local 7 of the U.F.C.W. — won large concessions, including wage increases of more than $5A an hour for some workers and a plan to move at least 500 part-time workers into full-time roles within a few months.As successful as the strike was for workers in Colorado, Larry Cohen, former president of the Communications Workers of America, said the contracts covered only employees at specific Kroger chains, making it difficult for unions to gain broader leverage.“When all contracts are local, how do you deal with a giant national company?” Mr. Cohen said. “Not very well.”Kroger has tightly controlled labor expenses during the pandemic. The company offered hero pay and thank-you bonuses to workers in the early months of the pandemic but ended those well before vaccinations were available. (Grocery workers were also not given priority for vaccinations in many states.) While some municipalities like Los Angeles and Seattle sought to institute hazard pay mandates, Kroger and grocery lobbying associations fought such efforts.Workers protested outside a Kroger-owned Food 4 Less store in California that was closed after the local government mandated hazard pay for grocery employees.Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesKroger’s resistance to wage increases peaked last year when the Los Angeles City Council approved a hazard pay mandate requiring large grocers and pharmacies to pay employees an additional $5 an hour for four months. In response, Kroger said it would close three stores in the area in May — two Ralphs locations and a Food 4 Less — blaming increased costs. The company pointed to a release at the time that said the stores were underperforming. But City Council members were left with the sense that the closures were retaliatory.Paul Koretz, a member of the Council, said he had dealt with backlash from some constituents about the impending closing of a Ralphs in his district, a go-to for the local Orthodox Jewish community. He said Ralphs representatives had warned him that they would close the store if the mandate was instituted.“I’m not sure I really believed that Ralphs would do it,” he said. “It just seemed so counterintuitive that you would mess with your very loyal customers.”Shoppers in his district have adapted since the store closed. But he said he believed that the impact of the closings on employees and Council members’ fear of angering constituents probably had a chilling effect on other municipalities that were considering similar measures. The mandated hazard pay gave many Kroger workers a glimpse of how their day-to-day lives could improve with more money. Areli Rivas, a part-time cashier at a Ralphs in Van Nuys, Calif., who is married to a full-time worker at the store, said the extra pay gave her “peace of mind.”“The economy we have is grueling,” said Mr. Romero, outside the Fred Meyer store where he works.Jovelle Tamayo for The New York TimesThe mother of two said it was hard to justify purchases like a new backpack for her son, even though his current one is fraying. More pay would also allow her to get her daughter a new glasses prescription.Some workers like Ms. Manning said that they couldn’t afford to shop at their store and that the employee discount of 10 percent applied only to Kroger-branded goods and did not always include produce and other essentials.Kroger said that the discount covered 19,000 private-label food products and that it did include dairy, proteins and produce.Pio Figueroa, 25, who has been working at a Ralphs in Laguna Beach, Calif., for about six years, said he was able to manage his monthly expenses now that he was among the highest earners in his store, making about $22.50 an hour. But at one point, he was making $15 or $16 per hour at the chain and struggled mightily.“There were times I could only budget to spend $100 on food and everything a week,” he said. “So there were times I would go without a meal or definitely think, ‘What am I going to eat tonight?’” More

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    Despite Labor Shortages, Workers See Few Gains in Economic Security

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    Over the past two months, Brenda Garcia, who works at a Chipotle in Queens, has struggled to land more than 20 hours per week, making it difficult to keep up with her expenses. When she confronts her manager, he vows to try to find her more work, but the problem invariably persists. In one recent week, the store scheduled her for a single 6.25-hour shift.“It’s not enough for me — they’re not giving me a stable job,” said Ms. Garcia, whose work involves chopping vegetables and other tasks before burritos are assembled. “They’re not giving me the hours and the days I’m supposed to be getting.”Ms. Garcia’s limited hours are not unusual at Chipotle, which has a largely part-time work force. A weekly schedule at her store from early January showed at least a dozen workers with fewer than 20 hours and several with fewer than 15.With workers nationwide quitting at high rates and companies complaining that they can’t fill jobs, employers might be expected to rethink their dependence on part-time scheduling. While some employees prefer the flexibility, many say it leaves them with too few hours, too little income or erratic hours.But that rethinking does not appear to have happened. Government data show that in retail businesses, the portion of workers on part-time schedules last year stood about where it was just before the pandemic, and that it increased somewhat in hospitality industries like restaurants and hotels.In a twice-yearly survey by Daniel Schneider, a Harvard sociologist, and Kristen Harknett, a sociologist at the University of California, San Francisco, one-quarter of workers at large retailers and restaurant chains said they were scheduled 35 hours a week or less and wanted more hours. That was down from about one-third in 2019, but the change was driven by a decline in the number of workers wanting more hours, most likely because of pandemic health risks and work-life conflicts, not because employers were providing more hours.Even as employers complain of having to scramble to fill vacancies, there is little evidence that service workers are winning any meaningful, long-term gains. While businesses have raised wages, those increases can be easily eroded by inflation, if they haven’t been already. The overall national rate of membership in unions — which can obtain wage increases for workers even absent labor shortages — matched its lowest level on record last year.Limited work hours are not unusual at Chipotle, which has a largely part-time work force.Brandon Bell/Getty ImagesAnd the unpredictable schedules that arise when employers constantly adjust staffing in response to customer demand, something that is common among part-timers, are roughly as prevalent as before the pandemic. The survey by Dr. Schneider and Dr. Harknett found that about two-thirds of workers continue to receive less than two weeks’ notice of their schedules.“Companies are doing all they can not to bake in any gains that are difficult to claw back,” Dr. Schneider said. “Workers’ labor market power is so far not yielding durable dividends.”The changes that make work lower paying, less stable and generally more precarious date back to the 1960s and ’70s, when the labor market evolved in two key ways. First, companies began pushing more work outside the firm — relying increasingly on contractors, temps and franchisees, a practice known as “fissuring.”Second, many businesses that continued to employ workers directly began hiring them to part-time positions, rather than full-time roles, particularly in the retail and hospitality industries.According to the scholars Chris Tilly of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Françoise Carré of the University of Massachusetts Boston, the initial impetus for the shift to part-time work was the mass entry of women into the work force, including many who preferred part-time positions so they could be home when children returned from school.Before long, however, employers saw an advantage in hiring part-timers and deliberately added more. “A light bulb went on one day,” Dr. Tilly said. “‘If we’re expanding part-time schedules, we don’t have to offer benefits, we can offer a lower wage rate.’”By the late 1980s, employers had begun using scheduling software to forecast customer demand and staffed accordingly. Having a large portion of part-time workers, who could be given more hours when stores got busy and fewer hours when business slowed, helped enable this practice, known as just-in-time scheduling.But the arrangement subjected workers to fluctuating schedules and unreliable hours, disrupting their personal lives, their sleep, even their children’s brain development.Nonetheless, the model continued to spread, and the shift to a heavily part-time work force was largely complete across retail by the mid-1990s.A recent study commissioned by Kroger found that about 70 percent of the supermarket company’s nearly 85,000 store employees in California, Colorado, Oregon and Washington State were part time. A survey of more than 10,000 Kroger workers on behalf of four union locals by the Economic Roundtable, a nonprofit research group, found widespread evidence of just-in-time scheduling, with more than half of workers reporting that their schedules changed at least weekly.Kroger, one of the nation’s largest employers, said in a statement that many of its employees sought part-time jobs for their flexibility and for health care benefits that competitors didn’t offer, as well as for opportunities for upward mobility. “We provide hundreds of thousands of people with first jobs (think baggers, cashiers, stockers, etc.), second chances, retirement employment, college gigs,” the statement said.The company added that locals of the United Food and Commercial Workers union had negotiated and agreed to the relevant provisions of its labor contracts for decades.A spokeswoman for Chipotle, where Service Employees International Union Local 32BJ is helping workers organize, likewise said that managers and employees mutually agreed on hours and that the company enabled employees to pick up additional shifts at other New York City stores when they were available.But the practices remain contentious. In mid-January, more than 8,000 Denver-area workers at King Soopers, a supermarket chain owned by Kroger, went on strike, citing the lack of full-time employment as a key issue.Workers picketing during a strike at King Soopers in Denver. A key issue was the lack of full-time employment.Michael Ciaglo/Getty ImagesRenae Vigil, who works in the meat department at a King Soopers in Denver and serves as a union steward, said many of her colleagues would like to work full time so that “they wouldn’t be worried about how to pay bills, how to get this or that paid, but at King’s, it’s like winning a lotto.”The frustrations suggest a relatively straightforward way for employers to reduce labor shortages: Offer more full-time positions.But Kim Cordova, president of U.F.C.W. Local 7, which represents the King Soopers workers, said employers like Kroger were rarely moved by this logic. “They’ve told us they think the market is going to correct itself, this is temporary and they don’t want to lock themselves into changing permanently,” she said. The food workers union estimated that King Soopers had 2,400 unfilled Denver-area jobs early this year.While the strike ended last month, after the company committed to raise pay, contribute more to health benefits and add at least 500 full-time positions, a majority of King Soopers workers are likely to remain on part-time schedules. Most retail and restaurant workers, who lack a union to organize a strike and provide strike pay, may have a harder time winning such changes.Susan Lambert, a social work scholar at the University of Chicago who studies employers’ scheduling practices, said she and a colleague had recently interviewed store managers in Seattle and Chicago and found that some had, in fact, sought to provide more consistent schedules during the pandemic.The change was driven by a combination of data, showing that more humane scheduling practices need not undermine profitability, and a desire by some employers to retain workers amid labor shortages, Dr. Lambert said. But she conceded that the changes were mostly at the margins.“There are not major investments in changing major systems,” she said.Data collected by the Labor Department indicate that the amount of part-time work in the retail and hospitality industries remains far above where it stood in the early 1970s. The same appears to be true of companies’ reliance on contractors and temps, which scholars say has helped weaken wage growth over the past several decades.Employers who outsource work to contractors or temps do not appear to have rethought those arrangements as a result of the pandemic, said Susan Houseman, a labor economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. She pointed to the temporary help industry’s return to close to its prepandemic share of employment and an increase in self-employment during the past two years.Gig companies whose apps allow people to find work as independent contractors say they have had an increase in workers over the last year or two. According to Uber, the number of drivers and couriers working through its service in a given month grew roughly 70 percent from January to October last year, or nearly 640,000.DoorDash said the number of people working through its delivery app as of the fall quarter had more than doubled during the pandemic, to over three million, and Instacart said the number of full-service shoppers on its service — those who shop for and deliver groceries — had increased by more than two and a half times, to over 500,000.The companies say that workers who use their apps value the flexibility of gig work, and that it helps sustain people during fallow periods or in places where work can be hard to find, such as rural communities. But gig jobs typically lack a variety of benefits and protections, like a minimum wage, and can reinforce economic insecurity.To Dr. Schneider, the Harvard sociologist, the insecurity that service workers continue to face during the pandemic, supposedly a period of unusual leverage, shows how resistant their industries are to changing.“I think it exposes something about how attached employers are to this just-in-time model,” he said. “This is something that goes to the heart of their business models.” More

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    For Retail Workers, Omicron Disruptions Aren’t Just About Health

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    Stores are shortening hours, fitting rooms are being closed and some employees can’t go on break. “Morale could not be lower,” one retail worker said.Long checkout lines. Closed fitting rooms. Empty shelves. Shortened store hours.Plus the dread of contracting the coronavirus and yet another season of skirmishes with customers who refuse to wear masks.A weary retail work force is experiencing the fallout from the latest wave of the pandemic, with a rapidly spreading variant cutting into staffing.While data shows that people infected with the Omicron variant are far less likely to be hospitalized than those with the Delta variant, especially if they are vaccinated, many store workers are dealing with a new jump in illness and exposures, grappling with shifting guidelines around isolation and juggling child care. At the same time, retailers are generally not extending hazard pay as they did earlier in the pandemic and have been loath to adopt vaccine or testing mandates.“We had gotten to a point here where we were comfortable, it wasn’t too bad, and then all of a sudden this new variant came and everybody got sick,” said Artavia Milliam, who works at H&M in Hudson Yards in Manhattan, which is popular with tourists. “It’s been overwhelming, just having to deal with not having enough staff and then twice as many people in the store.”Ms. Milliam, a member of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, is vaccinated but contracted the virus during the holidays, experiencing mild symptoms. She said that fewer employees were working registers and organizing clothing and that her store had been closing the fitting rooms in the mornings because nobody was available to monitor them.Macy’s said last week that it would shorten store hours nationally on Mondays through Thursdays for the rest of the month. At least 20 Apple Stores have had to close in recent weeks because so many employees had contracted Covid-19 or been exposed to someone who had, and others have curtailed hours or limited in-store access.At a Macy’s in Lynnwood, Wash., Liisa Luick, a longtime sales associate in the men’s department, said, “Every day, we have call-outs, and we have a lot of them.” She said the store had already reduced staff to cut costs in 2020. Now, she is often unable to take breaks and has fielded complaints from customers about a lack of sales help and unstaffed registers.“Morale could not be lower,” said Ms. Luick, who is a steward for the local unit of the United Food and Commercial Workers union. Even though Washington has a mask mandate for indoor public spaces, “we get a lot of pushback, so morale is even lower because there’s so many people who, there’s no easy way to say this, just don’t believe in masking,” she added.Store workers are navigating the changing nature of the virus and trying their best to gauge new risks. Many say that with vaccinations and boosters, they are less fearful for their lives than they were in 2020 — the United Food and Commercial Workers union has tracked more than 200 retail worker deaths since the start of the pandemic — but they remain nervous about catching and spreading the virus.At a Stop & Shop in Oyster Bay, N.Y., Wally Waugh, a front-end manager, said that checkout lines were growing longer and that grocery shelves were not being restocked in a timely manner because so many people were calling in sick with their own positive tests or those of family members.That has forced remaining employees to work more hours. But even with overtime pay, many of his colleagues are not eager to stay in the store longer than they must. Mr. Waugh has started taking off his work clothes in his garage and immediately putting them in the laundry before entering his house — a routine he hadn’t followed since the earliest days of the pandemic.Wally Waugh in his garage, where he changes out of the clothes he wears to work at a Stop & Shop to avoid possibly spreading the coronavirus.Sasha Maslov for The New York Times“People are not nervous like when Covid first started,” said Mr. Waugh, who is a steward for the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. “But we are gravely concerned.”At a QFC grocery store in Seattle, Sam Dancy, a front-end supervisor, said many colleagues were calling out sick. The store, part of a chain owned by Kroger, has closed early several times, and customers are helping to bag their own groceries. There are long lines, and some of the self-checkout lanes are closed because employees aren’t available to oversee them.“Some people are so tired of what’s going on — you have some that are exposed and some that are using it as an excuse to not have to work to be around these circumstances,” said Mr. Dancy, a member of the local food and commercial workers union, who has worked at the chain for 30 years. “I have anxiety till I get home, thinking, ‘Do I have this or not?’ It’s a mental thing that I think a lot of us are enduring.”Shifting guidelines around isolation are also causing confusion at many stores. While H&M has instructed employees like Ms. Milliam to isolate for 14 days after testing positive for Covid-19, Macy’s said in a memo to employees last week that it would adopt new guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that recommended shortening isolation for infected people to five days from 10 if they are asymptomatic or their symptoms are resolving.But even if retailers shorten isolation periods, schools and day-care facilities may have longer quarantine periods for exposed families, putting working parents in a bind.Ms. Luick of Macy’s said she felt the guidance was aimed at “constantly trying to get people to work,” and did not make her feel safer.Even as Omicron spreads faster than other variants, employers have not shown a willingness to reinstitute previous precautions or increased pay, said Kevin Schneider, secretary-treasurer of a unit of the United Food and Commercial Workers in the Denver area.Like many retailers, Kroger hasn’t provided hazard pay nationally since the early stages of the pandemic, though the union is negotiating for it to be reinstated. The chain has also discontinued measures like controlling how many customers are allowed in stores at a time. The union has been asking for armed guards at all of its stores in the Denver area as incidents of violence increase.“The company says they are providing a safe environment for workers to do their jobs in,” Mr. Schneider said. “We don’t believe that.”In a statement, a Kroger spokeswoman said, “We have been navigating the Covid-19 pandemic for nearly two years, and, in line with our values, the safety of our associates and customers has remained our top priority.”The company added that frontline employees had each received as much $1,760 in additional pay to “reward and recognize them for their efforts during the pandemic.”Some workers have reached another breaking point. In Jacksonville, Fla., one Apple Store employee organized a brief walkout on Christmas Eve to protest working conditions after he witnessed a customer spitting on his colleague. Dozens of people at other stores also participated.“It was my final straw,” said Daryl Sherman II, who organized the walkout. “Something had to be done.”In some cases, municipalities have stepped in to obtain hazard pay for workers. In Seattle, Kroger has been required to pay grocery store employees like Mr. Dancy an extra $4 an hour based on local legislation.“Some people are so tired of what’s going on,” said Sam Dancy, a front-end supervisor at QFC, a grocery store chain.Grant Hindsley for The New York TimesMore broadly, the staffing shortages have put a new spotlight on a potential vaccine-or-testing mandate from the Biden administration, which major retailers have been resisting. The fear of losing workers appears to be looming large, especially now.While the retail industry initially cited the holiday season rush for its resistance to such rules, it has more recently pointed to the burden of testing unvaccinated workers. After oral arguments in the case on Friday, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority expressed skepticism about whether the Biden administration had legal authority to mandate that large employers require workers to be vaccinated.The National Retail Federation, a major industry lobbying group, said in a statement last week that it “continues to believe that OSHA exceeded its authority in promulgating its vaccine mandate.” The group estimated that the order would require 20 million tests a week nationally, based on external data on unvaccinated workers, and that “such testing capacity currently does not exist.”When the top managers at Mr. Waugh’s Stop & Shop store began asking employees whether they were vaccinated in preparation for the federal vaccine mandates that could soon take effect, he said, a large number expressed concern to him about being asked to disclose that information.“It was concerning to see that so many people were distressed,” he said, though all of the employees complied.Ms. Luick of Macy’s near Seattle said that she worked with several vocal opponents of the Covid-19 vaccines and that she anticipated that at least some of her colleagues would resign if they were asked to provide vaccination status or proof of negative tests.Macy’s told employees last week that it would adopt new guidance from the C.D.C. that recommended shortening isolation periods.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesStill, Macy’s was among major employers that started asking employees for their vaccination status last week ahead of the Supreme Court hearing on Friday and said it might require proof of negative tests beginning on Feb. 16.“Our primary focus at this stage is preparing our members for an eventual mandate to ensure they have the information and tools they need to manage their work force and meet the needs of their customers,” said Brian Dodge, president of the Retail Industry Leaders Association, which includes companies like Macy’s, Target, Home Depot, Gap and Walmart.As seasonal Covid-19 surges become the norm, unions and companies are looking for consistent policies. Jim Araby, director of strategic campaigns for the food and commercial workers union in Northern California, said the retail industry needed to put in place more sustainable supports for workers who got ill.For example, he said, a trust fund jointly administered by the union and several employers could no longer offer Covid-related sick days for union members.“We have to start treating this as endemic,” Mr. Araby said. “And figuring out what are the structural issues we have to put forward to deal with this.”Kellen Browning contributed reporting. More

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    Pandemic Wave of Automation May Be Bad News for Workers

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    The need for social distancing led restaurants and grocery stores to seek technological help. That may improve productivity, but could also cost jobs.When Kroger customers in Cincinnati shop online these days, their groceries may be picked out not by a worker in their local supermarket but by a robot in a nearby warehouse.Gamers at Dave & Buster’s in Dallas who want pretzel dogs can order and pay from their phones — no need to flag down a waiter.And in the drive-through lane at Checkers near Atlanta, requests for Big Buford burgers and Mother Cruncher chicken sandwiches may be fielded not by a cashier in a headset, but by a voice-recognition algorithm.An increase in automation, especially in service industries, may prove to be an economic legacy of the pandemic. Businesses from factories to fast-food outlets to hotels turned to technology last year to keep operations running amid social distancing requirements and contagion fears. Now the outbreak is ebbing in the United States, but the difficulty in hiring workers — at least at the wages that employers are used to paying — is providing new momentum for automation.Technological investments that were made in response to the crisis may contribute to a post-pandemic productivity boom, allowing for higher wages and faster growth. But some economists say the latest wave of automation could eliminate jobs and erode bargaining power, particularly for the lowest-paid workers, in a lasting way.“Once a job is automated, it’s pretty hard to turn back,” said Casey Warman, an economist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia who has studied automation in the pandemic.The trend toward automation predates the pandemic, but it has accelerated at what is proving to be a critical moment. The rapid reopening of the economy has led to a surge in demand for waiters, hotel maids, retail sales clerks and other workers in service industries that had cut their staffs. At the same time, government benefits have allowed many people to be selective in the jobs they take. Together, those forces have given low-wage workers a rare moment of leverage, leading to higher pay, more generous benefits and other perks.Automation threatens to tip the advantage back toward employers, potentially eroding those gains. A working paper published by the International Monetary Fund this year predicted that pandemic-induced automation would increase inequality in coming years, not just in the United States but around the world.“Six months ago, all these workers were essential,” said Marc Perrone, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers, a union representing grocery workers. “Everyone was calling them heroes. Now, they’re trying to figure out how to get rid of them.”Checkers, like many fast-food restaurants, experienced a jump in sales when the pandemic shut down most in-person dining. But finding workers to meet that demand proved difficult — so much so that Shana Gonzales, a Checkers franchisee in the Atlanta area, found herself back behind the cash register three decades after she started working part time at Taco Bell while in high school.“We really felt like there has to be another solution,” she said.So Ms. Gonzales contacted Valyant AI, a Colorado-based start-up that makes voice recognition systems for restaurants. In December, after weeks of setup and testing, Valyant’s technology began taking orders at one of Ms. Gonzales’s drive-through lanes. Now customers are greeted by an automated voice designed to understand their orders — including modifications and special requests — suggest add-ons like fries or a shake, and feed the information directly to the kitchen and the cashier.The rollout has been successful enough that Ms. Gonzales is getting ready to expand the system to her three other restaurants.“We’ll look back and say why didn’t we do this sooner,” she said.Shana Gonzales, who owns four Checkers franchises in the Atlanta area, said she has had difficulty finding workers to meet demand.Lynsey Weatherspoon for The New York TimesThe push toward automation goes far beyond the restaurant sector. Hotels, retailers, manufacturers and other businesses have all accelerated technological investments. In a survey of nearly 300 global companies by the World Economic Forum last year, 43 percent of businesses said they expected to reduce their work forces through new uses of technology.Some economists see the increased investment as encouraging. For much of the past two decades, the U.S. economy has struggled with weak productivity growth, leaving workers and stockholders to compete over their share of the income — a game that workers tended to lose. Automation may harm specific workers, but if it makes the economy more productive, that could be good for workers as a whole, said Katy George, a senior partner at McKinsey, the consulting firm.She cited the example of a client in manufacturing who had been pushing his company for years to embrace augmented-reality technology in its factories. The pandemic finally helped him win the battle: With air travel off limits, the technology was the only way to bring in an expert to help troubleshoot issues at a remote plant.“For the first time, we’re seeing that these technologies are both increasing productivity, lowering cost, but they’re also increasing flexibility,” she said. “We’re starting to see real momentum building, which is great news for the world, frankly.”Other economists are less sanguine. Daron Acemoglu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said that many of the technological investments had just replaced human labor without adding much to overall productivity.In a recent working paper, Professor Acemoglu and a colleague concluded that “a significant portion of the rise in U.S. wage inequality over the last four decades has been driven by automation” — and he said that trend had almost certainly accelerated in the pandemic.“If we automated less, we would not actually have generated that much less output but we would have had a very different trajectory for inequality,” Professor Acemoglu said.Ms. Gonzales, the Checkers franchisee, isn’t looking to cut jobs. She said she would hire 30 people if she could find them. And she has raised hourly pay to about $10 for entry-level workers, from about $9 before the pandemic. Technology, she said, is easing pressure on workers and speeding up service when restaurants are chronically understaffed.“Our approach is, this is an assistant for you,” she said. “This allows our employee to really focus” on customers.Ms. Gonzales acknowledged she could fully staff her restaurants if she offered $14 to $15 an hour to attract workers. But doing so, she said, would force her to raise prices so much that she would lose sales — and automation allows her to take another course.The artificial intelligence system that feeds information to the kitchen at a Checkers.Lynsey Weatherspoon for The New York TimesTechnology is easing pressure on workers and speeding up service when restaurants are chronically understaffed, Ms. Gonzales said.Lynsey Weatherspoon for The New York TimesRob Carpenter, Valyant’s chief executive, noted that at most restaurants, taking drive-through orders is only part of an employee’s responsibilities. Automating that task doesn’t eliminate a job; it makes the job more manageable.“We’re not talking about automating an entire position,” he said. “It’s just one task within the restaurant, and it’s gnarly, one of the least desirable tasks.”But technology doesn’t have to take over all aspects of a job to leave workers worse off. If automation allows a restaurant that used to require 10 employees a shift to operate with eight or nine, that will mean fewer jobs in the long run. And even in the short term, the technology could erode workers’ bargaining power.“Often you displace enough of the tasks in an occupation and suddenly that occupation is no more,” Professor Acemoglu said. “It might kick me out of a job, or if I keep my job I’ll get lower wages.”At some businesses, automation is already affecting the number and type of jobs available. Meltwich, a restaurant chain that started in Canada and is expanding into the United States, has embraced a range of technologies to cut back on labor costs. Its grills no longer require someone to flip burgers — they grill both sides at once, and need little more than the press of a button.“You can pull a less-skilled worker in and have them adapt to our system much easier,” said Ryan Hillis, a Meltwich vice president. “It certainly widens the scope of who you can have behind that grill.”With more advanced kitchen equipment, software that allows online orders to flow directly to the restaurant and other technological advances, Meltwich needs only two to three workers on a shift, rather than three or four, Mr. Hillis said.Such changes, multiplied across thousands of businesses in dozens of industries, could significantly change workers’ prospects. Professor Warman, the Canadian economist, said technologies developed for one purpose tend to spread to similar tasks, which could make it hard for workers harmed by automation to shift to another occupation or industry.“If a whole sector of labor is hit, then where do those workers go?” Professor Warman said. Women, and to a lesser degree people of color, are likely to be disproportionately affected, he added.The grocery business has long been a source of steady, often unionized jobs for people without a college degree. But technology is changing the sector. Self-checkout lanes have reduced the number of cashiers; many stores have simple robots to patrol aisles for spills and check inventory; and warehouses have become increasingly automated. Kroger in April opened a 375,000-square-foot warehouse with more than 1,000 robots that bag groceries for delivery customers. The company is even experimenting with delivering groceries by drone.Other companies in the industry are doing the same. Jennifer Brogan, a spokeswoman for Stop & Shop, a grocery chain based in New England, said that technology allowed the company to better serve customers — and that it was a competitive necessity.“Competitors and other players in the retail space are developing technologies and partnerships to reduce their costs and offer improved service and value for customers,” she said. “Stop & Shop needs to do the same.”In 2011, Patrice Thomas took a part-time job in the deli at a Stop & Shop in Norwich, Conn. A decade later, he manages the store’s prepared foods department, earning around $40,000 a year.Mr. Thomas, 32, said that he wasn’t concerned about being replaced by a robot anytime soon, and that he welcomed technologies making him more productive — like more powerful ovens for rotisserie chickens and blast chillers that quickly cool items that must be stored cold.But he worries about other technologies — like automated meat slicers — that seem to enable grocers to rely on less experienced, lower-paid workers and make it harder to build a career in the industry.“The business model we seem to be following is we’re pushing toward automation and we’re not investing equally in the worker,” he said. “Today it’s, ‘We want to get these robots in here to replace you because we feel like you’re overpaid and we can get this kid in there and all he has to do is push this button.’” More