Thousands of Sainsbury's staff hit by shake-up
 

Now its Sainsburys
doing cut backs.


[Thousands of Sainsbury's store staff are facing
an uncertain future as the company looks
to restructure senior roles in an "efficiency" drive.
The UK's second-largest supermarket chain
would not say how many jobs could be lost
under the process - announced 24 hours
after a similar move affecting 1,700 roles
was revealed by its biggest rival, Tesco.]


https://news.sky.com/story/thousands...ke-up-11219460

Staff will be asked to reapply, [B]accept a more junior position[/B] or face redundancy

that would be a bitter pill to swallow

Your Aldi's and Lidl's must be kicking their butts in the market.

Hopefully it is the fat cats at the top that take the flack.

The dominoes are starting to fall and the banks and private equity firms don't want to bail them out. I follow the financial market closely and believe we are heading towards the perfect storm.

I work there and all my team leaders and managers have been made redundant, I wont be sad to see a few go

Pretty much every high street retailer will go this way if they haven't already, fewer and fewer management positions and people expected to broaden their responsibilities rather than be in a rigidly defined role

Consumerism has changed over the last decade, particularly in the past five years. People are spending less on the high street and well known supermarkets and more on Amazon, eating out, leisure activities and shops like Lidl and Aldi. High street shops and supermarkets have been struggling with their profit margins for the last few years and its now reaching a crisis point.

That said, GDP is being dragged down by a lack of consumer spending. A devalued exchange rate and real wages falling.

Many of us may not of noticed the real squeese on spending power. We may not of noticed the sudden lack of shop assistants in M&S and that most shops no longer afford security or have an assistant on the changing room door.

When salaries fail to keep up with inflation people will borrow (at least whilst borrowing is still cheap). This at least cushions the impact for individuals and circulates money back into the economy but its not enough to sustain productivity performance and growth.

The last crash was caused mainly by subprime mortgages. Thousands lost their homes but the banks were bailed out and then it was straight back to business, only this time they called it "impaired credit” or “credit repair” and its much bigger and more problematic than the last time.

We have been heading towards a crash for the last 18 months and like I've said before, its not 'will it happen', its 'when' will it happen.

It's happening in a lot of retailers atm. Wilko's has gotten rid of mid level management a on different teams in favour of a few overall supervisors who basically do everything and admin have largely been given the boot. I've managed to escape it quite luckily since, although I started off as admin, I've kind of moved on to other stuff now so my role hasn't been affected.

It's a kick in the teeth for a lot of people though, what's the point in trying to progress if you can lose it all so easily?

Luckily (lol...) for me, we already run at absolute bare minimum staffing levels and they literally couldn't make anyone redundant without closing the shop.