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(8,155 posts)
Fri Aug 2, 2013, 06:37 PM Aug 2013

Lest we forget all of the other minimum/low wage employees outside fast food.

Not that I wish to diminish the cause brought about by underpaid workers in the food service industry. But there are so many other fields where employees barely obtain minimum wage.

I work for a drug store and here are the company blue-prints. Let me explain to you the different positions within a conventional drug store location. The front floor of the store, excluding pharmacy, consists of the front register clerk, the cosmetics clerk, a certified photo technician and a supervisor called a "shift leader."

These are all wage positions. Let me explain the difficulties associated with each position

Front register clerk: You are the symbolic entrance to the store. You must greet every customer entering with a preset greeting. You must ring up every customer who comes to the front counter. You are responsible for handling tobacco and alcohol products (although some stores have an alcohol department and employee) which means you must constantly be verifying customer ages. You are handling immense quantities of product over the court of an 8 or 9 hour shift. 600 or 700 items go through your hands from 300 to 400 customers. You handle high dollar purchases ranging from expensive electronics to gift cards in excess of 1000 dollars a piece. You must also understand and properly practice the rules of processing bankless debit cards. These bankless debit cards are primarily used by three demographics in my area. The first two are undocumented immigrants and the homeless who do not have a feasible means for opening an actual bank account. The third demographic is drug dealers who have to launder their money as often as possible. As you would expect, the drug dealers create a lot of potential for police encounters and service issues.

The front clerk also must, being part of a drug store, deal with a large body of sick customers who are having terrible days or weeks. They are more likely to act rudely or indifferently especially when lines are long or other customers are tanking up more time than usual. There's also the inevitable issue of people who are simply huge assholes. Believe me, this can all be much worse than it sounds. During my time as a front clerk, I had customers insult me in ways I could have never imagined beforehand.


Starting pay: Minimum wage
Wage increase: The old system had mandatory 25 cent increases every 6 months. Now, raises are handled by "merit" from management who have an incentive to maintain low store expense and thus incentive to keep wages low.
Average observed wage: About 8.50 to 9 dollars a hour.


Cosmetic clerk: While the cosmetic clerks do not deal with nearly the same volume of product or customers as the front clerk, they must watch over and maintain an area of the store that is most likely to be subject to theft. Theft is an every day occurrence and dealing with thieves ranges from simply telling them to leave to having your life threatened. It ranges from someone stuffing an eyeliner in his or her pocket to teams of thieves packing carts with thousands of dollars worth of goods and attempting to walk out the door. This has the potential to be very risky for an employee who is in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The cosmetic clerk must also be EXTREMELY knowledgeable when it comes to the products he or she sells in order to make sure the customer gets what he or she needs. Such a knowledge is an essential prerequisite for the position. What this means is cosmetic clerks possess a critical skill set that can not simply be learned from short term training.

Cosmetic clerks also have the responsibility of stocking shelves, resetting displays, performing returns, and maintaining store restrooms. This position is multifaceted and demanding.

Starting pay: Minimum wage
Wage increase: The old system had mandatory 25 cent increases every 6 months. Now, raises are handled by "merit" from management who have an incentive to maintain low store expense and thus incentive to keep wages low.
Average observed wage: About 8.50 to 9 dollars a hour.


Certified Photo Technician: This is my current position. As a photo technician, I am charged with operating an expensive array of photo machines ranging from film developers to large size poster and canvas printers to inkjet refill machines and, finally, a behemoth of a wet-chemical photo printer. Many of these machines process an immense amount of product over the course of a day and are also aging. This means that regular maintenance is important and malfunctions and breaks happen quite often.

Maintaining wet-chemical machines involves handling volatile chemicals. Developers, bleachers and silver and power-wash solutions all contain chemistry that is potentially dangerous when mishandled. Last year, before putting on goggles, I accidentally splashed a small amount of developer into my eye and nearly had to go to the hospital.

Replacing the chemicals in a wet-chemical printer can take hours and requires a well practiced skill set and a cursory knowledge of relevant chemistry.

I also print and construct gift items like canvases, each taking about half an hour to complete, and photo books. On top of this, I must also digitally edit customer photos and process passport pictures. There is great potential for personal loss if I damage or destroy original content. Incorrectly creating and processing passport photos could cost a customer hundreds of dollars and make him or her unable to travel on time. This means at every step of the way I must constantly be checking and double checking what I'm doing.

Photo technicians are also generally responsible for stocking, facing and resetting about 1/4 to 1/2 of the store. We also maintain the walk in cooler and low temperature freezers. This involves working in temperatures ranging from 40 degrees all the way down to -20 degrees Fahrenheit for long periods of time. We also maintain the stores floor and handle trash.

Starting pay: Minimum wage
Wage increase: The old system had mandatory 25 cent increases every 6 months. Now, raises are handled by "merit" from management who have an incentive to maintain low store expense and thus incentive to keep wages low.
Average observed wage: About 8.50 to 9 dollars a hour.


Shift lead: The shift lead is a recently created position in an attempt to diffuse managerial responsibility among lower employees without paying them managerial wages. Shift leads are essentially assistant managers during the day, while store managers and EXAs are present, and store managers when the rest of upper management go home. They are responsible for dealing with high dollar returns, customer service, problem customers, complaints, handling and counting tills, maintaining the safes, stocking, facing or resetting essentially any part of the store and, when it comes down to it, performing any task reserved for the other positions I have talked about.

They are acting management without management pay.

Starting pay: Somewhere around 10 dollars an hour.
Wage increase: Merit based again on input by upper management who have incentive to keep cost low and thus incentive to not hand out raises.
Average observed wage: About 11 dollars an hour.



Part of accessing wage increases involves evaluating an employees participation in "community" or "company" events. This often involves attending sponsored events on the weekends or during a time that one would normally have to work. Failure to attend these events reflects negatively on the employee and this may in turn mean a poor employee evaluation and no expected raise.

There have recently been many shifts in company policy and practice coming from corporate. This involves eliminating managerial positions in favor of increased responsibility on lower employees. Minimum and low wage employees are also being tasked with counting tills and personally handling thousands of dollars from the safe. This increase in responsibility does not bring with it an increase in pay. Instead, we are being required to do more work without any reward.

Most of my work peers work full time and are also permanently on food stamps and other state and federal aid programs. There is company health insurance for those who work full time (management purposefully hires a surplus of employees to keep hours down in order to prevent us from enrolling in insurance programs). However, it contains preexisting condition denial clauses and has a fairly high deductible.

This is the new corporate model for Walgreens. I am fortunate enough to be in school and my employment here is a job, not a career. I do not have much responsibility and no dependents so I can afford to be poor especially since I know it is only temporary. Not all of my coworkers are so fortunate.


Walgreens has a net annual income of $2.127 billion. I have calculated that providing free employee insurance would only cut into about 1.2% of this net income.

Increasing all employee wages to at least 12 dollars an hour would cost roughly the same, if not less.


What this means is there is a great amount of room for expansion of employee pay and benefits that would barely scratch the companies revenue.
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Lest we forget all of the other minimum/low wage employees outside fast food. (Original Post) Gravitycollapse Aug 2013 OP
exactly. We need al living wage for all workers. We need another labor movement. liberal_at_heart Aug 2013 #1
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