Considering WW has unfair award deals with their employees you would think they could afford them working overnight/early morning.
The current agreement (which has technically ended and the new one has been in negotiation for over a year) provides penalty rates for midnight-5am weekdays, midnight-6am and after 10pm on Saturdays and 3 different rates on sundays (midnight-6am, 6am-10pm and 10pm-midnight). A previous agreement had the penalty rates kick in from 9pm instead of 10.
The store and wage budgeting created by the people in head office are in many cases, wrong. They expect stores to make a lot more in sales they they can reasonably expect (eg, the budget for one store near me is based on expected weekly sales of $860k. That store only barely makes $750k during increased sales periods such as the lead up to Christmas). They also don't account for known wage changes such as EBA ~1% pay raises every 6 months.
Then they do the same thing every year. They work out budgets, toss money at the stores and generally stick to the store level budgets. Then new years hits and the people in norwest looking at the numbers go "cough" and cut the budgets for the rest of the year. Every year, in the last 2-3 months of the FY, they go nuts and cut wages to the point that stores aren't allowed to keep staff levels at the required points and are forced to send people on holidays because they would otherwise blow the wage figure they've been given from above.
In most cases, the store level staff try there best with what they have (though some store staff are just utterly useless). The problems, the vast majority of problems that Woolworths has, comes from above the stores. Many sections of the "support" office don't listen to the stores and blame the stores for things the store has no control over. Warehouses rip off the stores, claiming to have sent stock when they didn't and the store has to eat the "cost" of the stock adjustment. There are a number of things that the marketers put on special, without checking with the buyers that said special can even been supplied.
As an example, late last year and early this year, stores in VIC and NSW stores supplied out of the Wodonga DC had a supplier change for the private label milk. The new supplier ships the milk in plastic wrap rather then milk crates. Each carton has less stock in it compared to the old crates (4 3L vs 6, 6 2L vs 9). This results in more handling of the milk to fill the shelf, thus it takes longer. Upper management said that yes, this change will mean it takes longer to stock the shelf. No, we will not allow for extra time in the costings. So even though it was known that it would take longer to fill each carton, they won't adjust the expected fill rate to compensate.
and the way HR and senior management handled the changes in meat departments last year in VIC and early this year to 35 stores across Canberra and southern NSW was just utter pure stupidity with much of the HR process used being illegal under the Fair Work Act.
It will take them 3/4 of a decade and a couple of $B to spec up their 1000 odd supers.... Masters drained them of cash and common sense.
There are 938 Woolworths supermarkets. As far as refits go, they plan something, roll it out to upwards of 150ish stores over 2-3 years, then change the format again and roll out a different refit to the next 150ish stores.
They changed the logo 8 years ago. There are still stores with the old branding (there is at least one store nearby that has the new logo over one door and the old logo over another...).
