Senator Warren joins striking Stop & Shop workers

[Tactical Peek]

SOMERVILLE — US Senator Elizabeth Warren brought a box of doughnuts with her as she joined dozens of workers outside a Stop & Shop here as the strike against New England’s largest supermarket chain entered its first full day Friday.

Warren greeted the workers on the sidewalk a short distance from the chain’s McGrath Highway store shortly after 11 a.m. She shook hands with some, posed for selfies with others, and then grabbed a bullhorn.

“What do you fight for? You fight for the dignity of working people,’’ Warren told an appreciative crowd. “Unions built America’s middle class — unions will be rebuilding American’s middle class.”

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/04/12/senator-warren-join-striking-stop-shop-workers/ThL3VjgB7Msx7bghEYdh0N/story.html

[tymorial]

1. Market Basket is better

[DAMANgoldberg]

4. I'm not from the area, but...

when I was an OTR trucker, about 2 lives ago, I would deliver to many supermarket chains, including Stop & Shop (now sister company to Food Lion here) and Market Basket. The Market Basket people were so helpful and nice, more than I can say for Stop & Shop and Giant for that matter.

[Hortensis]

2. Go, Liz and United Food & Commercial Workers Union!

Five locals of the United Food & Commercial Workers Union representing 31,000 Stop & Shop workers in New England have been negotiating a new contract. ...

The unions say the company is demanding "unreasonable" wage and benefit cuts. "Instead of a contract that recognizes the value and hard work that our members provide every day, Stop & Shop has only proposed drastic and unreasonable cuts to health care benefits and take home pay, while replacing real customer service with more serve-yourself checkout machines," the union statement said.

The unions said that Ahold Delhaize had more than $2 billion in profits last year and got a U.S. tax cut of $225 million in 2017. On its website, Stop & Shop said it is the "only large fully-unionized food retailer left in New England." The strike includes workers at Stop & Shop's 134 stores in Massachusetts, 92 locations in Connecticut and 27 Rhode Island stores.

https://www.wcvb.com/article/stop-and-shop-workers-go-on-strike-walk-off-job/27115921

[Hortensis]

3. "Stop & Shop owner beefs up robots, AI as US labor market tightens"

From November 2018:

The world’s eighth biggest food retailer and owner of Stop & Shop is upping its stake in the U.S. grocery war with mini robotic supermarkets. Ahold Delhaize announced Tuesday it will roll out small, automated warehouses at certain Stop & Shops across the country to speed up ordering and delivery times to online shoppers and to help them as they struggle to recruit in the tight labor market.

“So, there are quite a lot of things going on. I think the most important, we see is that the labor is not only getting more expensive but labor is also more difficult to get in general. The availability of people in a lot of warehousing environments or transportation environments are shrinking and I think we have to find solutions where we can look for different tasking off of a number of activities too,” Ahold Delhaize CEO Frans Muller tells FOX Business.

The Netherlands-based company said it has partnered with tech software company Takeoff to build the small warehouses that will use robot arms to stack groceries and assemble shopper’s online orders. ... Muller says it has also partnered with a number of universities and scientists to better understand forecast machine learning and create better algorithms to help customers shop faster and at a lower cost. In addition to robots, Stop & Shops will also roll out “frictionless checkouts” so customers can use their mobile app to scan items as they’re shopping, without having to wait in line.

?ve=1&tl=1

... Over the next three years, Muller says the company expects to deliver comparable sales growth and market share gains as well as doubling its net consumer online sales to around 7 billion euros by 2021. As for hiked grocery prices for the year ahead, Muller says the company always try to be as competitive as possible, but there is also a limit. With freight driver shortages, many shoppers may see increases in their favorite brands but he says there has to be an underlying truth and reason to those increases or they will not accept them.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/features/stop-shop-owner-beefs-up-robots-ai-as-us-labor-market-tightens

[LudwigPastorius]

5. Kicking

[backtoblue]

6. K&R