Canada

This shit shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.

Shoppers are owned by loblaws. The same company that got a Manulife contract to provide specific medications through it's pharmacies at the end of January.

Such a shame.

Worked for them from 2004 to 2009, first as a member of the renovations team and later as a front store manager.

Was a great job and a great company (especially for managers pay back then) I truly enjoyed my time there for the most part, especially the reno team, which would see me and my crew traveling around Western Canada renovating and/or setting up new stores before moving on to the next.

But this was long before friggin' Loblaw's bought them up and turned it into just another mega-corp treating their people like line items on a spreadsheet.

It just feels like the older I get, the more everything I remember fondly ends up getting fucked by corporate greed.

This is a ridiculously common thing in companies that live and die by KPIs.

They'll agree on a set of measure that supposedly incent the behaviours they want to see, but don't actually think about those incentives' having feedback loops or unintended consequences, and because there's no small amount of executive pride wrapped up in them, they wont go back and revisit their mistakes.

Loblaw does this a lot, by the way. Example: I've dealt with their procurement support team, and one of their metrics is minimizing the number of "clicks" it takes to purchase something from a vendor, which is admirable, but Loblaw took this to the extreme and actually breaks purchase-price-verification because this would take extra clicks, and the number-of-clicks was more important than the integrity of the buying process.