If you’re out of work and need a job during the COVID-19 outbreak, Safeway is immediately hiring more than 2,000 workers as shoppers strip aisles to stock up for staying home. Most of the openings are available at more than 165 Bay Area locations, the company said.
Stores include Safeway, Andronico’s, Vons and Pak ’N Save. Positions include deli, meat, bakery, produce, fuel stations and customer service departments, cashier or clerk. In-store employees receive paid training, flexible scheduling, employee discounts, benefits and paid vacation and holidays.
Safeway is also hiring for full-time and part-time delivery drivers with paid training (no commercial driver’s license required) and other benefits.
This is from Mallory Moench, “Safeway is hiring more than 2,000 workers due to coronavirus demand,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 16, 2020.
Many will say that this isn’t heroism at all: it is simply a large company responding to a profit opportunity. Exactly. But isn’t it great when the profit motive gives an incentive to normal not-particularly-heroic people to act like heroes?
A lot of people in the Bay Area are in danger of losing their livelihood, due to Mayor “Defining Moment” London Breed, who seems to be a legend in her own mind. She has shut down the city of San Francisco, except for a few exceptions, for three weeks. (My daughter, by the way, is one of the people whose livelihood has been reduced. Fortunately, she very creatively offered her services for remote Pilates instruction on Instagram and has already had 6 takers in less than 18 hours.) It’s great to see these opportunities opening up for people whose livelihood the mayor has squashed.
By the way, this move by Safeway also shows the harm that the Trump-Republican-Democrat bailout bill will do. If you’ve been someone who’s lost his/her job or who has been laid off temporarily without pay, why take a job with Safeway if the feds are about to subsidize you? Such bills slow or even prevent in some cases the reallocation of labor to higher-valued uses. (Not higher valued compared to the uses they were in, but higher-valued compared to not having a job.)
HT2 Tom Lee.
READER COMMENTS
Jon Murphy
Mar 17 2020 at 12:43pm
It would be interesting to me to see if Uber tries to get into this delivery market somehow, like they did with Uber Eats. It seems to me to be a natural extension and a lot of idle capital could be sitting around.
Dylan
Mar 17 2020 at 3:23pm
I appreciate the spirit of the post. As someone who’s been looking for work, I went to the local grocery store yesterday to see if they could use some extra hands with how busy they’ve been. At that time, they said no, because I don’t have any background working in that environment and don’t speak Spanish, which would make it difficult for me to work with other workers and help customers in this predominantly Spanish-speaking neighborhood.
However, I think you go wrong by saying this is the reason that the bailout will do. I agree that any bailout will likely be poorly targeted, and is unlikely to help the people that need it the most, but to suggest all of the people that are already out of work or will be soon, can quickly be reintegrated into new positions if only the incentives were right, seems to misjudge the nature of this particular crisis. For a long time society has had the ability to survive off of the back of the labor of a smaller and smaller proportion of the population. We’ve not had mass unemployment, because we’ve found more and more things to want. But, when a good chunk of those things are no longer possible legally, expecting the increased labor supply to be seamlessly picked up by things like additional Amazon warehouse employees and grocery store stockers, seems unrealistic.
Dylan
Mar 17 2020 at 3:29pm
By the way, the local fitness/yoga studio that I volunteer at also went to an online class model (as most have). They are charging half the price they did for a live class, but class sizes are still down by more than 75% so far. If this keeps up, it would be reasonable to expect that you would get to a model with very few instructors charging very small amounts for a class, and getting very large audiences. Great for a few rockstar instructors, not very good for the rest.
Dylan
Mar 18 2020 at 8:57am
I’ve been thinking more about this overnight. Given the experience in other countries that have been hard hit, but food availability has stayed fine, don’t we expect the rush for more grocery store workers to ease quite a bit in the coming weeks. There may be more need for extra cleaning, but once people realize they aren’t having problems getting food or toilet paper, the big rushes will end, as will most of the demand for additional help.
I’m wondering if we’re going to get a real world test of David Graeber’s hypothesis that much of the white collar jobs in the world aren’t really useful/needed, and have been a kind of make-work program for over educated wealthy people? I’m naturally pretty skeptical of these kinds of things, but after having worked in consulting for a n few years, where our job appeared to be to get clients to pay us a lot of money to create research reports that were never read…it becomes hard to discount the idea entirely.
David Henderson
Mar 18 2020 at 2:48pm
Dylan,
You wrote:
I’m not sure how you got that out of my post. I certainly didn’t say it and it’s not what I believe. Here’s what I wrote:
Dylan
Mar 18 2020 at 4:40pm
David,
I guess I didn’t state it clearly enough, but I think that any assistance the government is able to provide is going to be a drop in the bucket compared to the need. I’ve been stunned by the amount of people that are suddenly out of work here in NYC, have very little savings with which to pay rent and buy food, and are being told that most of them should expect to shelter in place for at least the next 3 weeks. Those are pretty difficult circumstances for labor to be able to reallocate to higher value uses.
There are close to 450,000 people in the Leisure and Hospitality sector, about 10% of the workforce, most of those people are out of a job, or will be soon. And that of course is just the tip of the iceberg. A friend at a well funded, hot startup, told me they laid off a quarter of their staff yesterday, and they have no direct exposure to the most impacted industries. We’ve got a huge film industry that is completely shut down, the list goes on and on. Compare that to the 63K people that work at grocery stores in the city, even with pretty big growth, that’s only going to take a small fraction of displaced workers.
For these workers, something like $1000 one time payment, isn’t going to have much impact at all, and certainly seems unlikely to meaningfully slow former servers and bartenders from looking for work in a grocery store. I understand that there is likely some marginal workers, who that pushes just enough to stay at home for a few weeks, instead of going straight out and looking for a new job. My hypothesis though is that there are going to be many more people looking for work who can’t find anything, then there are going to be people disincentivized because of government action.
David Seltzer
Mar 17 2020 at 3:23pm
“Its not from the benevolence of the butcher,” yet benefit is gained from voluntary exchange. Brilliant!
Alan Goldhammer
Mar 17 2020 at 4:21pm
David – I understand the point you are trying to make but what are the constructive options for reducing the case incidence of the virus. Our entire state is under semi-lockdown with all bars, restaurants, schools, libraries, courts, etc. closed. Some retailers such as REI have closed for an even longer period of time.
My daughter works at Children’s Hospital in San Francisco and has been deemed essential personnel even though she is a music therapist and not a nurse or MD. So she commutes in each day and because of the emergency gets free parking.
It’s not just the Bay Area that is being affected and where jobs are in peril. The bigger question is do we go the way of Italy or do we do something proactive to try to get a grip on things. What is your view??
robc
Mar 17 2020 at 5:44pm
See the bunches of other articles on this site. Some suggest the key is to do less…people need to be infected (slightly) faster.
I dont know if that is right or not.
Mark Bahner
Mar 17 2020 at 10:55pm
You didn’t ask my view, but here it is anyway. This whole situation reminds me of a Simpsons episode, and this absolutely classic moment:
Crack heads open, and feast on the goo inside?
You say that the question is whether we “go the way of Italy”…but I don’t think it’s possible for the U.S. to “go the way of Italy”. Italy has a significantly older population, much greater population density, smaller residences and buildings, and has social customs that involve much more close personal contact.
Plus, they are considerably poorer than we are, and have considerably fewer people than we do (despite their higher population density).
john hare
Mar 17 2020 at 5:35pm
Many industries have been having serious trouble staffing. This could be a golden opportunity for them to poach employees from short sighted employers. I noticed long ago that in a general layoff, the better than average workers move on at a much higher rate than the lower than average worker. IOW, indiscriminate layoffs come back to bite.
Thaomas
Mar 17 2020 at 7:11pm
“If you’ve been someone who’s lost his/her job or who has been laid off temporarily without pay, why take a job with Safeway if the feds are about to subsidize you?”
Because almost everyone would rather have work than receive welfare. We spend way too much effort trying to make sure no one (except high-income tax payers under the “Tax Cuts for the Rich and Deficits Act of 2017”) ever get as a handout.
But if we are worried that Safeway wont be able to get enough workers, just allow people to collect the UI and work if they can find a job.
Rob Rawlings
Mar 17 2020 at 11:54pm
‘If you’ve been someone who’s lost his/her job or who has been laid off temporarily without pay, why take a job with Safeway if the feds are about to subsidize you? ‘
I’d really like to agree with you but can’t help thinking that absent truly free-markets and free-banking (or possibly correct monetary policy if you agree with Scott Sumner) then fed subsidies (aka: fiscal policy) are the only thing to stave off impoverishment for many in the current crisis.
Mark Bahner
Mar 18 2020 at 12:13am
I’ll admit that I’ve been flip-flopping on this whole COVID-19 thing, but my latest thinking is that the United States has waaaayyyyyyyyy over-reacted on this disease. I think government edicts (federal, state, and local) are going to have far more costs than they have benefits.
This hopefully will be a lesson learned on how not to react to a pandemic.
Comments are closed.