Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Warehouse and stock work is, within certain constraints, a question of the volume of work that needs to be done; X amount of product needs to make its way from the back of a truck to the shelf, and that will take Y amount of people Z amount of time. Customer-facing roles are a more a question of availability, of having enough people available to dealing with customer's in a timely fashion, so the demand for labour is going to vary more dramatically throughout the day and week. Forty hours of work in the warehouse are easily organised as five eight-hour shifts, but that may be less use at front-end if the employee will spend ten of those hours kicking their heels and ten run ragged. It makes more sense to hire two people to work for twenty hours each, and having them working side-by-side on a Saturday afternoon, say, than having one person trying to do the work of two on a Saturday afternoon and counting the floor tiles on a Wednesday morning.
The fact that front-end work is dominated by people for whom part-time work is preferable is I think a function of this hiring preference. Plenty of women work full time in retail or other customer-facing roles, they're just less likely to do so in a grocery store.
The fact that front-end work is dominated by people for whom part-time work is preferable is I think a function of this hiring preference. Plenty of women work full time in retail or other customer-facing roles, they're just less likely to do so in a grocery store.
Thank you! 
