Corner Market Cafe (whose parent East Side Management INC) has a yearly revenue of $25.7 Million, and hires 917 workers and managers across 38 Seasons stores & 9 CMC’s in NH, MA, and RI & its Lincoln, RI HQ. It is a weak competitor among gas station grocers; its exclusive contract to be at Shell stations does not even cover the market of Shell stations, as there are 59 Shell stations in RI, 51 in New Hampshire, and 259 in Massachusetts. In NH there are 3, 18 in MA, and 17 in RI. The share of the Shell market in RI is the highest at 28%.
It pays $15.00/hr before taxes and tries wholeheartedly to deny benefits to part-time employees by limiting their hours below 30. Checks fluctuate between $250 and $500 depending on the amount of hours. Part-time workers who work more than 30 hrs can get vision and dental, but only full-time workers get medical. Sick time is naturally unpaid, and the stores are open holidays for time and a half. The average is $350. It employs mostly teens, college students, and semi-proletarians, all those who will accept part time work.
All stores are understaffed, and hours are afforded to managers weekly based on sales, who have to set the schedule weekly. Due to bickering between the different layers of managers, it always comes out Fridays. The small-time tyrants (store managers) push to get more hours, and the district and operational managers push to give less. Only during established rush hours from 7am-10am and 11am-1pm is there permitted more than one worker in the smaller stores!
For the service workers at CMC, this means surprise rushes without a full staff cause drastic jerks between rushes and periods of stagnation and re-organization. But this is a general feature of service work in an imperialist country; the rude and ungrateful petty-bourgeoisie are often its clientele and do not care what intensity of work they see the workers scramble around.
Let’s add a layer of capitalist incompetence, then. At CMC, Doordash was added in the early summer, without altering staffing to account for the change in the intensity of work. Orders were often late and lines of angry customers would accumulate confused about why they were not being waited on. See, CMC told workers if we are more than 5 minutes late for a Doordash it affects ratings, so to prioritize dashes. This was not strictly true.
Doordash will temporarily turn off access to a location if it is obscenely late, more than 30 minutes. But before then, dashers are accustomed to checking in as soon as they arrive and waiting if they are early. It was solely CMC who intensified the work and the divide between service workers and gig work doordashers.
Then add the August Deal, which was extended through the end of the year to compete with Dunkin and Wendy’s deals (without the same capital and labor budget!!). The breakfast sandwich, coffee, and a hashbrown at $5.41 are 44% off full-price and less than the usual cost of the sandwich alone ($5.71). Through massively increased sales, this deal has intensified work by three-fold and workers are expected to work faster for the same wages! Word is, grubhub and uber eats will be added soon too! Wait for the kicker… the register system is being swapped out to one without tips!
This company’s incompetence comes to the cost of us workers, who make the food and drinks and upkeep the storefront, work the register. More than they, we often have ideas and innovations based in our work, which is work they’ve never done. While they lose money on a sale their books can’t afford, they get on our ass about clocking out late, doing the work they set us up for. It’s up to us workers to organize our demands and unite in the organizational form of a shop committee strategically focused on becoming an independent union; all this apart from the state union apparatus and the bosses, who will tie us into a legal trap designed to strangle our struggle and shorten it.