And then there were four

I knew that there's a staffing shortage in the city. Everywhere I go I see help wanted signs. A couple weeks ago, the Journal had an article in which the writer went to a series of places throughout the city applying for jobs, just to see how desperate the market is right now. Some places he was offered a job on the spot, and was told that he could start that day. Other places, like McDonald's, had a bit more of a process, but offered him jobs as well.

Within my own employment organization, I had no idea how bad it was until today. There was a change of management at one of the stores, and subsequently all the employees quit. As of yesterday, the manager was the only person working at that particular store. Now there are two people in that store because head office pulled one of our assistant managers to help there. A bit of a shock to the system since we had a good team atmosphere, and another person quit last week taking the total staff down to five.

Now, our total store staff numbers at four people. That's the minimum amount of people you need to run the store daily. Sundays you can get by with three, but for the most part, you need four people. Since we received notice of the transfer just today, the schedule for the remainder of the week had to be adjusted to compensate for the lack of people. In short, I'm working more hours. I was already at 48 this week, and it has now increased to 52. Nice overtime, but I really hope that I'm not going to burn out. I don't mind working overtime, so long as I get my Sundays off. Thankfully, we have a transfer of our own that was previously in the works, and has now been expedited. The only downside is that he is going back to school in the fall. Funny that, so am I. I plan to do some part-time work in the fall though. Plan to. Once fall hits, and I realize what a foolish error that was, I might change my mind.

I have to go back to school though. I would like to continue working retail. It's a decent job, but I doubt that it would be sufficient to raise a family with. True, two of my co-workers have families, but their spouses are also working. An engineering position would pay better than retail would. I would suppose.