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Little of note to update you on from the past 24 hours. I rode my bike home from work. I didn't have to feed Cassie next door one last time because Alexia got back from Portland earlier than expected. We made plans to get back into our Star Wars movie marathon and watch
Solo tonight; she said she'll order takeout for us as a thank you for my looking after Cassie. Shobhit and I went down to Amazon Fresh on Jackson Street to spend $40 but only pay $20, using yet another one of their $20 off $40 coupons—
two of which got sent to us in the mail this time! They have the same expiration date of 8/30 so we'll have to go back again in a couple of days.
These coupons are clearly designed just to get us hooked on shopping at Amazon Fresh. I'm sure that works with many customers, but it won't for us. We just go where the deals are, and whenever these deals dry up, we'll stop going there. Besides, it's annoying that there
is an Amazon Fresh on Capitol Hill but it is not equipped to take these coupons, which is why we have to go to the one down in the International District. It's only these coupons that gets us down there, although they've now sent so many that we've gone several times. It's especially handy for Shobhit and his vegetable produce purchases. He does love his vegetables.
The lady who worked the register we went to, a heavy set white lady, quipped at us when we unloaded our products onto the conveyor belt: "Nothing fun? It's all healthy stuff!" I did note to her that I was getting a four-pack of ginger beer which I like to mix with vodka to make Moscow Mules. That's fun! This lady had never even heard of ginger beer, let alone the idea of mixing them with vodka. Where the hell was this lady from? I'm not used to coming across poster children for white trash in Seattle proper. I would bet anything she eats true garbage as part of her daily routine, just like my family did growing up in Spokane. I wouldn't have known what ginger beer was then either, and would have assumed it was actual beer just like she did. She was still pleasant to talk to, at least.
I would also bet anything Amazon pays her shit wages for that job, mitigated only by the city's minimum wage, which at $17.27/hour is higher than the state minimum wage ($14.49/hour) and far and away higher than the national minimum wage ($7.25, same as it's been since 2009, and that was a rate truly criminal even then). And since our local minimum wage is tied to inflation and we've seen higher inflation this year than in about forty years, the local rates are going to go up dramatically next year. And my assumption that this woman eats a shit diet doesn't keep me from wanting her to earn a living wage. I want that for everyone.
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Speaking of a living wage, we had a pretty engaged and meaningful All Staff Town Hall over Zoom yesterday, a lot of the discussion revolving around the Hazard Pay requirement for grocers in Seattle
as of September 2. This means non-mamagement / union employees at stores (this never applied to us at the office) will be earning $4 less per hour as of that date than they have since 2020. Well, not quite $4 less, because the union negotiated raises that did not include hazard pay, but it will still be less, and there is a widespread expectation that we will lose store staff as a result.
There's no reason not to believe Krish's assertion that PCC just cannot afford the many millions hazard pay costs us every year. He even noted that we will be operating at a minor "operating loss" for 2022, which I am assuming would not be the case if not for hazard pay. Trying to maintain hazard pay, he said, "We would quite simply run out of money." I get that people not inside the company react to such statements with skepticism, especially considering how expensive our products are, but they also don't tend to think about the fact that we are a co-op and not a corporation, and a) co-ops never operate awash in profits; and b) the prices of our products pay for living wages and great health benefits, but if we raised the prices even more to cover something like hazard pay, our sales would plummet, thereby defeating the purpose.
The other interesting point was the number of people who feel our central office space and location "doesn't match our values," which I find to be a dubious claim. This came up even when we moved here in 2016, and then-CEO Kate had a lot of justification responses, such as our sublease being a really great deal and all the office furniture procured at a discount of some sort. None of that changes the optics, and the responses now are the fact that we are locked into this lease for at least another three years, and subleasing to someone else right now is also not a cost effective idea given the glut of office space vacancy downtown right now (and for god knows how much longer, as people—people not including myself—have really taken to the comforts of working from home).
Incidentally, only a few years ago PCC created official statements for our "Vision," our "Mission," and our "Values." I can easily relate them to you here, because Meat Merchandiser David lists them as part of his email signature:
Our Vision: To inspire and advance the health and well-being of people, their communities and our planet
Our Mission: We ensure that good food nourishes the communities we serve, while cultivating vibrant local, organic food systems
Our Values: We foster high standards, We act with integrity, We embrace stewardship, We take action because we care
To be honest, I fail to see how our office location runs antithetical to any of this. I still have had the expectation, for a while, that our office location will indeed have to change again when our lease runs up, just because we don't use all the space here anymore and the price will likely skyrocket when the lease ends. I won't be surprised if we have to downsize, and that's going to bum me out, unless they somehow find a place even better. I mean, who knows. Three years is a long time in the 2020s. We don't even know what the state of the whole world will be in when it's 2025.
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[posted 12:44 pm]
