Read the Room

I’m reluctant to use this title for a single post; if I tried I could probably come up with dozens, if not hundreds, of stories about tone-deaf moves by businesses and their management teams that have made the pandemic era even worse than it already was. Maybe I can start a regular feature on this topic, running every week to cover the most egregious example I can find in the previous seven days. For sheer idiocy, in terms of a move that does not work well under the current atmosphere, it may take a while to top the story of an employee who wrote to the CEO of Trader Joe’s asking for more rigorous anti-COVID procedures at work, and was promptly fired for his trouble, however…

I picked up the story from The Washington Post, but you can also find it on Twitter or any number of aggregation sites. A crew member working for Trader Joe’s at one of their New York locations wrote directly to the company’s CEO, explaining that more stringent measures were needed to protect the store crews, and that only the CEO had sufficient authority to impose them on the entire chain. Most of these were not terribly surprising, as workers everywhere have been asking for better air filtration, more time and supplies to disinfect the store interiors, and more conscientious enforcement of mask requirements. The only really innovative point in the letter was the request for a “three strikes” policy against customers who refuse to wear masks when inside the store…

It seems worth pointing out that employee recommended that the company accommodate customers who can’t wear masks due to medical conditions by using a curbside pick-up – a common measure taken by grocery and pharmacy companies, and one which Trader Joe’s already offers its customers. It also seems worth the mention that the company insists that it fired the employee in our story because of “the disrespect he showed toward our customers,” while telling the employee himself that the requests in his email and his temerity in emailing them indicated that he didn’t understand or practice the company’s “values,” whatever those might be…

What takes this over the line from poor management practice into complete idiocy is that the employee claims to have received stellar annual reviews, praising him for (among other things) his dedication to customer service and excellence in assisting customers – and the company has not disputed any of this as of this to date. Unless those reviews were all disinformation of some kind, it would appear that this employee is actually very respectful of the customers, and the company is actually taking offense at his request. In listing different causes in his termination letter and in their statement to the Post about this situation, effectively lying about the facts of the matter and slamming the employee, the company has not only managed to flush their own credibility, they have also sparked public outcry and calls for a boycott…

Now, I’m not going to suggest that the CEO of any company, let alone a national chain the size of Trader Joe’s, should have to consider and respond to every request received from one of their employees. I am suggesting that, if this story is true, then this matter was handled in possibly the worst fashion possible. It would have been much simpler for one of the CEO’s administrative assistants to reply with the company’s standard “thank you for your suggestion; we will look into it” message, and then ignore the whole thing. If anyone at corporate headquarters is actually mortally offended at the request that senior management “show up for” its employees by granting these requests, in return for the employees risking their safety by showing up for work every day despite the pandemic, they could always find some plausible excuse for firing this employee at some later point. Hopefully without triggering public outrage, giving rise to wrongful termination lawsuits, or making themselves look like a bunch of arrogant, thin-skinned, easily-offended idiots…

Alternately, I suppose, they could actually consider his requests…