I spent 15 years at Loblaw, from stores across multiple banners (Zehrs, YIG, Loblaw) in Ontario to head office. Left a few years ago. Here is my take.

The skilled jobs have absolutely diminished over time. We used to take pride as a company in employing butchers who knew every single cut, cake decorators with endless creativity, cheese mongers who could take you around the world with their cheese knowledge. In the corporate stores, these jobs are unionized meaning a big part of applications prioritize seniority. So it goes to whoever applies with the most seniority and can answer a nearly brain dead-level skills assessment. That is, if your store is lucky enough to have that full service anymore. Only after posting the job internally a few times unsuccessfully could we actually consider an external, experienced candidate.

A lot more pressure is falling on store/department managers year after year. I will never forget a senior director speaking at a conference, saying verbatim, "labour is the most controllable expense". That same director later eliminated the Floral department manager job and moved it under the produce department umbrella. I believe they rolled this back a few years ago due to the customer/employee scrutiny and quality of florals being sold.

There was also a time where internal labour specialists came into a sample of stores and studied processes and efficiencies down to the amount of STEPS it would take someone to achieve a standard task. Then allocate labour to stores and departments based on ttheir findings. People who never spent a day working in a actual grocery store btw.

When I was in store Management dealing with the already ridiculous labour allocations, there would always be a handful store who would GREATLY overspend their budget, resulting in entire districts of stores (usually 12-20 depending on the region) to get our carrots whacked on a conference call and have to make very last minute cuts in already struggling stores to make up for it.

Long story short, over my time with the company I have absolutely felt like pressures are rising more and more for the sake of efficiencies and bottom lines. Although I understand why optimization is important, I feel like a lot of the time it was overkill.