• 2 Posts
  • 106 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Vote inertia and dog piling. I’ve seen it happen so many times. If you are voted to the negatives, it’s less likely you’ll receive many positive votes unless you receive enough to tip you back into positive numbers or someone points out that other, similar comments aren’t being down voted. The converse is also true, although the follow up comment phenomena seems not to hold.

    I’ve even experimented with it on Reddit, way back. I’d leave a comment I know would be well received, then edit it to make it poorly received, but not so awful that it’d get mobbed. It’d usually keep going up, albeit less quickly, or sit stagnant.

    On the flip side, I’d leave a shitty comment, then change it to a paraphrasing of a different, very well received sentiment once it was around -3 to -5. Despite the notion being well received elsewhere, the negative votes kept rolling in unless someone pointed out the collective hypocrisy in a follow up comment.

    Tl;dr: Lemmy is run by bipedal, social apes whose behavior and opinions are biased by the perceived opinions of their fellow apes. This bias can sometimes be overcome by pointing it out.







  • So, I’m not trying to be the “ackshually” guy.

    Value Village isn’t owned by Walmart.

    Buuuut, you’re still right. They’re absolutely a shit company. I was an assistant supervisor at Value Village a couple of decades ago. First, they’re 100% for profit but advertise in such a way that consumers believe they’re a charity. What they do is buy donations from charities by the pound. Any donations accepted at the store on behalf of a charity are paid at a drastically reduced rate, so of course they push HARD for customers to bring donations directly to the store.

    The shit cherry on top was the stores lying to charities about the quality of received goods to avoid paying. If clothes, for example, were soiled, they’d refuse to pay for the entire batch. Stores would find a few dirty shirts, claim the entire cart was crap, claw the money back, and sell the rest of the cart.

    The company makes a HUGE profit but pays their employees peanuts. Our head cashier had worked for the company for eight years and capped out at $7.25/hour in 2003, about $14 today. One year, they announced no raises, no reason given. My then girlfriend and I discovered the owners had purchased a cabin in Northern California for use by the c-suite douches. The store manager was pulling in $60k a year, plus bonus, in a very low cost of living area. Me? $8.25 per hour.

    What else? They incentivize under staffing by making a supervisor’s paltry bonuses tied to their staffing budget. Staying at budget meant no bonus. They had to come in under budget for any bonus, and the more “savings” the higher the bonus. I got chewed out when I first started scheduling because I used all the hours allotted in the budget. The store went from a shit hole to being fairly respectable but it would eat into my boss’s bonus. Her maximum annual bonus? $2.5k.

    So they may not be owned by Walmart, but they’re the Walmart of thrift stores. Fuck those guys.