Wegman’s, a grocery story chain, is a big deal around here. They’re regularly on the “Top 100 places to work” lists compiled by business magazines, because they pay well for a grocery store, offer benefits, and have a history of promoting from within. But this is ridiculous:
Some 10,000 people applied for 500 positions at a Wegmans slated to open next month.
About 500 new employees were hired from the applicant pool — a 5 percent acceptance rate.
By comparison, Harvard had an undergraduate acceptance rate of 5.8 percent in the most recent year.
This is from a story in the Philadelphia Business Journal about a Wegmans opening in Montgomery, PA. The story isn’t that Wegmans is as grand as Harvard and therefore is attracting applicants the way Harvard does. The story is that 10,000 people in Montgomery, PA are unemployed or underemployed, and even if they do get an entry-level job at Wegmans, they’ll still be working poor if they have a family.
And if they are working poor, they’re going to face another dilemma:
So the options we’ve been left with are this: both of us to work as much as possible, put the kids in daycare and lose healthcare, or keep our income at a level that at once facilitates a stay at home parent, ensures BadgerCare [Wisconsin Medicaid] and excludes our true earning potential, just for the sake of insurance of some kind. All in the name of if something should go wrong. Because if something big goes wrong or something bad happens, it’s not going to eat the savings — there isn’t any. We’ll go bankrupt and lose what little we have.
Obamacare will (hopefully) fix this problem by giving this family the option of insurance with premium support based on income. But someone got a 404 once on a page on healthcare.gov, so let’s be sure to focus on that instead.