B is worried.
Her boyfriend works at Meijer and may see his hours cut dramatically because of the repeal of a Michigan law that will take effect September 1st of this year. Meijer is a major supermarket in Michigan...and B's boyfriend is a stock clerk there. He spends much of his time at his job pricing items before putting them on the shelves.
But soon the whole Pricing Items thing is about to be eliminated, courtesy of the Rick Snyder Administration...it's going to save stores over 2 billion dollars per year.....largely in personnel costs. Good bye jobs! With State level deregulation like this, it's no wonder Michigan's economic recovery stalled out at the 10.5% rate and Michigan lost 30,000 jobs in the past three months.
We're about to lose more. And of course it hits the lowest wage earners the hardest at the worst possible time.
The Michigan Pricing and Advertising of Consumer Items Act of 1976, AKA the Scanner Law, required that items in stores be individually priced.
The idea was to protect consumers as price scanning became more common...so that consumers would be able to compare the price they were charged on the receipt to the price of the tag.
Rick Snyder's administration sees the law as merely a drag on the state economy. Apparently businesses have become much more honest since 1979, and consumers no longer need a means to compare the price they paid with the price that the item is marked.
So the consumer will suffer. Low wage earners will suffer, because there will be less of a need to hire people to price items. But hey! At least the megamarts will benefit! And that's what it's all about, right?
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