CHICAGO — Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has implemented a new scheduling system for hourly employees at 650 U.S. stores, which lets the company focus on serving peak shopping times while allowing employees to exercise scheduling preferences, according to company sources and interviews with store workers.
The system, called Customer First Scheduling, largely eliminates on-call scheduling, which has been a focus of labor activists and politicians who have consistently pushed retailers to offer more predictable hours for workers.
The new system was launched in all of Wal-Mart’s 650 small-format Neighborhood Markets at the end of July. It prioritizes peak shopping hours so that those shifts are filled first by taking into account foot traffic and sales data from every department in each store. Staff is then allocated to the remaining shifts in order of importance.
Currently, store managers allocate hours within the times employees say they are available to work.
The new system is ostensibly designed to increase workforce retention, but it is not immediately clear how workers can get overtime hours, an important component of low-paying retail jobs.
A Wal-Mart official familiar with the matter who did not wish to be identified said the company is reallocating hours in stores to specific times and specific departments based on when more customers are shopping.
“More hours are also available during times when the store needs to complete work to prepare for high customer traffic,” he said.