A great place to work?

Among the lies, & fallacies, disingenuous statements and statistics that appear out of thin air over at the old PLCB fudge factory, we hear how the PLCB is a great place to work! Jinkies! Cool!

But what do the numbers say? According to the 2019 annual report (on page 61) the average age of a store clerk is 44 years old. Not exactly attracting younger workers. And when they do get workers, 56% of them are part time. I don't think those are the "Family Sustaining Jobs" that are so often mentioned. Out of that 56%, over half of them quit every year for a turnover rate of 53.1%. Even if you somehow manage to get one of the 2,453 full time filled positions, there is a 49.3 % turn over rate there too. Now factor in this: 29% of store workers change location every year.

Can you say "turn and churn"? Is it burnout, or do they just get tired of the bullshit? If the PLCB isn't that good at retaining employees, just how good they are to work for?

Turn it on its head: is this mismanaged workforce of any benefit to the agency (and thus, to the commonwealth). The average sales per employee for 2017 across this kind of industry was $689,000 per each full time equivalent. The PLCB can force a "part time" employee to work 34 hours a week if they want to, so that makes figuring out the total hours the part time workforce puts in a bit difficult. I'll just go with 25 hours a week for part time workers and 15 hours for seasonal workers.

With 3,190 full time sales and admin employees putting in 37.5 hours per week times 52 weeks, that's a total of 6,320,125 hours. Add to that 25 hours times 1,773 workers times 52 weeks equals 2,304,900 hours plus 383 seasonal workers at 15 hours each, but only 13 weeks of work equals 74,490 for a grand total of  8,719,515 hours. Take that and divide it by 37.5*52 (1,950) and you get roughly 4,471 full time equivalent employees.

Now that we have the number of full-time equivalents, we can then multiply that by $689,000 for each employee and come up with $3,080,519,000 as what average sales should be. But the PLCB only did $2,126,927,971 in sales or UNDERPERFORMED the average by just about 45%. In simple terms, having the PLCB do things is costing the state about $950 Million in lost taxable sales based on average sales. Now that is the average, there could be significant differences for liquor stores. But looking at Total Wine, they are only about 10% below that average, so it pretty much confirms the PLCB is a bloated, poorly managed organization,

It gets worse. All the PLCB numbers were taken from the number of working employees as of June 2019. However, the amount that are authorized is greater.  If the PLCB were fully staffed, they would be 65% BELOW average in sales per employee. Filling over 1000 current vacancies might cause the PLCB to not be able to meet the amount of payout revenues requested by the administration.

That of course, would require the PLCB to variably screw the citizens that much harder just to keep them afloat. In that scenario, it is better for them to have less people on the sales floor. What a way to run a business!

PLCB workers, staff, administrators, board members, and your supporters in the Legislature: tell me why we need this bloated, under performing jobs program?

We are not safer, we are not better served and we are not satisfied. Privatize.