yes. very. I went from having enough to pay my rent to barely making ends meet.and my 8 hour shifts are now 7 and once a week i go in 3 hours later than i usually would. This is rediculous, and yet my gm hires MORE people, which gets the hours divided even more. You can only cut the same chunk so many times before you just have a 10000000 piece mess.

I sure feel adjusted. My hours have been cut pretty sharply (from my point of view). I was barely getting by before with paying my bills and rent and now its going to be tougher. Thank gods I have another job which helps some but I really couldn't afford the hour cut at all.

We were already short staffed as it was (or so it felt) and now its that much worse. We changed our store hours to cut down on payroll but that also means a cut to my check - and thus less money for food, rent and bills. Its a class A snafu.

The other thing that will be challenging is the same amount of work (paperwork, ordering, and what not) with more floor hours, and less time in general. Some of it just might not get done or it will get done off the clock. Yes the cut in hours will save on payroll and the magic bottom line but it won't help productivity at all. And less floor presence of employees can and probably will effect csi - and my theory is that it won't effect it in a positive way. Seeing as some borders employees have been pinned for CSI in the past this fills me with dread.

our GM had the bright idea of "making it as painless as possible" by making harder cuts to the people whose schedules are the most locked in. So we in IPT are losing 2 hours a week. Still have to get everything done in the 35 hours of course while covering the hours cut from the rest of the staff (maybe they'll take pity on us and cut store hours).

And our store is on the Corporate Shit List for not getting enough people signed up for the Bribe Card -- it has been communicated to us that if we can't get The Numbers up over 50% there might not be any raises next year (!). (Doublespeak award of the week is in the news story about the layoffs in Ann Arbor: "The company said the enormous success of its new Borders Rewards customer loyalty program stifled earnings." Is this not brilliant?? If Orwell were alive today he'd be rolling over in his grave.)

And they beat us up over the CSI scores -- but of course that's what they're for. BINC treats any response other than a 5 as a zero -- so there are four ways to fail for one way to pass. And when you only get 4 responses per week anybody with a Statistics 100 course behind them will tell you the results are meaningless anyway.

Other than that, things are just peachy.

Ah, yes...using that HSA. Dealing with how that all operates as well as trying to explain it to customers are high on my list of things about working at Borders that I am most definitely not going to miss. I wonder if the mavens who thought up the HSA have even a marginal clue how explaining and redeeming it will clog the checkout lines then, not to mention that slight drawback of draining the company's profits even more with both the HSA's drain and that of pissed off customers who walk out.

I'm inclined to wonder if one couple that I had buy over $100 worth of stuff on an inactive card won't be among those furious that they have nothing at the end of the year. Yes, I explained precisely why they would have nothing when they told me they have no email after I got the then-new email & phone prompt indicating they'd never activated the card.

Should be interesting how all the uproar will be dealt with at that most uproarious season of the year.

Our IPT had hours cut as well. And now that we've got masses of people wanting summer reading titles (and more people in the store during the day because school is out) the cuts have gotten fun.