Extraordinary bonuses of up to four thousand crowns per capita have already been paid to Kaufland employees and are also being prepared by Albert. Kaufland set aside 55 million crowns for the payment of rewards, in the spring it was fifty million. “With an extraordinary reward, we would like to thank the employees for their enormous efforts,” says Stefan Hoppe, CEO of Kaufland.
Albert does the same. “We will pay the extraordinary reward as a thank you to the operating employees in the stores for the second time this year and will run throughout the fourth quarter,” said Albert spokesman Jiří Mareček. According to him, the costs of this are in the order of tens of millions of crowns a month. In terms of employees, it will be up to three thousand crowns more per month.
As for other retail chains, they have not announced any specific financial increase per employee – at least for the time being. “As part of the first wave of the pandemic, Lidl paid an extraordinary reward to all employees and temporary workers in stores and logistics centers, which was part of the March payout. It was a one-time investment exceeding 37 million crowns, “recalls only, for example, the spokesperson of the Lidl chain Iveta Barabášová.
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According to people in the industry, the situation in retail chains in terms of employees is now different from the spring one. In the spring, the chains lacked more knowledge than they do now. This affects, among other things, the overflow of operators and operators of restaurants and pubs, who decided to reduce their trades in the autumn and winter due to new measures, into retail. So far, there has been no recurrence of the spring attack of customers on stores, which has also put a lot of pressure on stores.
“Wage increases alone are not happening at the moment. These are rather symbolic amounts of around five to ten crowns per hour. This is also due to the fact that in the spring the fear was significantly higher across the population than now. Due to these concerns, employees did not want to go to the stores, now this is no longer the case and they take it as part of their work, “says František Jareš from the Student agency, which supplies manpower to retail chains, among other things.