To think that since covid happened some businesses have 'got lazy and stayed lazy'

[Ilovechocolate87]

DH and i used to have an expression a couple of years back 'because covid' which we used when we thought a company was just using the virus as an excuse for not doing something properly or making unnecessary cutbacks.

But even now it seems that this is STILL continuing, but for no legitimate reason!

Some examples include;
-Our local bank shutting at 3pm...every day of the week.Crap for 9-5 working people like DH!

• No fireworks display at center parcs, which is a shame as it was really good and atmospheric over the lake.
• Soft play at our local sealife centre sitting there unused and wasted...such a shame as there is nothing wrong with it.
• Fitting rooms have been scrapped at sainsburys and asda (maybe elsewhere too?) so there is nowhere to try on clothes, resulting in either having to order online and have the expense and bother of posting it back if its not right (which it often isn't) or travelling to return it, neither of which are very good for the environment either, with all that plastic packaging and fuel!)

Has anyone else noticed that it just seems like SOME businesses/companies 'can't be bothered' anymore and are just doing the minimum possible? And the most frustrating thing is that as usual, they make the cutbacks, but the prices keep on going up!!

I think they use that as justification and you can't blame them when there's threads with a huge backlash about people WFH potentially falling out of bed five minutes before work and sitting on the sofa in their PJs all day.

The calls I have had with the dogs and the babies and the doorbells didn't feel like a productive atmosphere TBH. But for people who have a home office where they can shut the door and an empty house it's possibly true.

I haven’t managed a face to face with GP since start of Covid. Agree it could also be possibly down to shortage of GP’s, but 6 months ago my surgery agreed to extend their catchment area and take on another 2000 patients! Even less likely to get a face to face appointment now.

That made me laugh thank you, as this a rather depressing thread.

It was right an appropriate for a certain amount of time to follow covid restrictions. There was a tipping point where restrictions (and indeed even precautions) actually do much harm than good. This was acknowledged and recognised by SAGE right from the beginning. At that point indirect risks (and deaths) from covid restrictions became greater.

We long ago hit that point even for most clinically vulnerable because they need access to healthcare most and backlogs therefore affect them to a greater degree too.

I find it frustrating that it's an either / or mentality now, with people saying restrictions were wrong retrospectively. Or saying we aren't doing enough still.

Its more of an in the middle position that was needed - I think we got reasonably close to that but the uk population was more vulnerable from the outset due to demographics, poverty and ethnic mix.

We could have done better, but I doubt to the degree that many think tbh.

Where I work things are less efficient because there were loads of redundancies and reorganisation to save money. I'm sure that is happening everywhere. Nothing to do with people working from home or lockdown.

At this point it does seem a bit strange when things are still closed "because covid". About NHS - more staff than ever seem to be back in the hospital as people dont want to pay high energy bills working from home. I think some changes are here to stay because they are more efficient (telephone appointments being used more) especially with nhs staffing problems.

It's fairly trivial in the great scheme of things but my local gym stopped providing towels due to covid and have never reinstated them. I know it's easy to take my own towel but I used to like to shove a swimsuit into the corner of my bag and then if I had time on the way home from work I'd pop in for a quick swim. Covid was an excuse for them to cut the cost of providing them.

What's that got to do with covid or working from home though. They obviously are not at home.

Yes.

@TwoLeftSocksWithHoles

BA HA HA!

Yes, undisclosed home working meaning that information records cannot be accessed by staff and/or their technology fails so that information they send is inaccessible because they havent succeeded in proving the service via their home computer (probably company firewalls have prevented this and more thab 2.5 years after the pandemic started they havent sorted this out.

Customer complaint services and ombudmen have such lengthy delays that by the time any complaint is dealt with it will likely be too late to be of any help.

Numerous obstacles to overcome to see a GP (such as being available to answer the phone all day in order tobe triaged to see if you will be worthy of a visit, in which case unless you can attend exactly when they offer an appointment that day you are told to ring again another day and start the process all over again.

Two hour long queues at the local health centre for blood tests when the wait used to be no more than 20 minutes and often you were seen in less than 5 minutes ( and this is not a measure to improve covid safety as now the waiting room is packed full to bursting and most of those waiting are elderly or look like they have health problems so quite vulnerable.

Customers directed to online forms for many services where lengthy questionnaires have to be filled in to attend an appointment, for example. This was typically work that was previously done by the appointment/reception staff so it saves the company’s staff time getting customers to do it (hence having found they could do this since Covid, they are not stopping now).

My daughter was discharged from speech therapy after 4 appointments because the service was overrun with a huge backlog so that was all they could offer despite the therapist knowing they had not resolved her difficulties.

I could go on and on but thoroughly sick of it.

Totally agree, customer service and comfort has gone completely out the window. I was at a new trampoline park recently and the only way to order drinks was to scan a QR code and pay online. No option to just queue at the till and tap your card, which is so much easier.

I agree with this. The covid pandemic was the peak of a certain type of living and thinking. People genuinely expected the whole world to stop to 'protect' them and couldn't, for whatever reason, see the very obvious consequences of that. They are now learning that life happens no matter how 'safe' you want to be and that's not a bad lesson to learn at all. I'm really hopeful that once people get over the psychological torture inflicted on them by people too fearful to carry on with existence, they start to develop a much more gung-ho attitude than in previous generations and start to sort shit out once and for all.

totally agree OP

@oldbrownjug you want me to "take responsibility for" my son's crohns disease? Rather than take him to hospital I should do what exactly? Let him die at home? And my mum's foot operation (the one that would help her stay mobile and providing care for my dad, there y saving the state thousands), should I just have a go on the kitchen table?

How do people know that the inefficiencies are anything to do with home working? Does it not occur to you that companies are employing less staff? It's an easy way to blame (usually low paid staff) rather than the well paid management/owners that have decided to make people redundant in the hope that they can make more money.

Isn’t this the reason for the most part?the gp thing is maddening though.
actually all adequate healthcare is really really fucking shit.especially social and mental health care.but this decline was happening anyway under the government.so it might have quickened the pace but we would have got here anyway under them so they can stop using covid as an excuse.

The check out by 9am and can't check in until after 4 at certain holiday parks was introduced for additional cleaning and hasn't been lifted - it means you effectively lose a day of your holding and are rushing round to pack the night before you leave. assume it's because they are saving money on cleaning staff and paying fewer people to do it.

Customer service has all but evaporated across the board.

A lot of businesses are trying hard to keep costs down and cutting staff is part of that. Maybe if consumers were willing to pay for good service we'd have it?

I work for a charity. No one wants to see charities spend lots on staff or admin, they want to see most of the money going into whatever the charitable output is. So we deliver on a shoestring and now, surprise, surprise have trouble recruiting and retaining staff.

Agree with you OP. Nothing fucking works these days. I approach all life admin and health related tasks with low expectations. If I manage to actually a) speak to someone and b) get a solution for an issue I am frankly amazed because it happens so rarely.

One thing that really bugs me is supermarket home deliveries. Lots of things are out of stock, deliveries are often late or cancelled and when they do turn up the stuff isn't in bags and the drivers either refuse to carry it up the flight of stairs to my apartment or they mightily complain about it. They stopped coming into the building because covid and now they just don't want to.

Of course it can. I don't have a landline at home, and there's no facility to route calls from work to my mobile. I'd have to give my private number to people, and that's not hapenning.
Emails only in my job!

I think they use that as justification and you can't blame them when there's threads with a huge backlash about people WFH potentially falling out of bed five minutes before work and sitting on the sofa in their PJs all day.

Would it be better if all home workers got up two hours before the start of their work day, dressed in suits and spent an hour hanging onto their wardrobe rail, and swaying from side-to-side to recreate a commute?

What's it to you if home workers want to maximise their opportunity to sleep, and dress in what they find comfortable at home?

I get the point about interruptions, background noise and so on, but what you're talking about can't possibly affect anyone's ability to do their actual job.

@Fattoushi that's outrageous. Just put a phone app on your computer and plug a headset into your USB port.

I don't see how we just take the attitude of 'not accepting it'. It's a force that we can't just object to!

Yes, this about sums it up. It's not a choice based situation we're in. Some of the complaints are quite understandable: not the ones about people needing to get back in the office or being too lazy to work for NMW anymore, obviously, but plenty are. I have an ND child myself so we're familiar with the NHS waiting list dance, for example. But there are still wider structural forces at play here that cannot be opted out of.

Some of these problems can be solved by making work more worth it, of course. There'll be some of the people who are doing customer service jobs whilst looking after their kids who'd prefer to use childcare if it were free or their jobs paid enough for it, for example. But on a grand scale, we still don't have enough workers to do all the things we want doing. And some of the solutions to attracting those who aren't in the labour force back will involve employers providing more flexibility too, which like it or not is going to look like people having more choice about where they work.

A big part of the problem, I think, is that we never had the societal conversations about how Brexit and covid restrictions were inevitably going to have this impact. It's obvious why that couldn't happen with Brexit, Project Fear blah blah. But our political class also failed to accurately present covid and our response to it as a choice of which shit sandwich we were going to eat. There was never a proper societal discussion about the cost of restrictions. So people are having an unpleasant realisation that part of the approach we chose involves what we're experiencing now.

Perhaps there might be less frustration if there'd been greater understanding and awareness that this is the evil we were choosing. Informed consent, if you like. That was missing.