First of all, if corporate wasn’t paying their vendors, wouldn’t we have heard of the non-payments already. That will show up somewhere on somebody’s books that Giant Eagle has outstanding debt with them. Merchants and vendors do offer a line of credit up to a certain point, but will cut you off for non-payment and we would have saw a huge decrease in inventory if they weren’t paying merchants and vendors. There would have been lawsuits like crazy by now too.
Now with vendors like Sherwood and Sysco, Giant Eagle has them paid store level. Whenever they come in to drop off whatever the hell they are delivering, they get paid store level. They have to go to the customer service desk and have them print out a money order for the stuff they deliver. There’s a button on the Western Union money order machine that is labeled “vendor” on it. You hit that button and key in the amount owed on the invoice and print it out for them. The store manager has to sign the payee line and fill in the store address. The only reason I know this is because I used to work the service desk and print the money orders out for the delivery guys.
Now, the other stuff you see coming into the store, corporate pays for that and payments are usually handled by the warehouse receiver in Bedford, Ohio or Washington, PA. They’re the ones handling payments to the folks dropping off the food. This is why it looks to you that they aren’t paying them.
If someone was cooking the books at Giant Eagle, a lot of people would have been arrested by now and it would have been front page news. Giant Eagle as well as other businesses have external auditors and fraud examiners looking at their books too. They also have fraud software installed on their accounting system and wouldn’t you think someone would have caught all of this by now?
I do know however, Giant Eagle is not doing well financially. They have lost money to competition and e-commerce. The latest annual loss in revenue that I’ve heard was $500 million a year and they just slipped under $9 billion in value. Coupled with that, the company has made a lot of stupid decisions on their part that cost them money too. For example, pretty soon they’ll be changing their fuel perks program where now instead of them expiring every 60 days, it’s the 1st Tuesday of every month. Right now, it’s only offered to employees, but pretty soon they’ll roll it out to customers and customers will be p-ss-d about it and will go elsewhere. They got rid of loss prevention at many of their stores which is a huge no-no and they wonder why shrinkage is so high at some stores. They allow customers to scam the complaint line so that they could get free $25 gift cards. There’s a bunch of customers that go around chronically complaining over the stupidest b---s--- ever because they know they can get $25 out of it. It’s very common to see these individuals coming into the store with $200 worth of these gift cards and they load up on groceries. At one store alone, I’d see at least 10-15 customers in one shift with all of these customer satisfaction gift cards totaling to about $200 and sometimes more. They are scamming the tar out of the company too doing that and corporate is too stupid to see that. Corporate also cut a lot of corners too that cost them money and business to.
Corporate doesn’t care anymore. They know that they might not survive much longer. This is why they laid off a lot of people at corporate, shut down a warehouse here in Ohio, then in the past 7 years, closed at least 20-25 stores which is bad. They haven’t even opened any new stores either lately too-with the exception of the 2 Market District stores (which from what I heard isn’t doing to hot either-this is why they sc-apped plans on opening any more of those). I’d give them another 5 years before they either shutter or get taken over.