A group of female employees in London, Ont., has filed a human rights complaint against the Metro grocery chain and product-sampling company InStore Focus, alleging they were let go from their jobs as product samplers because of their age.
The seven women behind the complaint, who had worked for InStore Focus for between three and 15 years, range in age from 62 to 78. They are seeking $25,000 each in damages for “insult to dignity” and a combined $38,000 in lost wages.
According to the complaint, Mississauga, Ont.-based InStore Focus didn’t formally terminate the part-time workers, but beginning last September, the workers were told they would not be getting any hours.
Lone Thompson, 64, who filed the complaint with the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario, said she talked to her supervisor by phone to inquire about her hours for October. Thompson said she was told she would not be getting any hours, since the company is now looking for “soccer moms” and Thompson didn’t fit the profile.
Later in an e-mail, the supervisor wrote: “the mandate for Metro is their ‘target market’ so if the client is targeting a cereal for instance for children, they want someone who represents the ‘Mom’ who does most of the shopping for those kids.” Thompson then discovered a number of older employees were also not getting any hours.
“Thompson had been there 15 years and all of a sudden she’s told, ‘we need a new image,’” said Jennifer Ramsay, communications and external relations coordinator at the Human Rights Legal Support Centre, which is representing the women. “By all accounts, she had excellent performance reviews, excellent sales reports, she loved her job and was really good at it, and she was simply discarded one day.”
After making further inquiries in October, Thompson said InStore Focus attributed the layoffs to a “downturn” in business. Thompson alleges that was a “cover up.”
“When they said it was because of a downturn in business, they had two job fairs going and had also posted on Service Canada’s job site for 12 vacancies,” Thompson told Marketing.
Calls made to InStore Focus asking for comment were not returned. However, the voicemail greeting of John Baird, the company’s president, says the retail sampling division “is winding down.” In a news story by QMI Agency, Carlos Lui, the company’s vice-president of finance, said InStore Focus shut down its sample business in May.
Metro issued Marketing a statement that said “Metro does not comment on legal proceedings involving Metro or its suppliers.”
Thompson agreed marketers are within their bounds to assign a sampler based on their profile to demonstrate a particular product. “If there was a men’s deodorant and they said, ‘we need a man to demonstrate this,’ I would have said, ‘no problem.’”
But, she added, “we worked for 15 years for this company,” sampling everything from cleaning products to health and beauty to baby products. “We did in-depth, detailed research on our products and would not say anything unless we had good back-up information.”
Ramsay said she understands that, in terms of marketing, “there’s a whole range you have to take into account – looks, demographics – but certainly from what I heard from one of the women, there were lots of older shoppers and she fit right into the demographic and she got those sales.”
