Layoffs begin at Fry’s; jobless claims decline
Fry’s Electronics has detailed the layoffs it has planned for some of its operations after the iconic consumer electronics retailer decided to cease its operations.
The longtime tech retailer closed all its stores two weeks ago. The San Jose-based company said coronavirus-linked economic woes and online shopping forced it to pull the plug on operations.
Fry’s so far has laid off 148 workers in San Jose, according to official notices it filed with the state Employment Development Department.
“The company will be terminating active and previously furloughed employees at the Fry’s facility located at 600 E. Brokaw Road in San Jose as a result of the permanent closure and shutdown of the facility and the company’s business as a whole,” Randy Fry, the company’s president, wrote in the notice. “This termination of employees is expected to be permanent.”
At the time of its closure, Fry’s was operating more than a dozen stores across California. So far, layoff notices reflected only two stores in the Bay Area.
Ups and downs of jobless claims
Initial unemployment claims dropped below 100,000 last week in California for the second straight week, federal labor officials reported Thursday.
Bad weather hampered hiring across the U.S., leading to a rise in weekly claims.
Since the onset of the lockdowns in early 2020, California has posted weekly jobless claims well above 100,000 for 45 out of 48 weeks.
During the week that ended Feb. 27, California workers filed about 88,130 initial claims for unemployment, down 2,340 from the 90,470 claims filed in the week that ended Feb. 20, the U.S. Labor Department reported.
Nationwide, initial jobless claims totaled 745,000 last week, up 9,000 from the 736,000 claims filed the prior week.
Though the pace of layoffs has eased since the year began, they remain high by historical standards. Before the virus flattened the U.S. economy a year ago, applications for unemployment aid had never topped 700,000 nationwide in any week, even during the Great Recession.
All told, 4.3 million Americans are receiving traditional state unemployment benefits. Counting supplemental federal unemployment programs that were established to soften the economic damage from the virus, an estimated 18 million people are collecting some form of jobless aid.
Adelson empire ends in Vegas
Las Vegas Sands is selling the iconic Venetian casino resort and its Sands Expo and Convention Center for $6.25 billion, withdrawing from gambling operations on the Las Vegas Strip after changing the nature of the casino business there and just about everywhere else.
The name of the Venetian, the expo center as well as the Palazzo, the Sands’ luxury casino and resort that is part of the same complex, will remain, and the company’s headquarters will stay in Las Vegas.
But the company led by Sheldon Adelson until his death this year effectively will cease U.S. operations. Under Adelson, the company’s focus turned to Asia years ago, where revenue eventually outpaced even the operations on the Las Vegas Strip.
Under the two-part deal announced Wednesday, VICI Properties will buy the casino and resort and all assets associated with the Venetian Resort Las Vegas and the Sands Expo for $4 billion. And Apollo Global Management will acquire the operations of the Venetian for $2.25 billion.
The global pandemic broadsided Las Vegas, shuttering the Strip where Las Vegas Sands has been the biggest operator for years. Sales growth vanished last March as infections spread across the U.S. The company posted a quarterly loss of almost $300 million in January.
The sale comes just two months after the death of Adelson, who transformed the landmark Las Vegas casino that was once a hangout of Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack into a towering Italian-inspired complex.
Adelson reframed the target audience in Vegas, focusing on conventioneers and even families. He recognized that the real potential was not on the casino floor, as it was in the 1960s, but at the hotels, resorts and convention centers that surround them.
is one of the largest Mexican American communities in the United States — has had 388.
With more than 52,000 virus-related deaths, California has recorded the most of any state, but about average per capita. At Continental, the brutal reality of the death toll hits the gut first, the eyes second.
The workers’ burden
The trailer was cool and unusually empty. Eleven bodies were lined up on the right and seven on the left, all in cardboard boxes. The names were written in black marker on the flaps of the lids. The tallest stacks were four high, each box separated by a strip of plywood.
Victor Hernandez helped push a new one in, the 19th body. He was one of the newest employees of Continental Funeral Home.
Hernandez, 23, had been a chef at a sushi restaurant but lost his job during the state’s shutdown. Out of work for months, he went to the 7-Eleven across the street from the funeral home one day and saw the sign that Maldonado had posted at the corner: “Now Hiring!”
He started a few weeks ago, making $15 an hour, plus overtime. The coworker who helped him push the stretcher down the middle of the trailer, Daniel Murillo, 23, also was hired recently. He used to work at McDonald’s.
“I’m not going to lie: The first day I had nightmares,” Hernandez said. “It makes me appreciate life a lot more now. I see my parents, my sisters ... I see them differently than I did before. I’ve got to cherish them.”
Firefighters, nurses, doctors, paramedics, police officers — the first responders who make up the nation’s coronavirus front lines have been celebrated throughout the pandemic.
But in hard-hit cities, funeral home workers have been invisible last responders. They always have done the work no one wants to, but they do it now to an extreme. The virus has exhausted them, pushed some to quit and infected them, too. They view themselves as working-class emergency workers in a specialized, misunderstood field.
“I feel like for me this job was a calling,” said Brianna Hernandez, 26, a manager and apprentice embalmer. “Most of my friends and family are like, ‘You’re crazy.’ No one wants to talk about death. It’s going to happen to any of us, at any time, at any moment.”
Maldonado, Continental’s owner, said about 25% of the employees at her funeral homes in California have tested positive for the virus, but that none had been infected from handling bodies. Still, she has largely stayed away from relatives and fellow worshippers at her church.
“I’m not able to go to anybody’s house because I feel that I have the virus with me and I’m going to take it,” Maldonado said. “So for me, I just go home, take a shower and stay home.”
The numbers overwhelm
The calendar Maldonado keeps at her desk ran out of space in the pandemic. She had to tape extra columns to the bottom of the pages to add time slots, one of scores of small improvisations. One day recently, she had 12 funerals at her four Los Angeles-area locations. The next day, she had 13.
Maldonado and her managers estimate the total number of bodies at Continental’s East Los Angeles site most days at about 260.
Over the past 10 weeks, the office phones were flooded with hundreds of calls, so she turned the weekend answering service into a daily operation. She had the tables and the counters removed from the cafeteria where grieving relatives used to gather; after cooling units were installed, the space, like the chapel, was converted into a makeshift morgue. The large whiteboard on an office wall was built for 22 names of those who had perished. Now it has more than 150, and there are other bulletin boards filled up on other walls.
Two of the names were Ernestino and Luisa Hoyos.
They had been married nearly 40 years. He was 63 and a gardener. She was 60 and worked at an adult care facility for older people. They bought a house in Fontana big enough for the entire family to live together, including their children and grandchildren.
Luisa Hoyos worked at the adult care facility with her daughter. One of their co-workers infected Hoyos and her daughter, family members said, and they brought the virus home to Fontana. Hoyos and her husband were taken to the same hospital and eventually put in the same room. She died first, on Jan. 13; he died Jan. 16.
Just as they had shared a hospital room, the Hoyoses shared a funeral. At Continental, double funerals — for husbands and wives, fathers and sons, mothers
and daughters — have become commonplace.
“There are really no words to describe what we’re going through,” said the couple’s daughter, Anayeli Hoyos, 38. “I know COVID(-19) is going to go away, but we’re marked. We’re marked for the rest of our lives.”
Those who remain
Death has been quick in East Los Angeles, but mourning waits. The delays — for the body to be picked up from a hospital, for an open date for a funeral — last weeks.
Vicenta Bahena, 54, contracted the virus at a coin laundry. Everyone in her household was infected, including her longtime partner, Serafin Salgado, 47, a dump truck driver.
All recovered except Bahena, who was born in Iguala, Mexico, and raised three sons.
She died Jan. 26 at a hospital in Inglewood.
Salgado initially had thought Bahena’s body would be taken to the funeral home the day after she died at the hospital. But he called Continental and was told it would take weeks.
“They told me that they have so many bodies that they couldn’t help me yet,” Salgado said.
Bahena finally arrived at Continental more than two weeks after she died.
“I want to rest and stop thinking that she’s in the cold while I’m warm at home,” Salgado said.
He and Bahena had been together three decades but never legally married. They had planned to marry this year. Recently at Continental, in a hallway marked by so much death, near a row of empty upright coffins, there was a glimpse of life, on a hanger.
It was Bahena’s wedding dress, wrapped in plastic, awaiting her funeral.