Fish

Most are unionized but not all. Kroger's union is also just not very good. I never met a union rep that wasn't friends with management. They do very little to actually represent workers. Also, Kroger has such a high turnover rate that newer employees will usually vote to approve any contract that gives them a raise, no matter how small.

These contracts last for a few years, so as other retailers raise wages to compete with each other, Kroger workers are stuck in their old contract until it expires. If anything, Kroger's union results in lower wages for the workers compared to other grocery retailers.

UFCW is further weakened by "right-to-work" laws that give union benefits to non-union employees. In my experience, many of the people who opt out of union membership are brainwashed by conservatism and are anti-union. They are also often the people who stay at Kroger the longest.

In addition, Kroger has dozens of "districts", each with their own contract. These contracts are all negotiated at different times so that if there is a strike, Kroger can send managers from other districts and hire scabs until the strike is over. This prevents strikes from ever really hurting Kroger's bottom line.

So, to answer your question, Kroger is technically unionized but it's union is pretty ineffective. Kroger basically operates the same as Walmart or Meijer but with a handful of union policies that they have to follow or they might get fined for a union violation.

With that being said, I am still very pro union. The above is just based on my own experience, having worked there for too many years.

Good luck planting drugs on a skeleton with no shoes

The Redbox Crisis

Now I'm glad that I made disposable email addresses for most of my accounts a couple of months ago. With all the data breaches, it seems that email aliases are essential. I use SimpleLogin.

For the sake of simplicity, I also bought a domain to use for all those email addresses

FYI it's not gonna run on Windows. But you probably already know that.

Don't forget Grayjay (or anything FUTO makes in general)

I don't know about federated, but there is SearXNG, which is FOSS. There are plenty of public instances or you can run your own instance.

If you are willing to pay money ($5-10 USD) then I recommend Kagi. In my opinion Kagi is worth the money, as it it provides much better results and has a lot more features. Like SearXNG, it is also ad-free.

Like what? Is there one that functions well and isn't owned by a megacorporation or billionaire? I haven't been able to find one.

I tried Tidal and the app is absolute dogshit.

Have you never heard of enshitifcation that is driven by profit seeking?

I've been using Kagi and really like it so far. It's not good for local stuff, but afaik only Google and Bing have the resources and userbase for things like maps and reviews. It's designed to be an ad-free 'premium' search engine and only earns revenue from users paying for membership.