TORONTO, Feb. 19 (UPI) -- The Canadian chain of Loblaw supermarkets announced plans Tuesday to reduce losses of $1 billion to mismanagement and theft, The Globe and Mail reported.
At a shareholder meeting in Toronto, Chief Operating Officer Dalton Philips said the company has begun doing criminal background checks on people seeking jobs, and so far this year, 7.5 percent of them have been turned away because of their records.
He said the company was also trying to stem the "massive" turnover rate, in part by offering employees 10 percent shopping discounts, the report said.
Philips said a test program in the last quarter of 2007 would be applied chain-wide, in which prices of food would be marked down the day before their expiry dates. He said the test in the last quarter in 15 stores resulted in a 30 percent decline in throw-away rates.
The company's share levels have been falling for the past year along with its operating profit, the newspaper said.
The company Web site said it employs more than 139,000 full-time and part-time employees in more than 1,000 corporate and franchised stores across Canada.
