That sounds like poor management at that particular KM, Lisa. The one around here seems to do okay with the automated thingamagigies.
Those machines can be awfully intimidating. After all, if you’re checking out your own stuff, you’re the one responsibile for any delays. So if people are waiting behind you - well, all I can tell you is that it makes me nervous. What if I can’t read the screen right? Can’t find a button? Can’t figure out how to pay? That’s why I’m glad they do have someone ‘babysitting’ those lanes.
From what I gather based on personal experience K-Mart is going down in flames mostly because they treat their employees like crap. My brother worked for the massive distribution center in Morrisville PA along with my good friend who is still there. Tales of mismanagement have been flowing from those two since the beginning. It makes me laugh sometimes, but more often than not I find myself getting pissed off. How short-sighted do you have to be to realize that you screwed the pooch on relations with your employees? When the guys are coming home every night frustrated and totally unwilling to give anything more than the bare minimum because they feel management treats them badly its time to rework the organization.
Bongmaster, considering that the tales of Wal-Mart screwing its employees are abundant (despite Zette’s dad’s experience to the contrary), I think the significant difference is that Wal-Mart runs a tight ship, and K-Mart has a culture of sloppiness and disorganization.
And this is why K-Mart is already dead, dan; it just hasn’t quite stopped moving yet. You can’t undo something like that in a year; it took a lot longer than that for that culture to be established, and it would take a lot longer than that for it to be rooted out. Only K-Mart doesn’t have that much time.
Lisa, in the local K-Marts, they did put in four self-scan stations to be supervised by the one store clerk. But like you said, the sale prices never rang up, and of course K-Mart is more likely than most stores to have items on the shelf that don’t even have their barcoded tags, so if you find while scanning that you have one of those, you’re out of luck. Especially because the only thing the clerk supervising the self-scans could do about problems was point you to the regular checkouts, which meant that you’d just wasted time by trying the self-scan in the first place. Aaargh.
Well, with any luck they’ll have a Woolworth’s-type sale (70% off!) before they really go under.
How long do corporate bankruptcies last, anyway? That is, how long before the creditors can have at 'em again? Is it only a year? You’re right, that’s surely not enough time.
I look into my Crystal Ball ™. I see the future. I see another name in place of K-Mart. It is…it is…WAL-MART! Zette, the reason your dad is treated so well there is because he’s not a teenager. I had several friends who worked at Wal-Mart Back in The Day and they all ran screaming from it’s hellish clutches and into the rosy grasps of your Food Lions and Harris Teeters. Little things like demanding that they be there 5 minutes after school lets out and stay until 11. Like working 12-hour days on the weekend. Like doing every frickin’ job in the store up to and including toilet scrubber.
Although I will always remember K-Mart fondly as the first word I learned to read.
Like its been said, Walmart runs a tight ship. The srotes are pretty clean, bright, and at my local one the lines are rarely too big. Some Walmarts have bad management, its the nature of the beast.
Now that you mention it I think you’re right about the tight ship stuff. Walmart may suck in certain respects, but at least management won’t allow the rampant disorganization you find at Kmart, at least in the Philadelphia area. At Kmart the morale of the average warehouse employee was so bad that no matter what management does everyone hates them already…talk about an uphill battle.
I think K-Mart’s demise began with the words of Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman in “Rain Man”
quote: “K-Mart Sucks”
Oh and Guinastasia - I have the same types of nightmares (not K-mart related though).