I’m a part-time cart pusher at Wal-mar Supercenter. I work 20 hours a week for $8 an hour. That’s just to give you some background.
In every conceivable way, my Wal-Mart is an utter abomination. Now I realize that’s true of pretty much every Wal-Mart, but allow me to rant a little.
First of all, for the past 5 weeks, I’ve been the only cart pusher present on Saturday night. Now, some of you may not realize just how huge and busy a Super Wal-Mart is, but at the one I work at, we probably have > 400 people coming every hour on Saturday Nights. Add that to the fact that there is around 2000 carts for this store and you can see what the problem is. There is just no way for me to keep up with it.
The reason I’m the only one there is because the guy who should be there working with me has extracurricular stuff at his school. He told these managers WEEKS in advance that he wouldn’t be available to work on Saturday nights, but the managers neglected to schedule a replacement for him. They do this week after week, despite both us telling them repeatedly that they need to schedule someone else. So because of their ineptness, it’s just me by myself on Saturday nights.
Like I said, I can’t keep up with it; it’s just too much for one person to handle. In addition to being the only one there, when I come in there’s usually no carts in either cart bay in the store. This is because the guys who work saturday mornings usually leave 2-3 hours before I come in. So for that time, there are NO cart pushers at all for the store. So what happens is that there’s hundreds of carts in the parking lot, but almost no carts inside, available for the customers. This understandbly irritates them.
As a cart pusher, my other job is to take out heavy merchandise to customer’s cars and load it up for them (when they can’t do it themselves). However, since again, I’m the only one there, they may have to wait long periods of time if I’m already helping other customers with their stuff. You may say, “Why can’t another employee help these customers out if you’re busy?”
To that I say, “hahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.” The deal is, nobody else WILL come out to do that because no one cares. At all.
We have a cart pushing machine at the store I work at. It’s great because it can push around 45 carts at a time. Whereas I can only push in about 12 at a time. I could push in mroe than that, actually, but more than 12 carts is impossible to control. This cart machine then, makes me about 4 times as efficient. You would think that it would be in the management’s interest to keep that machine running, but every time it breaks, it takes them 4-6 WEEKS to fix it. They are well aware that it’s broken, they simply don’t care enough to do anything. And no, it isn’t me who’s been breaking the machine. In every case it’s been the overnight stockers. They keep overloading the machine and burning out its motor.
Let’s talk about the store’s appearence. In general, the word I would use is “filthy”. There is merchandise spread out all over the floor, everywhere. We simply don’t have enough people to pick things up after customers. Another problem is the fact that the swere line running out of the store is hopelessly backed up. This means that outside the store, there is a horrible smell that one can’t escape. It’s been there for the entire five months I’ve been working there. Again, management knows but doesn’t care.
Because we are perpetually short-handed, customers have to wait ~ 20-30 minutes to checkout. And since our cashiers have to page a CSM to do just about anything, they make our customers wait even longer until the CSM can get there and do whatever. Usually, it takes about 4 pages to get a CSM to a checkstand. As you can imagine, this is very frustrating for the customers.
Another, more minor deal, but it illustrates how our store is run: We have two entrances and exits in the store, each on one side of the store. On one of these sides, the sensor for the door broke, meaning that it wouldn’t open at all. It broke before Christmas. It was just last week that someone finally repaired it. So from Dec 16-February 20, one of the entrances didn’t even open!
To sum up, because we are short-handed and run by a completely inept management, everything about the store is done horribly wrong. And yes I am qutting soon. In fact, March 7 is my last day at this store.
Your complaints are the same reasons I don’t go to Wal Mart.