Wal-Mart logic; please explain

The Wal-Mart where I work is understaffed. Customers frequently complain to me that they were unable to find a sales associate to help them find a particular item. In the evenings and on weekends, it is not unusual for customers to stand in line at the checkout counter for a half hour or more- sometimes they wait for as long as an hour.

The Wal-Mart where I work is extremely profitable. Our store made $10million in profits before it had been open a year, and the customers, and their money, keep rolling in.

The Wal-Mart where I work is laying people off. I’m low enough on the seniority totem pole that my job may very well be one of the ones cut, so, yeah, I’m worried.

I asked a low-level management type why our extremely profitable and short-staffed store is laying off. His answer started with “I’m beginning to see the vision…” Apparently, some corporate bean counter figured out that it takes a given number of associates to move a given amount of product out the door in a given period of time, and our store has more than that given number of associates.

Damn corporate drone.

I hope he makes that his mantra when, due to the fact that we don’t have enough maintainance associates, he’s the one who has to clean up the melted ice cream off the floor because increasing numbers of customers abandon their cartloads of groceries when they get sick of waiting in line and decide to go shop at another store.

The revised Wal-Mart philosophy is much worse than when the old man was alive. Sam Walton believed in spending some money to make money. The new management would automate everything and control it all out of Bentonville if they could.

Can you find another job? Wal-Mart is a soulsucking pit of Hell.

The Semi-Insig Other worked there (Vision Center) for a while. I’d sell drugs on the street before i’d let him do that again. (Not that my drugs are good for much, but i’ve got a LOT of them. Wonder what Lomotil is going for on the black market?)

Ahhh, and the cycle continues. Once upon a time (when I was merely a cloud, and not yet a Saint) Kmart reigned supreme. They drove Main Street mom-and-pop stores into the ground, amidst much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Then cometh the mighty Walmart with tneir newness and bigness and incredible mass purchasing power, and they did overwhelm the Kmarts with their twenty and thirty year old, dirty, ill-stocked stores staffed with surly clerks, and ground them as the dust beneath their wheels. Now comes Thea Logica , like the canary in the coal mine, to give us early notice that the new King is already over-reaching, and the chinks in the armour are starting to show.

OK, not a literary classic. but I hope I made my point. Eat Shit, Walmart . Your days are numbered.

One doesn’t treat their “associates” the way you have described your treatment at Wal-Mart. That’s why that term is such an evil joke. Call people what they are, Wal-Mart… EMPLOYEES.

(Better yet, call them what you really of them as, mindless worker drones that are draining corporate profits until the day they can be replaced by robots)

Are you being facetious? I hope so.

Sounds like someone drank the Sam’s Choice Concentrated Artificially-Flavored Soft Drink (Compare to Kool-AidTM).

Why should they get more associates? The people are willing to stand in line for half an hour or more, so making the lines shorter for the customers is not going to make Wal-Mart any more money. Those people will all be right back the next week, too. Wal-Mart would have to administer routine random beatings of their customers to get people to stop shopping there.

I have been there before when I’ve seen lines half an hour long, on very routine weekday evenings. One time I pointedly parked my cart in front of the little cashier manager’s station and walked out.

I rarely go to Wal-Mart anymore, but I’m in a minority.

Dr. J

Go towards the light, Carol Ann!
:smiley:

I don’t think that would work either.

I stopped shopping in Wal-Mart after one of their assistant managers told me it was cheaper for them to order new fish than to treat the ones they have for a totally curable ailment.

I seldom got to WalMart either and when I do, it’s as a Demo Sales Rep(I just finished a job today) or if I win a gift card/want something WalMart has. The WalMarts I work at generally don’t seem to have the same problems that was mentioned in the OP though, so I guess it depends on the WalMart itself. Always busy though.

Course WalMart is generally my least favorite place to work. K-Mart is my favorite with Albertson’s at a very close second. Walmart Destin is third(great location/good atmosphere, but it’s STILL WalMart) and Ft. Walton WalMart IS the bottom of the barrel(generally awful atmosphere).

To me WalMart is just overwhelming and I can’t stand that. That is, until I win a gift card! WHEEE! :wink:

It really does vary by Wal-Mart. There are two within shouting distance of my house. The newer one for some strange reason only draws people from east of it; the older one still draws most of the customers within shouting distance of the newer one. Why? Because the newer one is situated right at the parish line, which is apparently, to the locals, an invisible wall 250 feet high that they WILL NOT CROSS even to shop at Wal-Mart.

So the older one is crowded, filthy, long lines, trash everywhere. The newer one, the longest I’ve had to wait in line was maybe ten minutes, and it’s generally cleaner without so much stuff lying around.

But it’s clear their corporate philosophy is going down the toilet. I hope Sam comes back to haunt 'em.

SAME thing at Kmart-purposely understaff and then feed the cashier to the wolves (aka “customers”) when they get hungry.

It’s insane. And Kmart is going down the tubes-Walmart will probably follow shortly.

Oh, example of Wal-Mart Corporate Mangement Logic:

Regional Vision Center Manager (Not an optician, not even the vaguest notion of anything about optical stuff) speaking with Semi-IO, who is an ABO Certified Optician:

Mgr: I see by the weekly reports that you have not sold any of the -1.00 lenses this week. What do you plan to do to remedy that?

Optician: I plan to wait until I have a prescription for -1.00 lenses.

Mgr: That’s unacceptable. You need to have a plan to move the merchandise.

Optician: Lenses are a prescription item. I cannot substitute -1.00 lenses for anything else, and I cannot sell them without a prescruption.

Mgr: If the people in other departments had your attitude, we would have to close this store.

Optician: Tell me, do you tell the shoe department to sell someone that needs a size 12 shoe 2 pairs of size 6? No, because that DOES NOT WORK. This is a more precise issue than that.

Mgr: Isn’t there something you can do to sell more -1.00 lenses?

Optician: Here, you go poke random people in the eye with this pen, then take them to the “independent doctor of optometry” next door, and then YOU threaten to double her rent unless she writes them prescriptions for -1:00 lenses.

Mgr: That’s not funny.

Optician: Neither are you.

This is why Wal-Martians should flee at their first chance. Stupid people are running the show there.

My Wal-Mart opened about two years ago. You know the little blue baskets (with piercing metal handles) for shoppers who don’t plan to buy enough to fill up a whole cart? Well, our Wal-Mart probably only bought a dozen of them when they opened and the baskets must have had a habit of either disapearing or breaking.

One night I came in at 3:00AM and there were no blue baskets (despite there only being 3 or 4 cars in the lot). I asked the cashier about it. She just shrugged and said they might order more. They never did. It’s been over a year since I’ve seen a single basket in that shitty store.

Oh, yeah, neutron star, thanks for the reminder. I keep meaning to bring those back.

Oh, did I mention that this layoff is coming concurrent with a much-ballyhooed “price rollback” complete with Smiley-Face Robin Hood balloons?

Seems to me that the associates (we have to call the employees that, it’s in the corporate bylaws or something) are paying for the latest round of price cuts with their jobs.

A 99 Cent Store just moved in across the street, I think the potential competition may have inspired the price rollback.

I get this picture of some evil little troll in a dungeon somewhere calculating that the reduction of workforce will pay for the reduction of prices, and the increase in customer traffic brought in by the reduction in prices will more than offset the sales lost because of customers abandoning their cartloads of items they intended to purchase before they got disgusted with the long lines…

I really believe that they account for these factors.

Damn. Didn’t I just see a TV commercial full of smiling Wal-Mart employees gushing over how great a place it is to work…

I just hope that doesn’t mean that the ad that says your girlfriend will gush over her new Wal-Mart engagement ring isn’t also false. Or the one about Wal-Mart private label wine being of ultra-premium quality…

Damn.

Damn. Didn’t I just see a TV commercial full of smiling Wal-Mart employees gushing over how great a place it is to work…

I just hope that doesn’t mean that the ad that says your girlfriend will gush over her new Wal-Mart engagement ring isn’t also false. Or the one about Wal-Mart private label wine being of ultra-premium quality…

Damn.

We got rid of our baskets at Kmart, because too many customers would just throw them all over the floor at random as they left, and people were tripping over them and getting hurt.
Assholes.

Wow! Your Wal*Mart actually has a time of the day when there are only 3 or 4 cars in the lot?

I don’t think I’ve ever seen fewer than 15 cars in our local WalMart parking lot, and I’ve been there at 3AM, 4AM and 5AM. It’s the only goddamn part of the day when you can shop there without needing the ability to slide your bodily molecules between those of other people. It’s also the only time of the day when the WalMart clientele doesn’t drive my blood pressure to stratospheric levels…

The local Wal Mart always smells like a sewer (and fried chicken, even though the “eatery” is never open). The few times I’ve been there the lines were long, and there were abandoned carts everywhere. I couldn’t find what I was looking for, and the aisles were hard to navigate. I don’t go to Wal Mart often, and when I do, its always an adventure.

They also don’t like people having empty Altoids cans in your coat pocket, because they think you somehow stole them and ate a whole can of them in the thirty seconds you were in the store.