Wal-Mart logic; please explain

I’m not Blonde, but i’m in Texas.

Most “WallyWorlds” here are the larger 24 hour Superstores, at least in and near the big cities. Smaller towns have regular Wal-Marts, medium sized towns have SuperStores that are not 24 hour, and large towns will generally have several, including at least one 24 hour Superstore.

No “Fred Meyer” that I have seen, but I don’t get to North Texas often. (Too close to Oklahoma, ick.)

From where I work, you can drive 3 to 7 minutes in any direction and be at a 24 hour Wal-Mart with a Sam’s next door or just across the freeway. It’s scary.

Walmart owns Asda in the UK so you can still enjoy the experience.

I shop at Asda but then again the other supermarkets in the UK are so completely awful that Asda is actually the best place to shop for food.

Is that one of them there SuperWalMarts? Or did they just add groceries (i.e, frozen/refrig. food) to an existing store?

Makes little sense to me to have a full-fledged grocery store in a WalMart. Most people consider their grocery shopping to be a trip unto itself, not something they do while at another store.

I think you are all missing the point - he’s seeing a vision of himself being fired if he doesn’t cooperate. :slight_smile:

ANyway, I have to say my local Wal-Mart is pretty good. I don’t go there very often, but I can always find people and its never too long in line.

Holy crap, this is almost exactly the same kind of discussion my cousin, a doctor, had with his supervisor in Cuba.

Supervisor: How many cases of “name your disease” have you treated this month.

Cousin: None, no one under my care came down with “disease x”.

S: That’s not good, you’re not going to meet your quota.

Of course the implications for my cousin were rather more dire. He stood to not just lose his job, but to be labeled a counter-revolutionary, which could’ve led to a whole bunch of crap, including prison. The supervisor, in a helpful tone, advised my cousin to “Make sure the quota for “disease x” was met, wink, wink, nudge, nudge.”

My cousin, who is an extremely smart man, dutifully filled out his monthly reports to meet all quotas. He used the names of whatever patients had not been in his office that month and randomly assigned them diseases and treatment.

IIRC, Gemco and K-Mart had stores that were both department and grocery combined and you know what happened to them.

I couldn’t wish a better end for Hellmart.:cool:

Going to the gun counter is usually quicker too, unless you get stuck behind someone who wants 15 keys cut.

Wal-Mart would do the same, if they could. The corporate mentality is such that those who work there must be kept on the edge of panic about losing their job. It’s theoretically to motivate them to do their best. What it acually does is make them apathetic or hostile.

Heh. A friend’s daughter got in trouble at work at Wal-Mart the other day. A large lady was looking for a package of cotton underwear in size 10. They had none on the shelves. The girl turns to her co-worker and says 'You try to talk her into two packages of size fives while I go find the 10’s that just came in." A manager caught her on the way to the back and chewed her out for making fun of the corporate culture, which states that you should sell a substitute by doubling up on an existing piece of stock to fill a need (I need a 12 pack of product A, you sell me two 6 packs instead.) By the time she got the 10’s and got back to the soles floor, the customer had gone to the front to complain…not about the joke, she thought that was funny, but about the manager stopping the kid while she was going to find the product for the customer.

Glad to know that stupid people are in charge everywhere, even in Cuba. As long as smart people can work around them, we’ll survive.

This just made my day.

dantheman, in answer to your question below:

I don’t think what Poysyn is describing is actually a super Wal-Mart. The SWMs are actually two stores in one – a full-size grocery store on one side, and a full-size Wal-Mart on the other. They’re roughly the size of Vermont. And if you don’t know your way around, it can be damn near impossible to find anything in the store.

Yeah, I’ve seen them. Most of the WalMarts I’ve ever been to added groceries after the fact, but I’ve seen one or two of the so-called Super ones.

the Wal-Mart where I work is, in fact, a SuperCenter. Which means that a lot of those customers who get fed up waiting in line and abandon there carts are abandoning cartloads of groceries. Which means, frozen goods thawing, meat and milk warming up to the temperature that makes them unsafe to put back on the shelf, ice cream melting, assorted perishables spoiling…

Clothing, housewares, sporting goods, etc. can be put back on the shelves and the store gets another crack at selling them, but the groceries that end up going bad because the customer ditched their cart are pure loss.

It does my heart good to be coming back from my break and see a cartload of groceries abandoned and spoiling in the aisle. Every dollar lost on those items represents a dollar not saved by not hiring enough cashiers to service the customers or laying them off when we’re already understaffed.

BTW, one of my co-workers was grousing in the break room last night. Seem that two months ago she asked for, and was approved, this Friday and Saturday off to attend her cousin’s wedding. We’ve had a bit of a management shakeup in the meantime, and the new manager scheduled her to work, yep, this Friday and Saturday. When she protested that she had been approved in advance to have the days off, the new manager refused to give them to her and told her, “If you want those days off, you have to find someone to trade with you.” I offered to trade her Saturday for Thursday these are the only days that my days off don’t overlap with hers, so now she only has to find someone to trade Friday with. Pretty short notice, though.

Also, this girl was scheduled to have the 4th of July off- the fourth is on a Friday, which would be a day she would normally work, and she needs the money from the holidy pay, but… Wally World is actually scheduling people for an extra day off the week of the Fourth so that the money they don’t have to pay them for the extra day off will negate the double time they would get paid for working the holiday.

Scumbags.

I’m planning to apply at Target within the next couple of weeks.

I live in northwest Arkansas, a mere 5 miles from Bentonville. Everyone here is obsessed with WalMart, which is understandable considering the money they have brought to this part of the state. I have sort of a love/hate relationship with the company. I love the convenience of the Super WalMart (the ones in NW Arkansas have abundant, friendly, and helpful staff, as well as very clean stores.) On the other hand, I feel like I should use other local shops more. I make up for the guilt by going to the farmers’ market and buying my tools at a local (not chain) hardware store.

When I used to live in New York, I dreaded going to WalMart due to long lines and a general lack of cleanliness. Those WalMart’s clearly were understaffed and more like you describe.

Just my 2 cents.