Walmart scares me

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Although most of you would be viewing Walmart and how they suck from the customer’s perspective, and most likely don’t have to spend 9 hours a day there, I’m sure I’m not the only one here who hates them.

I work in the lawn and garden section of a giant huge walmart that looks like a military compound. In fact this, among other things, has influenced me to write a book called The Value Force where a walmart-type store is its own military. Walmart itself, and my department in particular, is a comedy routine every single day. Why? Because it’s the most disorganized system I’ve ever seen. None of us have any training in anything, especially none in what we’re selling. I’m a cashier but find myself being asked about plants, lawn mowers, and grills, and I have no idea how to help the customers. My coworkers don’t either. We all kind of stumble around bumping into eachother. There’s these guys who work in our parking lot selling bags of soil and mulch, they’re my coworkers and my friends but try and find one when you need one! So my customers wait and wait and then get angry at me and complain.

Why is everyone in a bad mood when they come to my store, and my section in particular? Do they realize how silly they look when they make a complaint to a manager because I was in a good mood and when they asked if someone was in the parking lot to help them, I answered “Yup, just find the coolest-looking person out there and they’ll help you”. They thought I was being rude.

Our managers seem about as lost as we are. They also don’t seem to care for taking suggestions from the staff much. My friend even got fired for being sick.

Then there’s how walmart is a big scary cult: We’re all supposed to be smiley smiley smiley and greeting customers when they come within ten feet. We have this cheer we’re supposed to do at meetings. It’s very, very disturbing.

So the next time you go to walmart and have a bad experience, remember the poor associates working there.

2

I have a great deal of sympathy for you. I worked in a Super K-Mart when I was teenager.

It was hell on earth.

It wasn’t the customers (about whom anyone who has ever worked with the public has tales of horror and hilarity) or the job itself: it was the way managment treated the employees. Hey, I expect occasional abuse from the customers, but I draw the line at behing humiliated and dehumanized by the bosses.

3

Which is precisely why I never ask anyone at a mega-size store for help. (And it’s not just because I’m a man, either)

4

Could this explain that persistent Stepford Stare I get from virtually every Walmart associate?

5

Acrossthesea, come visit us at customerssuck.com. You will find a lot of kindred spirits there, including Plntlvr, who works in the gardening section of another huge chain store. There are lots of customer and management horror stories there and we’d like to hear yours too.

6

Um, no, actually.

Those are the ones who actually know what’s going on. They have deliberately removed their own minds from their brains and left them at home as self-defense against being driven insane by their hopeless working conditions and the incompetence of their managers, not to mention nonsensical corporate policies.

I have fond memories of filling in on the register in Lawn and Garden while the regular L&G cashier was supposed to be taking a fifteen minute break. Two hours later, I would still be there, there was never anyone around to help me answer customer questions, and…

well, there was the time someone brought a couple of bicycles with clearance sale tags on them and one of them rang up at the regular price. Since the difference was more than nine dollars (actually, more like twenty-nine), I needed a CSM’s approval to fix it. So I paged for a CSM… and paged, and paged, and paged… after nearly fifteen minutes, the customer got tired of waiting and decided he didn’t want to buy the bikes after all. Unfortunately, the purchase was over fifty dollars, so I couldn’t void it out of the register without CSM approval, which meant that I couldn’t wait on the growing line of customers. So, I paged for a CSM, and paged, and paged, and paged…

Finally, after nearly a half hour of paging a CSM and getting no response, the customers had all gone away to other registers, or decided not to buy stuff, an assistant manager happened to wander into the department. I called him over to void out my register, and told him how long I had been paging for a CSM without getting a response.

His reply was so vague, I can’t even remember what he said, but the upshot was that I was somehow wrong to expect a CSM to actually respond to a page when there was trouble at the register.

7

You have to do a CHEER at employee meetings? [shudder] I’m gonna regret this, but what is the cheer?

8

I used to work at Wal-Mart as well and I don’t remember the whole cheer but I know it involved a weird sort of shake that you were supposed to do with your whole body. I have blocked the rest out of my mind. :shudder: :frowning:

9

I was working as a tech consultant at Target HQ a few years ago. I needed to go out to one of the stores to watch a new PC get installed. I asked my manager if I needed to wear the red & khaki, and he said “No, you can just wear a suit if you want to.”

Note to self: WEAR A SUIT NEXT TIME.

People were walking up to me and asking all manner of questions. “Where do I get a job application?” “I just spilled something.” “Where’s the vaseline?”

:smack:

10

Sounds almost like something out of the 1930s.

11

Are you sure you don’t work at my store? It must be a walmart thing that if you’re at lawn & garden the CSMs will just ignore you. They do it to me constantly.

12

That’s the dreaded “SQUIGGLY”. As in, “Give me a squiggly”. Yeah, you’re supposed to spell out walmart and I guess the squiggly is that thing, the dash or in their logo the star, between the wal and the mart. The only good thing about working in the most disorganized department in the store is that I have a good excuse for avoiding meetings.

13

IBM is obviously scarier than walmart. I think these large corporations are secretly secret societies trying to brainwash their employees into taking over the world.

14

Oh, I’ll definitely check that out later. In my past I’ve worked at Pizza Hut, Papa John’s, a pet store, Barnes & Noble, and a BX, so I’m certainly loaded with great stories. I’ve actually written plays about the wild experiences I’ve had.

15

Just so everyone knows the horror of the cheer, read about half-way down this page. It’s a truly awful thing to hear.

-K

16

I’ve always noticed that the employees that don’t work checkout, seem to be kind of zombie like. If you ask them a question, they get a scared look. I’ve even seen them jump when I say “excuse me”. It’s like they’re not used to human contact.

17

I don’t know about WalMart, but we definitely had to do one at KrapMart.

We’d do the whole, "Gimme a G! Gimme an O! (Spelling out, "GO KMART!)

After the whole, “What’s that spell?” “Go Kmart!” part, it went:

Who’s Number One?
Kmart!

Who’s REALLY Number One?
The Customer!

How do we show it?
Beat me to the customer! (whatever the hell that meant).

And it was at 8 am, for crissakes. It’s a good thing I didn’t work in sporting goods…

(Sometimes I’d say, “WALMART!” instead of Kmart, to see if anyone noticed. Nope)

18

hillbillyqueen, more like they’ve had more human contact than they can handle. See, Wally World deliberately understaffs their stores to save money. I think they will eventually go the way of K-Mart when people finally get sick of the bad service and think it might be worth it to pay a dollar or two more for their jeans at Target because they can actually find sales help on the floor and then won’t have to wait forty-five minutes in line to check out with their purchases. But, I digress.

OK, you work in a store that is short-staffed. You may be the only person covering two or maybe even three or four departments. Or, you may just be a cashier doing go-backs or on their way to or from break. You are set upon by tens of millions of people each day. People want you to tell them where the golf clubs are, even though you work in women’s clothing and are unfamiliar with the sporting goods department. Your department is a mess because you can’t find the time to straighten your shelves and racks because, being the only blue vest wearing person for several thousand square miles, you are constantly helping customers find items in departments you don’t know your way around all that well. Then, when there’s enough of a slowdown that you can tidy your area, you finish a row of shelves, then look up to see that some charming individual, often a child, but usually an adult who should know better, has completely trashed the section you just spent a half hour cleaning up in the space of a few seconds. Then somebody wants to know where the embroidery needles are because there’s nobody manning Fabrics and Crafts.

Eventually, your brain starts to overheat. If you haven’t learned to leave your mind at home, the nerve synapses in your cerebral cortex start to short circuit. Your brain begins to die. Eventually, either because you’ve learned to leave your mind at home, or because accelerated brain cell death, you enter a zombie-like state. Your eyes become wide and glassy. You learn to fear the customers because, more often than not, they are asking you questions that you don’t know the answers to because they are asking about items that are several departements away from yours.

Then, of course, customer service deteriorates even further, customers decide it’s worth twenty-five cents more to buy their embroidery needles at Target because the customer service is better, the sales figures fall, then some bean counter in Bentonville decides that the ratio of employees, er, I mean Associates to sales revenue is too high, therefore the store is overstaffed, and sends down the order to lay another forty or fifty people off.

Eventually, the employees die, but since by that time, they actually have become zombies, nobody notices.

One day, a small group of them will dismember and eat a customer, and after that, people will be afraid to shop at Wal-Mart and the company will go under.

19

I got hired out-of-the-blue to work as a maintenance technician at one of Wal-Mart’s Optical Labs (in Dallas, TX). NOT one of the walk-ins at the Super-Centers, but one of the central labs that process orders and manufactures eyeware lenses to the tune of about 2,000 scrips a day.

It was actually a pretty cool place to work, since most of the maintenance staff were more “building” oriented, whereas I was totally machine oriented; I quickly moved up the ranks, and became a “go-to” guy on my shift, especially on the Edgers (which cut the lenses to the shape of the frame they are to go into).

And then the Corporate Culture descended: morning meeting with the Wal-Mart cheer. Quarter-hourly production updates blared over the intercom in an insanely strident tone of voice, with everyone (except the maintenance staff) cheering madly at a .25% production increase from the last 15 minute update.

And the double-think: I must be at the morning shift-meeting, but I must also have all machinery calibrated and ready to go the minute the meeting is over. When I point out the temporal impossibility of such a demand, I get lectures about being a team player on the Winning Wal-Mart Team (that may be trade-marked).

When a machine goes down, I get constantly pestered by the operator, supervisor, department manager, shift manager and production manager.

“Is it fixed yet?”
“No.”
“Is it fixed yet?”
“No.”
“Is it fixed yet?”
“NO.”
“Is it fixed yet?”
“I’m going on break.”
“Is it fixed yet?”
“The refractory drive is completely shot; unfortuantely, when it went, it set up a negative resonance feedback surge in the wave-guide conduit, and took out an entire relay series*****. Manufacturer says they’re on back order, and we can’t expect to see one inside of 6 months.”
“Oh…that sounds bad…so is it fixed yet?”

Even when I left, the maintenance people (supervisors and management included) were good people; they made the job bearable. The rest of management and the workers were…scary.

Someone else said “cult” earlier in the thread. An altogether apt word.
***** Who says Trekkie geeks are totally worthless?

20

This thread is enlightening.

I didn’t know they did that stuff. That “squiggly” thing sounds like a nice little way to dehumanize your employees while still being legal. A non-violent boot camp like strategy.

The ones you gotta watch out for are the employees who are into it. Probably practicing their squigglies at home. If you ever see a guy whose “squiggly” is way better one day than it was the day before, DO NOT TRUST HIM. He will rat your ass out in a millisecond.

To anyone working at a Walmart. . .find another job if you can. That’s weird, crazy stuff and most places don’t do it. Work food-service or something.

Does Home Depot do that? I’ve only been in a Wal-Mart once, like 8 years ago, but it seems like Home-Depot and Lowe’s employees are in a more sane environment.