*&%# Walmart

The BBQ Pit
1

Why is it that when the Walmart store is the most crowded, there are only two checkout clerks working the lines? Huh, why is that? Why have 12 checkout lines if only two of them are going be operative?

And why must the person in front of me have an article with no price on it, causing the line to stop completely?? Huh, why is that?

And worst of all is the return service desk. The one that is manned by ONE lady. It’s like a foriegn embassy. I spent 45 minutes no,reallyI timed it… 45 minutes paying for some items with a purchase order. While I waited I watched three employees fiddle with the popcorn machine for 20 minutes while that one lady answered the phone and handled all the return customers.

And it’s not just our store, it seems basically the same in most of the Walmart stores that I have been in. Walmart must be one of the richest corporations in business, so why don’t they hire enough help? And get some store managers that give a shit!

I know, I know, your saying to yourselves, “Then don’t go to Walmart.” But I have to go to Walmart cause they have everything that I need. ( Well I try not to buy my clothes there.)It’s really a good place to shop even though it has put many a mom and pop store out of business. Where else can you go on Sunday afternoon and buy a screwdriver?

But the bastards in Arkansas need to hone their profit margin down enough to be able to server the customer! Wait I am not through…

Once you go in there you are on your own too. Jut try and find an employee when you need to ask for something. In the store in my town, when you finally do find one they say, " errr well you will have to get Delores she is in charge of that dept."

It’s obvious to me that Walmart execs have said, “Hey the public can return things if they need to, that’s all the customer service we need to worry about.” Let’s just work our employees into the ground and to hell with the customer. Oh, I know how we can make people think we care…we’ll hire a 76 year old senior citizen as a greeter!!" Never mind that the poor greeter doesn’t have a clue as to where things are in the store.

Ok I’m done.

Yours truly,
aha

2

No offense aha, but my brother’s company (which I work for) builds Wal*Marts all over the western US.

Personally, I have had good service (for the most part) and rarely have I had problems with returns, although I don’t return a lot of things.

BTW it’s not because my bro’s company that I state this, but customer service EVERYWHERE has become a thing of the past.

I do think, at least with our local grocery store, there is a card you can fill out or a manager you can talk to. I realize that you may think this is a waste of time, but if you don’t speak up to those that can help you out, then your voice isn’t heard.

Get a hold of the manager of the store, write a letter and CC the corporate offices. I am pretty sure that you may get a response.

Hey, I called Kraft one day to bitch about the fact that their shredded mozerella looked too much like their shredded parmesan. I told them I was wanting to make a batch of fettucine alfredo only to find out when I got home that I had picked up the moz. instead. Two-three weeks later I had a coupon for 4 bucks in the mail and about 6 months later they changed the packaging. I am sure a lot of other people complained thereby getting them to change it.

techchick rambles on…

3

techchick68 said:

You hit the nail square on the head, there - one of the downsides of low unemployment rates I guess. The biggest idiots can get fired from one job and find another in short order because some employers are so desperate for help.

I’m still trying to think of an appropriate way to thank the jackass who was so dramatically unhappy about handling my merchandise return that she scratched the magnetic strip on my debit card, rendering it completely unusable at ATMs. :mad:

4

The friendly Walmart folks just put up a store in my neck of the woods, and I must say it was a complete disappointment.

I musta looked around the damned store for 45 minutes, and it turns out they don’t sell walls at all.

Dr. Watson
“Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.” – Goethe

5

Dr. Watson will be with us all week, ladies and gentlemen! Be sure to try the buffet, and don’t forget to tip your server.

Jodi

Fiat Justitia

6

Wat, you’re a goof, but I say that lovingly < grin>

PS, when I say goof, it’s a nice thing, in my life it’s a means by which I have an affection (not sexually) towards a poster.

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Way to go out on a limb, there, techchick!

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I refuse to buy so much as a pack of gum from Wal-Mart. It’s that prissy Church Lady hypocritical “morality” that they try to push. It disgusts me that they edit albums to remove what they consider “offensive.” Just don’t sell the fucking album if you think it’s “dirty.” What? Afraid of losing profits for what you supposedly stand for?

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Dr.Watson writes:

Doc, I had thought better of you.

Of course they don’t sell walls; they sell wals. If they purported to sell walls, they’d be called “Wallmart”, eh?

“I don’t just want you to feel envy. I want you to suffer, I want you to bleed, I want you to die a little bit each day. And I want you to thank me for it.” – What “Let’s just be friends” really means

10

That’s why I patronize my local Target store. You’ve got basically all the same crap as you do in a Wal-mart, and if you manage to find a CD you actually want in their small selection, you get the music the way it was meant to be heard, perhaps with the occasional “Fuck!” or “Goddamn”.

I know this doesn’t seem like much, but Walmart is always refusing to carry this album or that album for some reason. They refuse to sell Cheryl Crow records, for cryin’ out loud, because one of her songs includes lyrics which mention Walmart in a potentially negative way. Although I believe Cheryl was using Walmart in a generic, everywhere-store sort of way (kind of a compliment, really), the mart took offense since it suggested that the youth of America might be injured with firearms sold by Walmart. Whatever.

Wouldn’t that be a cool job? Sitting in some Walmart corporate office, previewing all the new CDs to determine which ones are offensive the company’s sensibilities?

11

This may not be such a problem in more urban areas, but my bitch with Wal-Mart is, they come into smaller communities and basically destroy small, longstanding, local family-owned businesses that can’t possibly hope to compete.

Then they run their TV commercials in which folksy, small-town kinda people help other folksy, small-town kinda people find the stuff they need.

“We’re just here to help, just a valued part of our little community,” seems to be the underlying message in all of their ads.
Absolute yak shit.

“Nothing is so firmly believed as what is least known” - Michel Gyquem de Montaigne

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Walmart anecdotal story:

I went to the local walmart with my income tax return and bought a Murray riding mower. I have three acres so I needed it bad enough to pay 1300.00 bucks plus tax. As I wrote the check there were three guys out there putting it in my truck while the manager took my money. Man I didn’t have to do anything but pay and drive away.

Next day:

I crank up the Murray and “BAUMMM” a huge backfire blew out of the exhaust system. I thought huh uh I ain’t puttin up with this. I went back to walmart with my receipt in hand and asked to see the manager. "The reply was, “Well ah don’t thank he is around at the moment.” I said , ok “let me talk to one of the guys that works in the mower dept.” ( I was thinking of one of those 3 guys that loaded it in my truck.)
The reply was, "they ain’t here either.

So I ended up telling my story to some poor housewife that just happened to work the floor at walmart. She didn’t have a clue about the mowers. I left and later when I got home I called Wally world again and asked to speak to the manager…and walla’ he got on the phone. I quickly told him my problem and ask if he would come and pick up the mower. Welllll…he said…don’t have any way of picking it up right now. We have a guy that comes everyother week that does warrenty work…blather blather blather.

Well I won’t go on with this story I just hope you get the irony of the situation:
Buy something and you get 4 guys counting the manager to help you load it up… all the help you need! Return something and you are just shit out of luck!

Wait I am not quite through,

The people they hire at our walmart are certainly nice people and it’s not necessarily their fault that they don’t have a high school education. They probably started out life raising kids and that is a full time job. But now the kids are gone and mom has decided to work for walmart. Never mind that she doesn’t have ** one iota of professional training **! She works cheap!
So the checkout lines are constantly fraught with problems and the customer is constantly frustrated because they don’t let checkers have more than 50.00 bucks cash to work with and they are constantly screaming over the fucking microphone…JOYCE! JOYCE! need change at number 6! Price checks take 15 minutes and ** don’t buy anything outside the store like topsoil or flowers ** because the checkers don’t know what the fuck your buying or how much it costs!

I would continue this story but the wife is buggin me to go to Walmart. Thanks for listening ( er reading).

Yours truly,
aha

13

My Wal-Mart anecdote:

The lines were very long and hubby and I were very tired. I groused that the signs above the check-out stand said, “If the line is more than 3 people deep, we will open another register!” All the lines were more than 3 people deep, I growled. A customer service rep who was standing within earshot gave us a dirty look, then huffed up to a closed register and opened it. Frostily, she checked out our purchases and sent us on our way.

Now when we go to Wal-Mart, I look all over for those signs but I don’t see them anymore.

“I hope life isn’t a big joke, because I don’t get it,” Jack Handy

The Kat House
Join the FSH Muscular Dystrophy Webring

14

Bwahahahahahaha!

Our local Wal-Mart is crap, too. I’m sure it varies with management just like a restaurant or theater, but I also have a beef with the way the checkout lines themselves are laid out. You can’t tell who is open, who’s an express lane, who takes ATMs, etc. They’re on some weird staggered diagonal or something and all have those truncated conveyor belts so that you can only put like 2 items at a time on it. I haven’t had any trouble with the products or returning things, but gaddamit – getting out of that place is a nightmare!

Now there’s nothing unexpected about the water giving out; “Land” is not a word we have to shout.

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I happen to like what Wal Mart offers in the way of selection and value, but I do agree they should hire people other than the ubiquitous slack-jawed morons they currently employ.

I do have an interesting anecdote concerning a return. Ex girlfriend purchases one of those word processor thingies. Cost several hundred dollars. Well, she didn’t like it and wanted to take it back. Of course, she can not find the receipt (she could never keep up with anything, but that’s another story).

Anyway, they won’t give a refund, but they will do an even exchange. So, now we’ve got about $400 to spend. How do you spend that much money at Wal-Mart? Easy. You get three carts and start stocking up. We walked out of there with more paper towels, cookies, household supplies, cleaning supplies, reams of paper, pens, etc… than we were able to use for a year. Anything interesting or useful at all–in the basket. Took two trips in the car.

I think they were kindof pissed, but there wasn’t much they could do about it. Their policy!

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“. . . a means by which I have an affection (not sexually) towards a poster.”
Y’know, ya study hard, go to a good school, pass all yer boards, get a good job, get a haircut, keep yer nose clean and yer fingernails clipped, and look what happens . . .

Screw it. I’m buyin’ a Harley.
Dr. Watson
“Water which is too pure has no fish.” – Ts’ai Ken T’an

17

For two years in a row I’ve caught my local Walmart running a holiday scam, especially around Christmas, with men and women’s perfume and cologne.

In the center aisle, right when one enters, is a big display of perfumes and colognes. All marked down for Christmas. A normally $14 bottle of, lets say, Stetson, sells for $8.95. Good buy. The stuff sells out quickly. As you wander the store, you’ll come to a second, smaller display, farther away from the center aisle. There will be the same colognes and perfumes there, in the same sizes – but at full price. Most harassed Christmas shoppers will not notice this and will happily grab a bottle and toss it in with their goods and later check out, not knowing that the second display rings up at full price – $14.00.

Walmart also has this cute trick they like to pull with price markers on small, hanging goods. You’ll go to a rack of, say, small packaged oddities like cute magnets, faucet spray tips and so on and find something in there like, say a pen set. Everything in the rack is marked clearly at under $3.00, but the pen and pencil set is missing the price sticker for the rack and nothing is individually marked. Most people will buy the set, thinking it to be as cheap as everything else. It isn’t. Unless they pay attention when their goods are rung up, they won’t notice that the set actually costs $10.00. Walmart installed bar code readers so people can check prices but those readers are few and often far away from where such pricing ‘errors’ take place so most people will not hunt them down.

I have caught Walmart placing high priced items, unmarked, in low priced slots. I noticed this when wooden, assemble it yourself file cabinets were in a slot marked $9.95. I quickly grabbed one, ran it up to the register and bought it and discovered it to be $29.95. There is a law on the books that says retailers MUST sell you an item for the price displayed, even if wrong. I had to get a manager and take her to the display and show her the price before getting it for $9.95. I had seen those same file cabinets in that same slot for two days previously – during which several had been sold and no one had changed the price so that indicated that they had been selling them at full price.

I liked to stop at those robot claw machines to pay my 50 cents and get a stuffed toy for my niece – until after many failures I observed that those toys were not just dumped into the machine, but stacked to make it as difficult as possible to pull one out. They all interlocked. Yet the machine states that every toy in there can be obtained and a letter to Walmart about the machines was responded to with assurances that they are never stacked.

You have to be a wary shopper when shopping in Walmart.

Plus, they have a tendency to have their orders filled by the main office, who might not agree with them. Like, I love Land O Lakes stick margerine. Six months ago, Walmart stopped carrying it, though it sold well. They sell the tub version, which I dislike and have stocked up on cheaper brands of stick margerine. Several requests for it have only gotten me explainations that they order it but it doesn’t come in. So I go to the grocery store across the street and buy it.

18

I needed to buy a second lawnmower, there are more weeds than grass in our backyard, and using the same mower has now gotten my front yard roughly resembling the back, SO,

I go to our neighborhood Wal Mart, and I find the lowest price mower they have is one hundred dollars, and while I knew it would fit in the trunk of my car, I DID expect someone to carry it for me…oh, what was I thinking??? The cashier looked at me like I had oatmeal dripping down my shirtfront, ‘you can get it yourself, ma’am, just getta cart an’ I’ll ring it fer ya’.

Yeah, jerk that I am, AND the fact that my two dogs have disappeared in the high weeds in the backyard, I bought the mower, and don’t you just know, I would wrestle that big carton onto the shopping cart top, and the wheel got stuck so it kept turning in circles, oh yeah, it was a GOOD day at Wal Mart for me! :rolleyes:

“Um, according to who? Nothing more than a high brow troll, though occasionally the bi polar personality swung in a constructive direction on innocuous topics.” Omniscient

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I like going to Wal-mart, only because it is the only retail store open 24 hours and the only time I get to go shopping without taking all five heathens is to go in the middle of the nite.
I do on the other hand have a list of 101 fun things to do at Wal-mart. Such as…

Setting all the alarm clocks to the same time to go off on full volume
Go to the aisle where they have the fishing gear and get a pole and see what you can catch in the next aisle
Going into the lawn and garden dept. sitting down in the lawn furnature with a cool drink, and making yourself at home
Going to the gun dept. looking all deranged and asking if you can hold one of the pretty shiny guns and if they could just skip the background check
And my all time favorite…
Put 100 bags of M&M’s on layaway

You get the gist of the list, but the hard part is trying to do all 101 things in the same nite!

Mistress Kricket

Are you stuck on stupid?

20

Wal-mart just bought out a supermarket chain over here,from your posts it looks like there’ll be an improvement in service.