Welcome to Fort Walton

Not only do the hours that you work vary wildly, so too does the job that you are doing. Even though I was hired as a cashier, my job does not end there. It begins with the fact that Customer Service Manager’s are responsible for providing two 15-minute and one hour long lunch hour per 8 hour shift for all employees on the front-end (Cashiers, People Greeters, and Customer Service Desk Associates.) In order to do this and combat the pervasive understaffing, the CSM’s try to “cross-train” all employees, meaning train them in several different positions. This gives WAL-MART the flexibility it needs to pull off Mission Impossible, and supposedly is the key for associates to advance up the company ladder. (However, I’m not sure if it is so much the knowledge of multiple positions as it is a willingness to be submissive and play the game that leads to ones advancement…) What all this means is that many times you are never given a register to call home and spend all day bouncing around the store spelling breaks and lunches.

Obviously this arrangement works out better for the company than the employee who never knows what to expect. The fact that WAL-MART always keeps us guessing is annoying, and sometimes much more than that. For example, with winter approaching the job of People Greeter or cashiering near the doors became a very cold one – it’s like a wind tunnel over there. The problem is that we never know in advance when we will be by the door and whether or not to bundle up (other sections of the store get downright balmy so forget just playing it safe.) Here is the worst part: we aren’t allowed to have extra clothing at the register. CSM’s regularly come down on cashiers who try to bundle up, insisting that the vest and nametag be worn on top. I watched one of them go so far as to refuse to allow an old women who was freezing on register to wear a coat underneath since the vest didn’t fit properly. Adding to the problem is the fact that we only have one coat rack for 450 employees. Coats bulge in every direction of the rack and are strewn across much of the floor in the break room. Higher-ups often find a cubicle or somewhere else to stash their coat, but those of us who aren’t as fortunate simply leave them in the car. And forget running to grab your coat out of your car or off the break room floor while on the clock since this is the very definition of “time theft.” Within a few weeks of starting at the store I had come down with my first cold, which would later become the flu since I did not have any health insurance.

And this is just one of the bad things about guarding the door. Door guard is a much more accurate title than the official name for the position: People Greeter. You know who I am talking about, the usually elderly individual who greets customers as they enter the store. WAL-MART has made a big deal about its people greeters, often featuring them in commercials, since they represent how much they care about their customers and how “our people make the difference.” But the training that I was given focused exclusively on how to prevent shoplifting or “shrinkage,” adding as an afterthought that I was supposed to say hello to customers who entered the store. When the alarms went off – which was quite often – I was to politely ask the customer to come inside and produce their receipt, then search for and deactivate the troublesome alarm. As I am recording all of this information in our security log I should be apologizing for the inconvenience, never once accusing them of stealing. The priorities were crystal clear: someone must be watching the doors at all times to prevent shoplifting, and, hey, while they are there, they should greet the customers with a big smile. Make no mistake about it, this is the single worst job in the entire store and inexplicably it is also the lowest paid (pay grade 1 of 7.) You have to stand on the hard concrete all day as time moves by agonizingly slow. As bad as the boredom was, it was having to greet the customers that I dreaded. The door was much worse than the register in this regard since more often than not the person would look right through me without saying a word after I greeted them. The whole experience makes you feel simply worthless.

Our security personnel took me aside on several occasions, quizzing me about how to authenticate a receipt and reminding me about how important my job was to preventing shrinkage. I was to watch for anything suspicious: anxious individuals, repeated comings and goings, mysterious bulges. These two women, full-time and salaried, spent their day in plainclothes, trailing customers and discreetly spying on them while pretending to shop themselves. Occasionally they would spot someone suspicious for me to stop and demand a receipt or even search their unopened packages. (Fairly or not, every single time I was given this warning the suspect was in their teens or early-twenties…) When they did catch someone a team of three people would swoop in and whisk them back to the secret security room where they kept all of the cameras. The police would arrive after a few minutes, on one of the several visits that they would pay us each day, no doubt to scare the hell out of the accused shoplifter before WAL-MART inevitably pressed charges, to the fullest extent of the law, mind you.