My First Coaching

After nearly two months of cashiering, my move to the Customer Service Desk was a welcome one. This job was perfect for me, and I had been angling to get a transfer here. The desk was where the action was, not to mention the fact that I got the chance to talk with disgruntled customers all day long! At first glance the job appears simple: I had to accept returns of merchandise from customers. However, there were countless rules in place governing this process, and then an equal number of exceptions to these rules. In addition to this, there were money orders and Money Grams, vendor’s and left behinds to log in, gift cards and regular purchases to sell, not to mention all of the returns to sort and send back onto the sales floor. It was a lot to absorb at first but the up-and-coming guy who trained me on the desk reassured me by saying, “You will have a lot of judgment calls up here. Do your best and we will back you up.” Well, you can probably guess what happens next.

Once again they didn’t exactly ease me into my new job, leaving me to close down the desk all alone after only one full day of training. At some point during the madness that ensued a friendly elderly couple came in to bring back several defective products, one of which was a six-piece screwdriver set missing two of the tools. When I raised an eyebrow the woman embarrassedly explained that when she bought it the set the screwdrivers were arranged in such a way that she didn’t realize there were supposed to be six. I saw what she was saying and believed her, so with the advice I had received echoing in my head I took back the screwdrivers and quickly moved on to the next person in my long line. This return would precipitate in my being hauled into the manager's office four days later for my first official coaching.

Coaching is Waltonese for being written-up. This threat hangs over even the most minor of infractions, whereby the associate is taken aside by management and sufficiently bitched out. If you have an active coaching on your record you are disqualified from promotions, and could ultimately be fired. Knowing all of this, I fidgeted outside the manager's office while waiting for a full-fifteen minutes, plotting the scene I would cause on my way out the door. To be fair, the co-manager who finally came back to coach me was pretty restrained and handled the task fairly well. He tactfully disagreed with my conclusion that the old woman didn't steal two of our screwdrivers, advising me to ask a CSM next time in order to "cover your butt." I realized that this reprimand was all that was in the works for today and that the co-manager clearly wasn’t interested in my excuses. So I meekly nodded and promised to be more careful in the future, spinelessly swallowing the protests in my head.

Coaching at WAL-MART is a very demeaning and unpleasant exercise. I really don't care too much what management thinks of me, but even so I found myself thoroughly unnerved. You can imagine how much worse this would be for someone who cares about their job and depends upon it to make ends meet. While I was relieved at first to only get a slap on the wrist, I would soon become annoyed about the whole thing. Later that night I overheard our store manager mocking my decision to take back this return in front of other associates, a move he would repeat throughout the coming weeks. Besides being totally unprofessional, his words stung. Soon I realized that the real reason for my coaching was to crack the whip, and make sure everyone would be more stingy on accepting returns on the eve of our busy return season. Indeed, another one of my co-worker on the service desk was coached that same day for an even more petty offense.

But that isn't even the annoying part. While WAL-MART wants us on the service desk to be tightfisted when accepting returns, they will back down any time a customer puts up a fight. So associates are put into an impossible position: enforce written policy or else be coached, but if you do and the customer goes over your head management will ALWAYS side with the customer. And it doesn't take a customer long to realize that in order to get their way at WAL-MART all they have to do is raise a fuss. What it comes down to is that management is so afraid of losing a sale that they cowardly fail to stand up for themselves or their associates. I cannot emphasize how frustrating it is as an employee to always be sold out by your supervisor, and it is an indignity I suffer every single day. I overheard the front-end manager put it best: “I’m a big supporter of the no balls thing. It helps the store the most.”