The Open Door

Working on register eight hours a day can be mind-numbingly boring and all too often I found myself zoning-out. During one of these times a friend came through my line (just to get a look at me in my spiffy blue vest) and was horrified by the zombie he found. Apparently I was just robotically scanning items, emotionlessly greeting customers, and even looked straight through him without a trace of recognition. After this I resolved to be more observant and mindful of what was going on around me… and it quickly paid off.

It was late afternoon on a Thursday when the scene unfolded directly in front of the register where I was spelling a lunch break. An off-duty middle-aged female sales associate had pulled one of the Assistant Manager’s aside into the Optical Center to talk to him. Straining to hear over the incessant beeping of my register, I caught enough bits and pieces to gather that the associate needed to change department’s or possibly shifts. She had been visibly brooding over some misfortune for the past few days and I was sure that the two were related. One thing was for certain: the woman was using the company’s Open Door Policy by skipping her immediate supervisor and taking the issue directly to management. At WAL-MART there is an Open Door Policy in place that allows an associate to bring an issue to any member of management, all the way up to the CEO Lee Scott in Bentonville, without fear of retaliation.

As the associate continued to speak, the manager from Department 65 (WAL-MART’s secret code name for store security) walked through the empty adjacent register, studying the conversation taking place in front of her. The woman from security then abruptly stopped behind the associate, turning on her tiptoes to face the Assistant Manager and catch his eye. In a single exaggerated motion she signaled to him by cutting her throat with her index finger, disappearing as quickly as she had come. Looking back at the Assistant Manager in disbelief I saw that he was still earnestly nodding to the associate’s story, never once breaking character. The message being conveyed was immediately clear: don’t listen to a word she is saying. What I had witnessed was two members of management failing to respect the Open Door, and as a result the sales associate was never given a fair hearing. By the middle of the following week the associate was gone; whether she quit or was fired I never found out.

For management to not take an employees complaint seriously in my store is hardly noteworthy; it is just rarely so blatant. The Open Door Policy is a sham that is mainly used as a tool by the home office to discourage associates from seeking a union. The logic goes that if an associate can bring any problem to management without being retaliated against, why would anyone need a third party to represent them? During unionizing efforts WAL-MART throws this message into overdrive, distributing buttons that read “I can speak for myself!” The problem with this, of course, is that associates will be retaliated against when using the Open Door. No associate with half a brain would bring up a serious complaint about a supervisor or the company a whole through the policy. Best case scenario is that you would be ignored; worst case is that you would be fired. As one of my fellow cashiers advised me, you can get by here just as long as you “play their game, and don’t rock the boat too much.”