WAL-MART lies to its customers. Okay, so I covered this topic three weeks ago in “The Customer is Number… 2?” but I have a few more anecdotes that are too good to pass up. While at the service desk at on a Wednesday night I received a call from a panicked woman who detected bleach in a gallon of spring water that she had just purchased. Allergic to bleach, the woman had burned her lips and throat when drinking the infected water. She wanted us to test the remaining product and pull it off the shelves if necessary, which I passed along to the CSM on duty, noting that the woman sounded serious. We weren’t going to do that she said, but would tell an assistant manager nonetheless. Sure enough, the woman arrived just before the desk closed at 10 pm with the tainted water as evidence for me to smell (I declined the offer.) As expected the CSM hadn’t done anything with the tip, so we hurriedly ran back to the manager’s office to brief the assistant manager and co-manager who were still in the store. They rejected the seemingly reasonable request of testing the remaining jugs of water out-of-hand. “Tell her management is looking into it” the co-manager said without a trace of humor. And with that they called it a day, leaving me to break the news to the customer and track down a product-liability form since “it’s all we can do.” Back at the desk I parroted the party line while the woman filled out the form, promising to have the water tested on her own. A good idea, I said, knowing WAL-MART surely wasn’t going to do anything about it.
And the store doesn’t stop at lying to its customers; it cheats them too. One of the CSM’s took me aside when I asked whether we should give a customer double their money back on unsatisfactory beef, a WAL-MART policy for rotten meat or produce. Don’t offer them 200% unless they ask for it she advised me; many of them don’t know about it. I played dumb, asking another supervisor if it was right to swindle customers out of money just because they were ignorant about our policy. Although it took twice as many words, she too agreed that I shouldn’t make good on the company’s promise. I witness this inconsistency between written policy and actual in-store return policy every day. We refuse to accept returns on products from other WAL-MART stores that we do not carry, despite explicit instruction to the contrary in our policy binder. Ditto for our insistence of processing returns according to the mode of payment (e.g. purchases off a gift card must go back to a gift card.) However, the most interesting example of this came when I was left to shred confidential documents back in layaway. Here I found department breakdowns of each items cost, retail price, and total mark-up. Despite all WAL-MART’s talk of bringing customers the lowest possible price, in truth department markups averaged in the high 30%’s, with one topping out at an incredible 56% average markup! Individual products might see a 70-80% increase, or a whopping 93% for a package of beef (I wonder if that was the rotten one…) I would later find out from one of the department manager’s that his 25% markups would yield an $80,000 profit per month!
WAL-MART is a firm believer in equal opportunity however, meaning it swindles everyone around them, not just their customers. There are the suppliers, the natural enemies of our claims department. The main purpose of their job is to try to recoup as much money as possible from suppliers for damaged returns, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when a sign appeared instructing us to never record that a product had been damaged in shipping since we wouldn’t receive credit for it. Of course it is employees who bear the worst of the company’s deceitful ways. After getting busted for violations in several states, management is vigilant about not having employees work off the clock, on the surface anyway. In truth, employees are pressed to work off the clock in countless way, with long lunch hours, unscheduled mandatory meetings, and the incredible pressure put on associates to get enormous jobs done. One associate got in trouble for having her boyfriend work off the clock to help her zone, but no additional resources were sent her way to complete the Herculean task of managing her department. At this point though, employees aren’t fooled easily, and when Open Enrollment time came around my co-workers were justifiably suspicious about a new “Value Plan” for health insurance. Personally, I can not think of a single associate who signed up for this new packaging of the old plan with its high deductibles, poor coverage, and heavy risk. “I think it sucks personally” commented one co-worker. “But it’s better than nothing.”
Showing posts with label "Everyday low prices". Show all posts
Showing posts with label "Everyday low prices". Show all posts
Monday, February 20, 2006
Wednesday, February 01, 2006
Indian Wallets
I was checking out probably the twentieth mother-daughter combination of the day when my blood ran cold. The item that gave me pause was a George wallet, which I had seen before, or more accurately, I had seen its case before. The wooden case was simple, yet very sharp looking. The interlocking wooden pieces were unstained, with the logo burned into the wood, perfectly framing the black leather wallet. While unremarkable to most, the case was etched into my memory from an experience on the other side of the world -- the slums of Chennai, India.
On my semester abroad during college I had the opportunity to visit several different countries for a few days, with this city on India's southeastern coast being one of the stops. My last morning in Chennai I visited the Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance Board, a group that built housing for those living in the city's low-lying slums. While their work was interesting, what really caught my attention was the tiny concrete building we visited: a sweatshop. The shop was relatively well-ventilated and not too cluttered; however, this was the shop the state-government run board brought us to. Several bare chested men in the front room labored to cut small wooden pieces for the boxes using a deafening buzz saw. In the adjacent room several dozen brightly dressed women crowded around the tables to build the boxes, using a potent glue and paintbrushes. What appeared to be the two youngest girls of the group did their work on the floor, sitting cross-legged and barefoot. When completed their finished product would be filled with the leather wallets that the shop had made the previous month.
After pestering all of my tour guides and one of the male workers who spoke broken English (my Tamil is not what it used to be...) I pieced together the story of this sweatshop. Small orders for various multi-national corporations were filled here, with the product being made rotating on a fairly regular bi-weekly basis. It was hard to become a worker in the shop since this was one of the few employers in the slum. While the jobs were hard and the hours were long, what little money they made was still better than nothing one of the guides reasoned. To my obvious follow up question he informed me that the workers logged 48 hour weeks for $40 per month, which I later calculated to be less than 19 cents per hour. The leather George wallet in its sharp wooden case sells for $14.96 at WAL-MART. Hard to beat that price.
With my line beginning to grow behind the two women, I stopped my unsuccessful search for a tag inside the wallet (obstensibly pretending to deactivate the wallet's alarm.) I realize that the odds are small, but I would bet a day's pay that this wallet and case were made by Indian's in the state of Tamil Nadu. Now I know that the allegation that WAL-MART makes some of its products in developing countries in less than ideal working conditions is hardly shocking, but this experience certainly made this reality hit home for me. From then on, whenever I saw a tag that read Made in China, or Honduras, or Bangladesh, I couldn't help but conjure up the image of that quiet barefoot girl, who wore all the colors of the rainbow, making WAL-MART's $14.96 leather wallet for 19 cents per hour.
On my semester abroad during college I had the opportunity to visit several different countries for a few days, with this city on India's southeastern coast being one of the stops. My last morning in Chennai I visited the Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance Board, a group that built housing for those living in the city's low-lying slums. While their work was interesting, what really caught my attention was the tiny concrete building we visited: a sweatshop. The shop was relatively well-ventilated and not too cluttered; however, this was the shop the state-government run board brought us to. Several bare chested men in the front room labored to cut small wooden pieces for the boxes using a deafening buzz saw. In the adjacent room several dozen brightly dressed women crowded around the tables to build the boxes, using a potent glue and paintbrushes. What appeared to be the two youngest girls of the group did their work on the floor, sitting cross-legged and barefoot. When completed their finished product would be filled with the leather wallets that the shop had made the previous month.
After pestering all of my tour guides and one of the male workers who spoke broken English (my Tamil is not what it used to be...) I pieced together the story of this sweatshop. Small orders for various multi-national corporations were filled here, with the product being made rotating on a fairly regular bi-weekly basis. It was hard to become a worker in the shop since this was one of the few employers in the slum. While the jobs were hard and the hours were long, what little money they made was still better than nothing one of the guides reasoned. To my obvious follow up question he informed me that the workers logged 48 hour weeks for $40 per month, which I later calculated to be less than 19 cents per hour. The leather George wallet in its sharp wooden case sells for $14.96 at WAL-MART. Hard to beat that price.
With my line beginning to grow behind the two women, I stopped my unsuccessful search for a tag inside the wallet (obstensibly pretending to deactivate the wallet's alarm.) I realize that the odds are small, but I would bet a day's pay that this wallet and case were made by Indian's in the state of Tamil Nadu. Now I know that the allegation that WAL-MART makes some of its products in developing countries in less than ideal working conditions is hardly shocking, but this experience certainly made this reality hit home for me. From then on, whenever I saw a tag that read Made in China, or Honduras, or Bangladesh, I couldn't help but conjure up the image of that quiet barefoot girl, who wore all the colors of the rainbow, making WAL-MART's $14.96 leather wallet for 19 cents per hour.
Monday, January 30, 2006
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.
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.
Friday, January 27, 2006
Under Pressure
As I said in the last post, cashiering is not an easy job and in truth is a fairly stressful one. However, the stress that surrounds the position often comes from other places, or more specifically, other people. To understand what I mean I must start by outlining my understanding of the nature of the beast. In short, WAL-MART is a moneymaking machine whose primary objective is to create large profits. The recipe for success that they have struck on is genius in its simplicity: sell a high volume of merchandise by setting low prices. In order for this to work WAL-MART must keep its overhead as low as possible, in other words, minimize every expense as much as possible. The result? WAL-MART is incredibly cheap. I cannot overstate this point. The example I liked to give was how I need pens to do my job as a cashier. WAL-MART does not provide pens. Therefore, every month I need to go out and buy a pack of pens. I don’t share this story because I care about buying the pens (although it is kind of outrageous), rather it is because it is the perfect example of how the company squeezes the last penny out of anyone around it. Governments, suppliers, customers, employees are all fair game.
One of the biggest expenses for any company is payroll, and as a result WAL-MART is consistently understaffed. It isn’t for lack of labor; personnel had a stack of applications on file not to mention the many part-time employees like myself who needed more hours. Instead, this is a concerted effort to make the individual stores do more with less. And when they are successful they are rewarded with even less than less, no doubt due to the simplistic logic that if they could run Customer Service Desk with 3 people, why not see if they can run it with 2? Employees are constantly given more and more duties, a clearly unsustainable strategy that puts increasing pressure on the employees. For example, WAL-MART never has enough cashiers for the volume of traffic. This is not an accident. The company intentionally keeps its lines just long enough to save money but not lose too many customers. This doesn’t always work and customers do get angry, taking their frustration out on the employees. Again, everyone loses but WAL-MART.
Furthermore, the burden for everything is shifted onto the employee. WAL-MART has countless rules on the books in order to protect itself legally. However, by not providing enough resources for everything, the corporation creates an environment in which the rules must be broken, and the blame is placed squarely on the shoulders of the employee. For example, associates are expected to work the hours that they are assigned and part-time employees cannot exceed 33 hours per week (the point at which they would be entitled to benefits.) Problem is there are never enough associates to get people out on time and you can hardly just up and leave without a replacement. Consequently, by the end of the week many associates are projected to break the threshold, a coachable offense. [“Coaching” is WAL-MART’s cute colloquial for getting written-up and generally entails getting hauled into the manager’s office and bitched out. Written coachings go on your record and may lead to your getting denied promotions or even fired.] The solution? Managers routinely have workers take an extra-long lunch break; one of my friends was forced to sit in the break room for an 1:45 minutes off the clock because they didn’t get him out on time earlier in the week! This is but one of countless instances of pressure being transferred onto the employee.
As bad as all of this is there is an even more sinister undertone that I picked up on at Morning Meeting. These meetings were made infamous for the theatrics of the WAL-MART cheer (Give me a W! Give me an A!...) but the meetings in my store were far less peppy. The employees seemed to appreciate the break from the floor, but the browbeating that we were given hardly seemed worth it to me. One of the quickly rising assistant managers singled out different department’s and people for low sales percentages and high shelf availability. Subtlety was not the goal: “You really killed us yesterday” he griped. Store sales were down because of us, we weren’t trying hard enough. I came to realize that management was purposefully engaging in low-level psychological warfare against its own employees. Everything action is geared toward convincing us that we need to give them more. Sadly, most of the workers have no trouble reading between the lines: you are worthless. No doubt a lack of self-esteem among associates helps to create the highly submissive, dependent workforce that WAL-MART depends upon for success.
One of the biggest expenses for any company is payroll, and as a result WAL-MART is consistently understaffed. It isn’t for lack of labor; personnel had a stack of applications on file not to mention the many part-time employees like myself who needed more hours. Instead, this is a concerted effort to make the individual stores do more with less. And when they are successful they are rewarded with even less than less, no doubt due to the simplistic logic that if they could run Customer Service Desk with 3 people, why not see if they can run it with 2? Employees are constantly given more and more duties, a clearly unsustainable strategy that puts increasing pressure on the employees. For example, WAL-MART never has enough cashiers for the volume of traffic. This is not an accident. The company intentionally keeps its lines just long enough to save money but not lose too many customers. This doesn’t always work and customers do get angry, taking their frustration out on the employees. Again, everyone loses but WAL-MART.
Furthermore, the burden for everything is shifted onto the employee. WAL-MART has countless rules on the books in order to protect itself legally. However, by not providing enough resources for everything, the corporation creates an environment in which the rules must be broken, and the blame is placed squarely on the shoulders of the employee. For example, associates are expected to work the hours that they are assigned and part-time employees cannot exceed 33 hours per week (the point at which they would be entitled to benefits.) Problem is there are never enough associates to get people out on time and you can hardly just up and leave without a replacement. Consequently, by the end of the week many associates are projected to break the threshold, a coachable offense. [“Coaching” is WAL-MART’s cute colloquial for getting written-up and generally entails getting hauled into the manager’s office and bitched out. Written coachings go on your record and may lead to your getting denied promotions or even fired.] The solution? Managers routinely have workers take an extra-long lunch break; one of my friends was forced to sit in the break room for an 1:45 minutes off the clock because they didn’t get him out on time earlier in the week! This is but one of countless instances of pressure being transferred onto the employee.
As bad as all of this is there is an even more sinister undertone that I picked up on at Morning Meeting. These meetings were made infamous for the theatrics of the WAL-MART cheer (Give me a W! Give me an A!...) but the meetings in my store were far less peppy. The employees seemed to appreciate the break from the floor, but the browbeating that we were given hardly seemed worth it to me. One of the quickly rising assistant managers singled out different department’s and people for low sales percentages and high shelf availability. Subtlety was not the goal: “You really killed us yesterday” he griped. Store sales were down because of us, we weren’t trying hard enough. I came to realize that management was purposefully engaging in low-level psychological warfare against its own employees. Everything action is geared toward convincing us that we need to give them more. Sadly, most of the workers have no trouble reading between the lines: you are worthless. No doubt a lack of self-esteem among associates helps to create the highly submissive, dependent workforce that WAL-MART depends upon for success.
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