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.

Scheduling Hell

I knew it was coming, but it was annoying nonetheless. When my two week training period ended, so too did my schedule being pegged to that of my mentor. Gone were the 5 consecutive 9 hour days followed by the “weekend,” albeit on Monday and Tuesday. In its place was a much more hellish schedule that I knew to be more typical at WAL-MART.

While every week varied wildly, there were several common characteristics from week to week. First off, despite only being “part-time” I was scheduled five days a week with only one exception. What this meant was that more often than not I would have to drive an hour roundtrip for less than a full shift; especially popular was scheduling four hours in the middle of the day, which are barely worth the cost of gas. Secondly, these two days off were hardly ever back to back. At one point I went for 32 days without getting a WAL-MART weekend, meaning any two consecutive days off.

Finally, and perhaps worst of all, was the stores propensity to schedule short turn-arounds; working late one night only to be in early the next morning. It was common place to hear of door guards working past 11:00 pm and starting again the following day at 7:00 am. While I never had a turn-around quite that bad, I would work past midnight and have to be in at 9:30 am. Factor in extra time to clock out and in, a half-hour commute both ways, and time to prepare for work the next morning, even if you go straight to bed you are lucky to get seven hours sleep.

So here is what all of that looks like:
Saturday 5:00 pm – 12:00 am
Sunday 6:00 pm – 1:15 am
Monday Off
Tuesday 9:45 am – 6:45 pm
Wednesday 4:00 pm – 11:45 pm
Thursday 9:45 am – 6:45 pm
Friday Off

And another example:
Saturday 6:00 pm – 10:00 pm
Sunday Off
Monday 2:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Tuesday 3:00 pm – 12:00 am
Wednesday 6:15 pm – 11:00 pm
Thursday 2:00 pm – 8:45 pm
Friday Off

WAL-MART eagerly admits that “For years we have had a scheduling system in place that is designed to match associates’ work schedules to projected customer flow to our stores.” But this justification doesn’t explain the lack of consideration to the person who then has to rearrange their life to this clockwork. My being scheduled until 11:45 pm on a Wednesday night and in Thursday morning at 9:45 am has nothing to do with the demands of customers; believe me, it was as dead as could be at 10 pm that Wednesday. No, WAL-MART illustrates an utter lack of concern for the lives of its associates because it has an utter lack of concern for the lives of its associates. Many of my fellow associates blame their hellish schedule on “a computer down in Bentonville.” As far as I can discern this is true, since the home office seems to design a template outlining how many associates are needed when.

The maddening aspect of all this is how actual people are lost in the shuffle. If WAL-MART cared even a little bit about the people who work for them, they would put a little bit of effort into building reasonable schedules. While the company no doubt appreciates the flexibility that not caring gives them, it is hardly so important of a benefit that renders ruining a workers life necessary. And if you think I am being melodramatic here remember that many WAL-MART employees must also juggle childcare, try to work in second jobs or classes, and hopefully find a few minutes to spend time with their equally busy loved ones. Ultimately this approach benefits no one in the long run since it greatly contributes to employee dissatisfaction and eventually turnover. Indeed, if the company ever wanted to remake its image through deeds rather than just words, and care for its employees, revamping its hellish scheduling system would be a fine place to start.

Struggling on Register

Cashiering is not an easy job. On the surface this does appear to be the case, since you just ring up them items and put them in bags, right? Needless to say there is more that goes into it and this is hardly the unskilled position that many consider it to be. Compounding the difficulty of cashiering is WAL-MART’s half-assed approach to training anyone. According to the plan, new associates would be assigned a mentor to train us, where at first we would observe them cashiering and then switch rolls, going solo only when we were completely comfortable. My mentor – a very friendly older man who would become one of my best friends in the store – did a great job of trying to show me the ropes and encourage me. However, the problem was that he rarely got the chance. Due to a shortage of staffing the Customer Service Manager’s, or CSM's, took my mentor and I off register and had us on the door as People Greeter’s for most of my first week (but more on this absurd job later.) When we were on register observing each other it was hardly a leisurely timetable, and I found myself separated from my mentor on my first day on register, scrambling to find help.

I had joked with my friends beforehand that I was dangerously unequipped for this job, which we all secretly knew was not really a joke at all. To be a good cashier you must be quick, adept at multi-tasking, have a good memory, be submissive, calm under pressure, as well as outgoing and cheery while maintaining a thick skin… all things that I am not. In addition to scanning and bagging items there are codes to memorize, gift cards to sell, alarms to deactivate, price checks to search for, loans and change to order, coupons to scan, check to cash, not to mention the utility payments, WIC orders, food stamps, employee discounts, and multiple means of payment. And this is just a list of your typical tasks, let alone the unusual ones that few knew how to deal with that would continue to crop up months later. It was a struggle as I rang up items too many times, didn’t see others, forgot to scan coupons, crushed merchandise, and didn’t give the proper change. And this was just during the two days that my mentor was watching me.

As complicated as these jobs could get, by far the most difficult part of cashiering is dealing with the customers. Now I have always enjoyed interacting with people, and genuinely believe that people are naturally well intentioned. But if there was ever a place to make me question humanity it is the checkout lines at WAL-MART. The first part of my job as a cashier is to smile and greet the customer, preferably by name, and ask them if they found everything that they were looking for. The problem is that many customers do not feel it necessary to respond to us or acknowledge our existence in any way. While this is thoroughly discouraging and disrespectful, I would rather be ignored by a customer than have them be nasty and take out all of their problems on me. I try to be understanding by reasoning that many of the customers are poor and lead stressful lives, or that WAL-MART creates such an unpleasant shopping experience that it is natural for them to lash out at me as a symbol of the corporation. However, when a customer is actually yelling at you for something totally out of your control, this knowledge isn’t especially reassuring. Most frustrating of all is the fact that you can’t talk back, you have to stand there and take it, or else you will be fired.

And all of this has to be done at a breakneck pace, for speed is the name of the game when cashiering at WAL-MART. IPH, or Items Per Hour is the company’s way of calculating this skill and thus is golden standard for all associates. The computers in our registers keep track of everything: including every transaction down to the last penny, total number of items voided, and how many items we ring up per hour. This single minded obsession among management is obvious: raises are tied to factors such as IPH; the results are posted outside the break room with the top five IPH’s highlighted; the associate of the month seems to coincide with the highest IPH for that period; there is even a separate award at the annual award ceremony given to the fastest cashier. Not surprisingly this fixation on keeping up your IPH is passed on to the cashiers; nearly every tip given to me by other associates focused on how I could do this (the most popular trick was to enter that the customer was going to pay by check whenever you have down time in order to pause the clock.) This constant need to go faster, faster, faster is obviously quite stressful, and in the end doesn’t serve the best interest of anyone… except for WAL-MART.