Our People Make The Difference

My first couple of weeks at WAL-MART were pretty rough. What made it bearable were the associates that I worked with; their people truly made the difference. A single interesting breakroom conversation could make my entire day worthwhile. Don’t get me wrong, getting employees to open up to me was not an easy task. For the first few weeks I focused nearly exclusively on getting to know as many of my co-workers as possible and slowly building a rapport with them (not an easy task since this required me to memorize a couple hundred names...) I knew that a new associate coming in with a barrage of questions would raise a lot of eyebrows and only cause them to clam up, so I practiced as much restraint as possible, letting them open up to me on their own terms. And they did.

Some people were very friendly, like the two greying women who were veterans of the sales floor and welcomed me during my first lunch break. It was fascinating to listen to them defend one of the company's policies then turn around and lament that they couldn't afford to spend $10 on a Halloween costume without a trace of irony. Others, like the rambunctious associate I met in the parking lot minutes later, mocked WAL-MART openly for its foolish company cheer and its customers for only caring about "everyday low prices." Sadly, few other associates were this brave. The vast majority fell in between these two extremes, doing their job without complaint and refusing to hold the corporation responsible for their predicament. I found this tendency to be both honorable and maddening, ultimately falling in love with my co-workers for both their strength and weakness.

But what made the job of befriending my fellow associates even harder was WAL-MART’s usage of a classic tactic of oppressors: conquer and divide. Whenever possible the company attempts to isolate its workers, the obvious aim being to prevent any attempts at unionizing the store. Example: there is no official area for employees to take a smoke break outside. Instead when they are on break they are supposed to smoke in their car, which many do. Another instance is how the break room is almost always a mess, and with only 20 seats far too small to accommodate the 460 employees that work there. In addition to this, management seizes every opportunity to reduce it even further by storing shipments or layaway packages, removing tables and chairs, and not providing enough space in the refrigerator or coat-rack. This inhospitable environment leads many employees to lunch elsewhere, going home, going for fast-food, or going to eat alone in their car. The few employees who do stay still isolate themselves, many talking in hushed tones on their cell phones or losing themselves in the community newspaper. My early attempts to strike up conversation were often awkward and pained since that clearly didn’t happen here... WAL-MART wouldn't have it any other way.

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.