An Impressive Coup D'état

Sam Walton believed that, “If some community, for whatever reason, doesn’t want us in there, we aren’t interested in going in and creating a fuss.” With countless communities standing up to the store and WAL-MART attempting to bullying its way in regardless, obviously times have changed. In his place Lee Scott asks rhetorically, “When you have a group of people, a small group of people, who don’t want you in a community, does that mean you aren’t going to go there?” Indeed, the changing of the guard after Walton’s death also ushered in a new era of political sophistication for WAL-MART. The head office in Bentonville now fully understands the importance of their image in a community, and desperately wants to avoid being branded an outsider (which is, of course, exactly what they are.) WAL-MART now engages in a year round political campaign to define themselves to the public, hiring hundreds of lobbyists and media consultants to work on the national and local level. This campaign takes place not only in communities with potential stores, but well-established markets such as the one I work in.

The chief tool for getting this message across was through charity work. One slow morning on the desk the head of community involvement gave me a crash course in how our store raised $143,000 for charity in the past year. All requests for donations are received in writing and then “everything goes on a gift card.” She said $25-50 certificates work better for the company since it is simpler and you know that the whole amount will be spent in the store (not to mention that the store ends up giving less actual money since a sizable percentage is the markup/profit…) In addition to this matching funds are given for on-site fundraisers, like hot dog sales, and grants are given for such things as the Teacher of the Year Award. Doing some generous math in my head I didn’t even get up to half the total on the board; where does the rest of the money come from? Well, there are the employee fundraisers she offered, but (and this was what I was looking for) a far bigger chunk comes from claims. In order to inflate the total WAL-MART tacks on more than $60,000 in annual grocery claims since some, but not all, of this is donated to local food banks. Ah ha, this was the slight of hand I was looking for!

Like anything else, this public image campaign took place on the backs of its workers. The head of community involvement had mentioned the employee fundraisers, but I knew how small scale these projects were. I have never been solicited for donations more in my life than the past three months while working at WAL-MART. There were raffle tickets, potluck dinners, and flat out monetary donations, going to Barbara Bush’s Children’s Miracle Network, Law Enforcement’s Torch Run for the Special Olympics, and the Sunshine Fund. The last of these is the most interesting since the Sunshine Fund goes to associates-in-need in our store. Generally the associate-in-need would be nameless, but one of the recipients I did know had gotten really sick and was left with unaffordable bills for what the health plan would not cover. Obviously these fundraisers that targeted already destitute employees weren’t huge money makers, but I was surprised to find that employees pieced together $200 out-of-pocket and the Sunshine Fund chipped in another $100 for my friend. It was touching to see how readily my co-workers would give for one of their own, perhaps thinking of how close they were to being in the same position. I couldn’t help but become intensely angry at the irony of the whole situation. Associates who were paid so little were asked to give on WAL-MART’s behalf, to enhance the store’s image and pick up the slack for its employees living in poverty.

But the campaign seemed to be working. Our Supercenter was the most profitable in the state and was constantly receiving favorable press. The pinnacle came when our store manager was named Business Person of the Year by the county’s Chamber of Commerce. Recognized for the stores donations to charity and his personal community involvement, he was rewarded with a banquet in his honor. It was an impressive coup d'état, even by WAL-MART standards.

Our (Conservative) Cultural Gatekeeper

Recently several women from Massachusetts sued WAL-MART for not carrying the morning-after-pill. This promises to be an interesting case since it brings to the forefront the often neglected issue of WAL-MART’s role in censoring consumer's choices. By choosing to carry such a broad range of products, the depth of product options is surprisingly thin. For example, the store may have a hundred ice scrapers for your car in-stock, but there will actually only be two or three different types of these scrapers, all made by the same company. Then there is a far more insidious type of censorship. WAL-MART edits out the “explicit lyrics” for all of the music that the store carries. WAL-MART refuses to sell racy magazines such as Maxim. Or, even more alarming, WAL-MART censors books like The Daily Show’s America: The Book (because of the infamous picture of naked Supreme Court Justices...)

The problem of censorship stems from the fact that WAL-MART is a retailing monopoly. To even the biggest corporations WAL-MART’s contract is a must-have, forcing them to kowtow to the company’s slightest whim. In many ways WAL-MART’s suppliers are abused just as badly by the golliath as anyone else, forced to accept whatever price and modifications Bentonville imposes upon them. So you can imagine the chilling effect on entire industries when WAL-MART makes it clear that something is a little too risqué for their customers. Music producers will do whatever is necessary to have their album carried by the world’s biggest distributor of music, even if that means pressuring their artist to clean up their lyrics enough so as not to offend the Walton’s. Although we rarely see it, WAL-MART has truly become our cultural gatekeeper.

This fact becomes positively disturbing when you consider WAL-MART’s conservative Christian credentials. The company is the darling of the Religious Right, for the impression it has created as a good Christian family company. I see the signs of this carefully constructed facade every day at my store. When I walk into the store in the morning the first thing I see on Wal-Mart TV is FOX News parroting the Republican talking points of the day. Next off I sign on to my register, which is blanketed with magnetic yellow ribbons demanding that I “Support Our Troops.” Then, still before I have seen my first customer, I hear over the intercom the latest NASCAR standings being broadcast. And don’t think that I am basing WAL-MART’s cozy relationships with the neo-cons of the Bush Administration on mere anecdotal evidence. The best example is the memo that was leaked last fall whereby Bush’s Labor Department made a secret deal to alert the company two weeks in advance of any investigations about child labor law violations. For this nice little gift WAL-MART had to give up nothing, except of course the few hundred thousand dollars it had contributed to Republican coffers across the country.

But to be honest, I don’t think WAL-MART is controlled by crazy constituents of the Religious Right. To have membership in this club would require genuine beliefs and morals, something that the company does not have. Once again, WAL-MART is a soulless, profit-making machine. They do not care about politics or social issues so they take the path of least resistance… unless it is going to affect their bottom line. In this case the powers-that-be down in Bentonville have decided that it will, so they play to their base just as a politician would. They know full well who shops at WAL-MART, so they are sure to announce the NASCAR standings and carry several versions of software that reads The Bible aloud. Ultimately though, WAL-MART drops the act when they realize that the other side offers the promise of greater profits, as they did this Christmas by sticking with the more inclusive greeting of “Happy Holidays” over “Merry Christmas.” The moral of the story should be clear: we will only change WAL-MART’s cultural gatekeeping, or any aspect of the company, when we prove a significant threat to their profits.

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.”

A Cool $42

One big reason that I wanted to take this project on was a desire to settle the furious public debate being waged about the corporation by the various sides of the political divide. Conservatives were quick to point out that WAL-MART's low prices greatly benefited the poor, with Sebastian Mallaby of the Washington Post using some horrendous math to suggest that the store saves poor American's $200 billion per year, more than food stamps and the earned-income tax credit combined. On the other side of the spectrum Liza Featherstone, author of "Selling Women Short," a comprehensive look at the historic class action lawsuit that accuses WAL-MART of gender discrimination, put it this way:

"In a chilling reversal of Henry Ford's strategy, which was to pay his workers amply so they could buy Ford cars, Wal-Mart's stingy compensation policies contribute to an economy in which, increasingly, workers can only afford to shop at Wal-Mart."

Whether or not this cold-hearted logic passed through Walton's head is uncertain; what we do know is that history did work out this way. There are countless studies to show that when WAL-MART moves into town it drives down wages and small businesses into bankruptcy. But I see this play out on a smaller level in my store, with every employee sending a significant chunk of their paycheck directly back to the company in order to buy groceries or any other necessities (and occasionally luxuries.) Bizarrely, many associates would come back to WAL-MART on their day off in order to do their weekly shopping, something that I wouldn't be caught dead doing for oh so many reasons.

In addition to convenience, many associates are drawn to shopping at WAL-MART by the 10% employee discount. However, this discount is only for immediate family, does not cover items that are on sale, and most importantly, does not cover any food. I have made it a habit to announce an employees discount to them in an effort to get across how shitty a perk this really is. "And 5 cents is your discount..." Essentially, WAL-MART has captured the market of 1.3 million American's, nothing to slouch at. This stranglehold is never more pronounced than at lunchtime. Nearly every associate will clock out for lunch then run back into the store to pick up a container of popcorn shrimp or a frozen dinner along with a soda and some other junk food. Although this meal is still meager and unhealthy, it nevertheless adds right up, easily breaking 3, 4, or even 5 dollars.

Therefore I have been bringing my own lunches, a luxury I am well aware many of the associates do not have. My seemingly modest lunches of rice and bean leftovers have drawn ooh's and ahh's, and feeling guilty I have tried to cut back as much as possible. Not helping matters is all of the people who content themselves with a bag of chips and a soda from the vending machines, or even worse, not eating at all. I routinely chide my friends -- especially the young women -- to eat something substantial since far too many of them treat their poverty as an incentive to diet. One woman summed it up tragically when I asked her if the tiny burrito she was sitting down with was dinner. "Yeah, if you are poor" she sighed. "The second week [after payday] is always meager."

Sadly, the first week after payday isn't much better. As I said earlier, my starting wage as a cashier was $7.40 per hour, which to be fair, is higher than my state's minimum wage. However, the livable wage for my county -- the amount needed to cover basic living expenses such as housing, transportation, child care, etc. -- is $11.70. Making matters worse is the fact that WAL-MART considers full-time to be 34 hours a week, and at my store a third of hourly workers are part-time, like myself. In other words, for an eight hour shift I earn $59.20. But taxes shrink this amount by 20%, closer to $47. And two gallons of gas for my 30 minute drive each way in to work (which I would say is only slightly above the norm for workers at my store) lop off another $5. So at the end of the day, after slaving for 8 hours on register, I take home a cool $42. Like I said though, many days I don't even get a full shift, instead going in for only 4 hours of work, or $19. As a cashier getting part-time hours at my WAL-MART Supercenter, I will not break the $10,000 mark in earnings for the year.