WAL-MART

My name is Josh Smith and I am a 23 year old from the small town of Mt. Vernon, ME. I graduated in 2004 from Stonehill College, a small liberal arts school just south of Boston, with a degree in political science. After graduation I participated in a year of service with the Holy Cross Associates, volunteering at a homeless shelter in Portland, OR. Wanting to work more with the issue of poverty, I knew it was time to try my hand at community organizing. And after months of reading and a couple of weeks planning while hiking on the Appalachian Trail, I was ready.

On October 12th, 2005 I was hired as an associate at WAL-MART Supercenter #2046 in Augusta, ME. As a temporary (and later part-time) hire, I averaged 32 hours per week at $7.40 per hour, with no benefits. My hours were erratic and I worked throughout the store as a cashier and door guard, in customer service and layaway, and at times even helping the stockmen and sales floor associates. All the while I witnessed the company cheat their employees out of benefits and raises, ignore workplace safety hazards, rig charitable-giving totals, engage in gender discrimination... It didn't take much of this for me to realize how difficult a job this truly is, especially given the intense pressure, the culture of fear, and the utter lack of respect handed down by the company. But I think what makes this job nearly unbearable is that, at the end of the day, despite working for the largest corporation in the world, these workers must return home to a life of poverty.

And as unpleasant as the job itself may have been, I had fun doing it. Inevitably it helped to know that I was at least trying to do something good, but ultimately it was the people that I befriended that made the experience worthwhile... as well as so difficult. WAL-MART reaps billions of dollars in profits by exploiting its workers and it is simply not right. The good news is that we have the power to stop the injustice. By standing up to WAL-MART and threatening the only thing they care about, their profits, we can reform this company for the better. It is a big job, so let us each begin today.

Let me just say that if you have read this whole blog from start to finish, well done! I really appreciate your reading and hope that you too will decide to hold WAL-MART responsible by not shopping there. And if you have just discovered this treasure trove, start at the beginning and work your way forward... I think you will find it worth your while. Thanks again.

Liars and Cheaters

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.”

Everyone Loves a Snow Day

The close of the busy Christmas season brought an abrupt about-face for WAL-MART. Rather than seeking to squeeze more hours out of its employees the store began to find ways cut their hours whenever possible. Almost across the board, associates saw their schedule trimmed down by 2-4 hours every week; mine were cut on the high-end of this range. The store may only be saving itself $15-$30, but this can make a difference to people who are already struggling to make ends meet. Also, who gets their hours cut can be fairly arbitrary: one of the older male cashiers noted how his hours hadn’t changed while the four longest tenured female cashiers had lost hours. As I mentioned in an earlier post, he attributed this not to gender discrimination, but to his being in the good graces of his supervisors and not complaining quite as much as the women did.

Another way of limiting hours is to send people home early. If sales were down for the week, or even the day, managers would get the word from above (both inside the store and from the home office) to trim payroll expenses in an effort to off-set the loss. “We are supposed to send people home as long as it won’t hurt us,” one of the Customer Service Manager’s confided in me candidly. To be fair, many of the associates will want to get the hell out of there, a request which the managers are only too happy to oblige. One of the cashiers put this inner struggle best: “Want to [leave], but can’t afford to.” I would always fight being sent home early no matter how badly I wanted to leave, since I had been lobbying for full-time hours from the beginning. This didn’t make much of a difference and I was routinely sent home anywhere from 30-90 minutes early. One time they even tried to send me home half-way through my four-hour shift, but my favorite CSM relented when I protested it wouldn’t even have been worth the price of gas to come in. “We can’t cut hours that have already been cut” she agreed sympathetically.

Snowstorms presented management with a golden opportunity to trim hours. Claiming their hands were tied, they would note that sales were down 51% for the day from the previous year (a foolish statistic since there are snowstorms that keep customers away every year.) Nevertheless, with their cover in place, an assistant manager would page on the hour that all sales floor associates would be capped at six-hour shifts, no exceptions. On top of this, there could be dozens of call-outs in anticipation of the bad weather. It should come as no surprise then that management would okay the call-out without putting up a fight. Obviously there was a downside to this strategy since often times the skeleton crew that remained would be swamped with all the slack they had to pick up. One morning a CSM was griping about being short-handed and the long lines that were gathering at her only three open registers. So I was surprised to go back to the break room and find a friend just sitting there since she had mistakenly thought her shift started two hours earlier than it did. I dutifully told that same CSM that I had found the solution to her problems, only to discover that she was the one that told her to wait back there. At that point I stopped feeling sorry for the CSM.

But these methods for cutting hours are small fish compared to their ultimate strategy: keep as many workers part-time (or as they call it, peak-time) as possible. As I mentioned, I had trying since my first interview to gain full-time status unsuccessfully. When they were desperate for people they would magnanimously throw me an extra hour or two, as long as it didn’t result in overtime… that had to be specifically authorized by management. I couldn’t help but be amused when a fellow temporary hire cashier resolved to me stupidly, “I have to get my full-time hours back.” “Good luck” quipped a manager from personnel, realizing as I did the remoteness of this possibility. Indeed, one of the veterans told me that the company never moves people to full-time if they are hired as part-time; you are better off quitting and trying to get hired again. I took a tally one day of the schedule posted on the wall, which revealed that 119 of the 385 scheduled hourly workers were part-time, or 30%. By purposefully hiring and keeping more workers part-time, like myself, WAL-MART also saves itself the expense of paying benefits. It is our problem to try to live off this pittance of a sum.

The Temp Trick

Quite possibly the most interesting revelation that I discovered in my time at WAL-MART was a devious scheme to control their new workers and deny them benefits. It is a slight of hand used by the store with its new hires and I am the perfect example of how this works.

As I mentioned before, I was hired as a temporary peak-time cashier, which means that the company can work me for as many or few hours as they want without providing benefits for three months. Ordinarily peak-time workers (which is the same as part-time) must wait for two years before becoming eligible for benefits; with this little trick that date is pushed back yet another three months. Just as significant is the fact that temporary workers aren’t peak-time or full-time, but rather any-time. If for example, I was hired as a permanent peak-time associate, I would be limited to working 32 hours per week. Due to my temp status, the store was not held to this threshold when scheduling me to work, a perk that they exercised during all 7 weeks of the peak holiday shopping season.

Not only this, but as a temporary worker I am only under contract for three months. WAL-MART sets a termination date for 90 days after being hired and is under no obligation to keep me on board. In essence the three months were a limbo period where I was forced to walk on eggshells in one marathon job interview. Inexplicably, in a lapse of judgment I had been lulled into believing my friends in the store when they reassured me that I would be kept on since I was such a hard worker. I was jarred back to reality a couple of weeks before Christmas when I overheard one of the CSM’s saying in a hushed tone that “We had a great group [of temporary hires] last year and they let them all go. And they were hiring again a month later.” With this I was forced into an exhausting guessing game of reading into the mixed messages of my co-workers. Once again, it isn’t hard to imagine the stress that this uncertainty would cause a low-wage worker who is trying to provide for his or her family. And it wasn’t until the day after Christmas that the Front-end Manager said as an afterthought on my way out the door that, congratulations, I would be staying on.

For these reasons, WAL-MART loves its temporary workers. So much so that it will use any excuse in order to get more of them. Mine was the rapidly approaching holiday shopping season that they desperately needed more cashiers for. But I would later find out that even the most flimsiest of occasions would serve as sufficient justification for not hiring permanent workers. For the previous half-year it had been the summer renovations that took place at the Supercenter, although the actual logic used by the store is unclear. Nearly all of the renovations were done by outside contractors with only the smallest of projects done by actual WAL-MART associates. This gap in logic was seemingly lost on the employees in the store who had been hired as temp workers, nearly all of whom dismissed the incident one big misunderstanding.

These aren’t theoreticals that I am speaking in; all of this did happen. I won’t be eligible for benefits until a staggering 820 days after my hire date. I worked as many as 46 hours in a week, even though I was hired as a peak-time worker. And most importantly, there was a Post-Christmas massacre at our WAL-MART Supercenter. I made the cut, but at least five of my fellow hires did not. There was the socially-awkward young man who I had painstakingly built a rapport with. Or the tough-looking but disarmingly polite teen. Or the tall, soft-spoken red-haired boy and the sadly forgettable girl. And most tragically, the friendly, emotional pregnant woman, who gave birth to a healthy young boy on Christmas Day. All five were young like myself, and perfectly capable cashiers in every sense as far as I could tell. And after slaving for months for WAL-MART Stores, Inc. all five were casualties of the temp trick on the day after Christmas. Two short weeks later the store would be hiring once again and the cycle started anew.

Lee Scott: Environmental Steward

My brief tenure at WAL-MART has been a very significant time for the company. According to CEO Lee Scott, Hurricane Katrina marked a turning point for the corporation; no doubt after their donation of merchandise and timely delivery efforts generated widespread accolades. This PR coup stymied the increasingly vocal and well-organized opposition groups, that is until a memo was leaked suggesting various under-handed strategies for the board to deny benefits to employees. On its heels came the debut of the documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, which was shown to a million people worldwide. Scott came back swinging, unveiling a barrage of new initiatives. WAL-MART would now offer a Value Plan in an effort to insure more workers. WAL-MART would support a higher minimum wage to help out its impoverished customers. WAL-MART would become a green company and “a good steward for the environment.” The whole thing was so out of left field that you just had to laugh.

As much as I would like to be encouraged by Scott’s proposed reforms, given their track record I could not help but be skeptical. The Value Plan still has high deductibles and many hidden charges, with little meaningful coverage for employees. Pushing for a higher minimum wage without offering their own employees a livable wage reveals the company’s motivation not as humanitarian but as yet another money grab. But perhaps Scott’s aim to become a green company was the most surprising about face. Over the next three years WAL-MART would improve the fuel efficiency of its truck fleet, favor “green” factories in China, and reduce waste from its domestic stores. Up until this point the company has demonstrated an utter disregard for the environment and has repeatedly been ordered to pay fines for violating the Clean Water Act in a number of states. However, most of the environmental damage wrought by WAL-MART is institutionalized and therefore much harder to stop. For example, the retailer had $18 billion worth of goods assembled in China in 2004, meaning that tons of toxic emissions were released by ships and trucks in the unnecessary detour back and forth across the Pacific Ocean.

Closer to home, my store does not recycle its plastic clothes hangers, instead throwing them away. While this may seem like a nit-picky qualm, you have to realize that my store easily has hundreds of hangers left over from sales at the end of each day; multiplying this number by 365 days and 5,000 some stores and you realize that we are talking about hundreds of millions of perfectly good hangers being sent to our nation’s landfills. WAL-MART could reuse these hangers, but it would take a little bit of effort… and what is in it for them anyways? However, from now on, whenever I think of WAL-MART’s utter lack of concern for issues like the environment I will think of dead birds. Before winter set in my store undertook some renovations in their Lawn and Garden Department, exposing a hole to the outside. Through this opening dozens of birds flew into the store, buzzing from department to department and shitting on the merchandise. I noticed the birds late one night while returning products to Lawn and Garden and realized that they were trapped inside the store. Needless to say my concern fell on deaf ears; one employee could only lament what a messy job it was to fish the dead birds out from on top of the racks of merchandise. Over the next couple weeks no less than four different concerned customers came up to alert me that someone needed to free the birds from inside the store. Toeing the party line I promised them that someone was looking into it, before rushing back to the job at hand. I wish I had saved those birds.

One of the main reasons I chose to work at the Supercenter that I did was the unbelievable sprawl that WAL-MART had started near my hometown (although sometimes it’s hard to know which came first, the store or the suburb…) In the city I worked in it was definitely WAL-MART. Fifteen years ago when the company first started building on the lot on the outskirts of town there was nothing, except hills and trees. Once WAL-MART and SAM’S CLUB moved in it was all over. Barnes & Noble, Michael’s, Staples, Home Depot, Old Navy, Linens N' Things, Radio Shack, Eddie Bauer, Kohl’s, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Cicuit City; the horror show goes on. Take them all together and you now have big-box buildings and parking lots as far as the eye can see. Insane traffic has completely transformed this quiet section of town (not to mention the now ramshackle main drag downtown.) Air pollution from these cars, not to mention light pollution from the street lamps at night, obscures the sky by day and stars by night. Sadly, there is no end in sight. Now this sleepy little city is home to the largest mall in my entire state.

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.

Screening for Non-Conformists

My first step was certainly straightforward enough: get hired. However, I was well aware of what I was up against. An excellent article about WAL-MART in The Nation a while back explained how:

“the company screens out potential union supporters through its hiring process: in addition to excluding those with union histories, the company also administers personality tests to weed out those likely to be sympathetic to unions, and offers managers tips on how to spot such people.”

With this in mind, my goal going in was to be as honest as possible without lying, not because I owe that to them but because I didn’t want to give them an easy excuse for firing me later on. I would tell them I graduated from college but play down my more suspicious activities such as volunteering for a year of community service, my activism against the war, and certainly my working on a gubernatorial campaign.

All applications had to be filed on an in-store computer, which was greuling and surprisingly difficult, taking a full 50 minutes to complete. As I awaited their phone call I began to fear that I was too honest in providing background information, revealing my political science major and saying that the least I would work for was $8 per hour. Overall, I did well, navigating the tricky and repetitive 67 questions that focused largely on drug use and stealing from employers. (My favorites ones were: Is someone who steals $5 a year from an employer a thief? Is there room in every company for a non-conformist?) Five days later I received the message I was looking for: my interview would be the next day at 1:30 pm.

On my arrival the “Training Associate” took me out back and proceeded to lay out a great deal of paperwork for me to fill out concerning contracts (or lack thereof). The woman then asked me a series of disarmingly difficult questions about my last job, which I stumbled through, again being just a little too candid. Soon I hit my stride, throwing in all the right buzzwords and even stooped so low as to say that I wanted to work at WAL-MART because it seemed like such a friendly place to work. This was the right tact; there is no such thing as too big of a suck-up at WAL-MART. Case in point was when a member of management eventually showed up to take over for the Training Associate and conduct a second interview. After regurgitating the same questions that had just been asked in greater depth we moved on to some concerns that the computer has “flagged” on my questionnaire… not wrong answers, mind you! Questions in need of further discussion was my slight agreement that managers deserve more perks than employees and that employees should criticize an employer if they believe it to be wrong. Apparently anything less than “strongly agree” on these matters warned them that I might be one of those non-conformists, which of course there is no room for in this corporation. I backtracked on all of these questions and my request for $8 per hour, spinelessly settling for $7.40 per hour as a temporary hire part-time cashier. Due to the upcoming holiday shopping season the store was only hiring employees on a temporary basis, that is, for a three-month period where they can work you as much or as little as they want without paying you any benefits. The young female manager kindly assured me that they would be in touch and that I should be in good shape, pending my background check, or course.

Five days later the good news came. Show up at 9 am on Wednesday for part one of the two-day orientation. Bring two forms of ID and please don’t wear jeans.