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.”

Struggling in the Service Economy

As I entered the forth month of my tenure in the store, the toll of the job was beginning to show. I was tired and that long trudge across the parking lot to the main doors was becoming more difficult by the day. It was now a struggle to find the energy to strike up conversations in the break room and keep up with my journal entries like I had when I first started working at the store. On the job, I felt like I had become a different person, and not exactly a change for the better. No longer did I appreciate my interactions with people, instead I had become aloof and almost standoffish with customers. Believe it or not, I couldn’t help but bring the job home with me. Friends who called late at night would be horrified when I groggily reverted back to my nightmare of doing returns at WAL-MART. All of this and I didn’t even have the economic worries that my co-workers had to grapple with.

In the best of times, it was difficult to make ends meet with WAL-MART’s wages… and these were hardly the best of times. Despite our President’s rosy forecasts, where I was the economy wasn’t doing us any favors. For countless employees, WAL-MART marked their first venture into retail after jobs dried up in manufacturing, construction, and even the high tech field. A close friend of mine had this happen after his business doing contract plumbing and electrical work petered out during a lull in the economy; now he found himself getting poorer by the month after whittling through all of his savings. Some workers would try to garner the needed extra income by picking up a second job, whether it be in fast-food restaurants or freelance positions. On top of this, high prices at the pump and for heating oil hit the working poor particularly hard. There were many associates like myself who commuted an hour roundtrip every day, not to mention the CSM who bemoaned the fact that she would have to sell her few shares of stock in order to pay for oil, again. For several friends I watched personal problems – from mysterious illnesses to car troubles – completely disrupt this tight-rope act, throwing them into desperate straits. It was into this environment that H&R Block set-up shop immediately after Christmas, ushering in WAL-MART's self-proclaimed "Tax Season." Associates and customers alike would readily sign on for their "Instant Money Refund Anticipation Loans," knowing it was a scam, but being too desperate to care.

This bleak picture became even more clear on payday, when I would get to cash the paychecks of many of my co-workers (a huge perk of working at the service desk.) Obviously the total on the check doesn’t tell the whole picture of how many hours were worked, and these are probably some of the worst off since they may not have a bank and generally need to cash the check immediately. Nevertheless, taken as a whole, these pitiful sums can be instructive. Consider the examples gathered over two paydays: $248, 321, 343, 344, 363, 388, 418, 442, 445, 502, 508, 558, 616, 873, 925. Average these together and you get $486.27 in net earnings for two weeks of work. Annually this works out to $12,643, well below the 2005 federal poverty line of $16,090 for a family of three. Strickingly similarly sums would come in from our fellow big-box neighbors in the mall, like Home Depot, Michael’s, and Kohl’s. No, my personal struggles with this project could not compare to the real ones faced by retail workers every day.

Large, Cheap, Old Box

I work in a box – a large, cheap, old box. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that there are a few leaks in the building (like the spot in front of the general merchandise doors where a plastic container is always stationed to catch the brownish liquid dripping from above.) But when it rained through the first week of the New Year, the waterworks really started up, and not just the normal trouble spots. Back in claims I realized that with all the leaks if the rain kept up much of the receiving area would be flooded by morning. Far more disturbing though was the positive deluge in the, wait for it, Electrical Room! A blue tarp hung haphazardly above part of the machinery, doing little to slow the rush of water. Looking from the “HAZARD” signs to the puddle of water I was standing in, I got the hell out of there. Sure enough, the next morning I walked into a partially darkened store; the flood had shorted out three large panels of lighting running across the back half of the store. I would also discover that a water-bogged ceiling tile above Electronics had crashed on top of a display case of DVD’s, thankfully missing any customers (or associates.) Five days later the lights were still out, and more Tupperware containers had been broken out for the Electrical Room.

Given workplace dangers like this one, I was surprised to discover when I started my job that the store was in its second month of being-accident free. Once the old record was broken our new goal became going for 90 days without an accident, with “reasonable” suggestions for a reward solicited from employees. Ignoring all of the proposed monetary awards, our store manager instead promised us “chicken and potatoes.” Sadly, we did not make it when a guy in receiving slipped and screwed up his foot pretty badly. Predictably enough, the other associates were very upset, wondering why he couldn’t have just “sucked it up." Blowing the whole thing into a big deal was very clever on their part, serving the dual purpose of making us more aware of safety issues and less likely to spoil the party by reporting injuries. I saw this firsthand when I tried to get a close friend of mine to report and injury suffered to her wrist while moving boxes around in Layaway. She refused to, afraid they would blame it on her and say she was "stupid," a fear I couldn't honestly dispute.

And customers aren’t always spared either. A big commotion ensued after one woman was struck in the arm by a falling humidifier. Whoever had stacked the boxes hadn’t done a very good job, but this was hardly unusual. With little extra space to store all of the merchandise coming in every evening, the pallets are wheeled onto the sales floor and the overnight associates are expected to find a place for it. The result is predictable: rickety displays jammed with merchandise and boxes towering inside of the three feet buffer zone of the ceiling that was meant to prevent fire hazards. A friend who heard the woman scream when hit said she was given ice, told to see a doctor and that the insurance company would be in touch. While I don’t know what happened in her case, I do know of another woman who was befallen by a similar situation. After filing her accident report WAL-MART promised the insurance company would call, but a ten days later they still had not returned her call.

Accidents are to be expected everywhere, what upsets me is WAL-MART’s preoccupation with covering their own ass and lack of concern for the people who are actually getting hurt. The best anecdote I can offer played out on one of the busy weekends before Christmas. Snow from the previous night had frozen on the many carts that had been left out in the parking lot. The problem, of course, came the next morning when customers brought the icy carts into the store and they began to thaw. Quickly massive puddles formed in the aisles and I was dispatched to find a mop, only to find that we did not have one for the front-end! I stood by a couple of spills as we had been trained, only to have the Lead CSM tell me there was nothing she could do about it. On hearing this, we left the spills and went back to work. A few minutes later a PA announcement was made to warn the customers to “be careful” – no doubt this was deemed the easiest way to absolve WAL-MART of responsibility for the situation.

A Christmas Story

I found myself at the customer service desk on the day after Christmas, the busiest day of the year for returns. The lines were long, but moved along steadily since we had plenty of help and a couple of other registers had been converted to accept returns. Once again, given adequate resources, we proved we could get the job done… not that they made it easy on us. The single biggest issue was WAL-MART’s refusal to accept seasonal items as returns, thinking perhaps people would cheat the store by using the item for Christmas then return it after they were done. However, this problem continued to arise for weeks afterwards since the store still wouldn’t accept the return even if the customer had purchased the item on clearance after Christmas. Seeing this for the money-grubbing attempt it was, customers went ballistic. One manager pulled me aside to tell me not to worry about cheap $2-3 items since they weren’t worth the hassle. But when I told him point blank that the real problem was not accepting seasonal returns, he ignored me and repeated his earlier advice… that issue was clearly off the table.

Of course the real reason that WAL-MART gets so many returns isn’t because their customers are trying to cheat them but because their products, frankly, suck. I have taken back literally thousands of products in every department that simply do not work at all. One of my favorite things to do at the service desk is to ask the customer what they paid for their microwave that doesn’t work. When they say “$34” I just nod my head and try to remain expressionless. Sometimes they will get my point and say they should have known better, but far more often they'll say they would like to take another chance with an equal exchange. A close second in favorite activities to kill time at the desk is to read about different WAL-MART products that have been recalled. They are simply hilarious, albeit in an alarming sort of way. Most are for battery packs that overheat and start a fire; worse are the children’s toys that promise choking hazards, lead paint, collapsing cribs, and even “amputation of finger’s.” Inevitably, at the bottom of the recall flier it will say “MADE IN CHINA.” Much is made of the company’s cozy relationship with the People’s Republic, but it doesn’t really hit home until you walk through our toy department and see that almost every single one carries this label. Oh, if only there was some way of knowing…

While it is certainly an up-hill battle taking returns during the holidays, WAL-MART doesn’t make the other jobs on the front-end any easier. A good illustration is our shortage of bags, a reoccurring problem. It starts out as the usual annoyance of having to steal bags from the other registers, but soon all of the vacant registers are picked clean. Even cheaper bags, seemingly from the early-1990’s, appear and it becomes clear that this time we will actually run out of bags. And so you begin doing exactly what they want, stretching the use of every last bag (one time I had to switch over to the large bags, cleverly rigging them to fit on the turning-rack.) Operations slow down and customers get pissed, but we never actually run out, with one of the CSM’s speeding to the nearest store at the last minute and jamming their car full with a case of bags. Again, customers may view this debacle as amateur hour, but in reality it is a purposeful effort to meet ever-lower quotas. The story is the same with big bags, small bags, freezer bags, and trash bags; with gift card envelopes; with car batteries and walkie-talkie batteries; with dustpans and snow shovels. In the end, all this does is save a couple of dollars and it makes our job much harder.

Not to sound whiny, but WAL-MART did ruin my Christmas. I knew going on into this that I would hate being inside a WAL-MART all day, but I had never been inside a WAL-MART all day during Christmas time. It takes hell to a whole new level. The mean customers and out-of-control consumerism were just too much for me, and WAL-MART somehow managed to make an already difficult job almost impossible. To top it off, I found out that Christmas bonuses ranged from a low of $25 up to a high of $75. However, with renovations that previous summer, money was tight, so I would not be getting my Christmas bonus that year. At least a new year was one the way.

A Black Start to the Holidays

Both a blessing and a curse, my time at WAL-MART coincided with the holiday shopping season. I had no delusions that this would be an easy experience, but it wasn’t one I wanted to miss... and it all kicked off on Black Friday. In the days leading up to this orgy of shopping, veterans of past Blitz Day’s (WAL-MART’s pet name for the day) had regaled me with their favorite horror stories. One woman tore up her arm when it became pinned between a shopping cart and a shelf. Another was pushed upside-down into the cart she had wheeled out stuffed with Furby’s, stuck there as the surging crowd pulled the toys out from underneath her. And then of course there were the numerous reports of customers who had been trampled in that first stampede into the store. My interest was sufficiently piqued; I had to see this for myself.

When I arrived at the store at 4:30 am I had to fight my way through the crowd that would swell to an estimated 670 people by the time our store manager radioed the go-ahead at 4:57 am. Many were dressed in pajamas; even more had Dunkin’ Donuts coffee purchased from a cart that wound its way through the crowd; cell-phones and store maps completed the insanity. The lead row of carts surged through the front doors, sprinting toward Electronics with the rest of the crowd jogging in behind them. For five full minutes the shoppers poured in, until every aisle was packed with the speed walkers. Only the lucky few who had snagged the $398 laptop computers checked out early, but by quarter past five the lines were six people deep in all 30 some registers. Flush from the cold then exercise the shoppers seemed at once relieved to be done and sad to leave.

Then the unthinkable happened: the power went out! A nervous hush went over the crowd as I hurriedly plotted the best way to initiate the rioting that would surely ensue. Sadly less than a minute went by before the lights came back on; ten minutes later all operations were again running at full capacity. And this was hardly the only snafu in the much ballyhooed plan to get people out the door smoothly (clocking-in in single file, sharing register tills, etc.) The biggest problem was mispriced DVD’s, which required constant Supervisor Overrides (although this mistake did provide a nice extra boost to WAL-MART’s bottom line…) There were a few reports of pushing and one woman claimed to have been trampled coming inside, but nothing too out of the ordinary given the number of people and the store’s narrow aisles. The long lines and ridiculous customers frazzled me a couple of times, but I didn’t freak out like some.

Two of my friends were casualties on day one of the shopping season. Our exhuberant door guard (and currently reigning "Associate of the Year") lost it when a customer went off on him for asking them not to take pictures in the store. A sensitive fellow, he would submit his resignation before the end of his shift (but would stay on after failing to find another job...) Another buddy of mine quit mid-shift when CSM's refused to let him buy a digital camera on sale during his break. Despite written policy in his favor management insisted that blitz items were to be saved for our customers (probably not wanting to give him his 10% markdown.) Needless to say our store made out much better on the day than its associates did, reporting gains from the previous year. By the end of the day I alone had checked out 177 customers for a whopping $20,128.19 in sales! And I was only one of thirty plus cashiers working one of three shifts. It all adds up to a million dollar day for our Supercenter, easy. While this is outrageous, I think what will stick with me will be the mood of the day: pure madness.

As I mentioned before, I try not to blame to customers who are rude since it seemed to be misplacing blame that properly belonged to WAL-MART. After all, many customers would be upset by the time they reached my register since the store kept them waiting in line for so long; I too would be annoyed at such a wholly unpleasant shopping experience. In addition to this, many WAL-MART regulars were just as poor as I was, not to mention the toll that the holidays seem to take on just about everyone. However, as the Christmas season dragged on I found it increasingly difficult to forgive shoppers who lashed out at associates.

A nasty customer really could ruin your entire day; thinking back weeks later I still get a little upset. There was the unspeakably rude woman who browbeat me into loading her cart up on my own, only to return and curse me out further after her container of apple juice broke in the parking lot. Or the one who suffered a mental breakdown when my register asked to see her State ID, complete with tears and screaming at her 5 year-old daughter. (Her vow to never return to the store was short lived since I saw her refilling her cart 45 minutes later.) I’ve seen co-workers had things thrown at them, pushed out of the way, and called literally every name in the book… all during the Holiday Season. Indeed, WAL-MART would prove to be some bizarro world where the true spirit of Christmas played out to its perverse opposite.

The Customer is Number... 2?

By the time I witnessed my first cashier meeting I had already figured out that it would be a pointless exercise. There are supposed to be regularly scheduled meetings for every position in the store, but in reality they occur far less frequently. I think this just fine by most associates since the meetings are mandatory and require many of them to make a special trip into the store on their day off or after their shift for 30 minutes of lecturing. The meeting was run by the CSM’s and was really just a laundry list of pet peeves they had about cashiers. Most interesting though were their instructions for dealing with customers. We were to have a “sense of urgency” when taking our break, being sure to take off our vest on the way to the break room. What this really meant was that we were supposed to duck the customers in an attempt to avoid wasting time by answering their questions (of which there were many since only a few sales associates would be working on the floor.) Even more surprising was their command to “try to kill the conversation as quickly as possible” with customers in our lines who were checking out. Of course don’t be rude or say “I’m not allowed to talk with you,” but just stick to “hello” and “thank you for shopping at WAL-MART.” Apparently the customer didn’t really want to talk to us at all and would rather get out of the store a few seconds quicker. I couldn’t help but wonder how I as an associate could still make the difference if my first priority was efficiency and not serving the customer.

Obviously this is another case of the WAL-MART Disconnect, a seemingly universal divorce between the company’s words and deeds. The company cloaks absolutely everything in their concern for their beloved customers. There are the signs in several of the aisles that say that they videotape customers “in order to bring you low prices.” And whenever lines are long the page for all register-trained associates to come and help inevitably ends with “in order to help out our customers.” Often the evidence is subtle, like the renovations to the store that summer. Aisles were narrowed. More of the unpopular self-check outs were added. There still were not enough cart-holders or any security in the parking lot. And most interestingly, turn-tables of bags were added to the end of every register. This contraption cleverly put the customer to work at loading their bags back into the cart, leaving me to scan and fill the bags much more quickly. Another consequences of the turn-table was the possibility of leaving behind bags (it was very easy to forget to pick up a few on the other side.) While this frequent occurrence was a pain for customers, WAL-MART made out quite well since it would restock the merchandise and resell it again. Whether this was intentional or not, I can’t say, but the simple fact of the matter is that if the customer doesn’t return (which was usually the case) the store made 100% profit on selling the item again.

An even more naked grab at a customer’s money is by over-charging customers. In November the Chicago Tribune published the results of a study conducted in the Midwest and California that concluded, “A majority of Wal-Mart stores tested in this evaluation of price accuracy demonstrated errors in pricing that exceeded federally accepted standards for large retail establishments.” This is an understatement since random purchases at 60 stores in California yielded a wrong price 8.3% of the time, quadruple the 2% required by the National Institute for Standards and Technology! I see this play out every day at my own store. The best example though was after Halloween when the store repeatedly cut the prices of its costumes (it doesn’t have the room necessary to store seasonal items.) Despite announced savings of 90% off, I cannot recall any of them wringing up properly all week long. No more than four or five customers caught the mistake and I missed dozens before realizing, never having been warned by any of my supervisors. I tried to correct the most grievous overcharges (the full priced $17 Star Wars outfit that should have cost $1.70…) but I couldn’t keep up with them all, a crime seemingly all my fellow cashiers were guilty of as well. Again, I can’t say for sure that this is a purposeful effort since it is probably partially a product of the stores chronic understaffing. Ultimately, what makes me think that the company is concertedly trying to rip off customers with this systemic practice is the striking number of times the mistake is made not in favor of the customer, but WAL-MART.

There is no doubt in my mind that profit ranks well ahead of customers as WAL-MART’s top priority since nearly every action taken by my store underscores this point. I think that discrediting the theory that WAL-MART’s singular purpose is caring for its customers is essential in order to prevent customers from shopping at the store. While some people will boycott the store for treating workers poorly and killing small businesses, at least an equal number would stop going to the store if they realized the company only wanted their money. After all, is such an unpleasant shopping experience worth saving a couple of bucks?