I was aware that we were entering the busiest time of the year for Walmart in the weeks leading up to Christmas. We had survived Blitz, but that was just a steep hill we had to climb before reaching a brief summit. We had a much higher hill to climb, although the incline was a lot less severe.
While the lines never got to be as long as they were on Black Friday, there were very few times that I wasn't ringing up customers. It was a very steady flow that continued to get heavier as we got close to Christmas Eve.
When I looked at my schedule for the 24th, I saw that I was working 11am - 8pm. I thought, "Good! That means I won't be here when the store closes." A couple of days before, I found out that the store would close at 6pm. That meant I would be there at the close and have to stay two more hours having to help clean everything up. I was not looking forward to that.
6pm came around and I still had a long line of customers at my register. The line was almost as long as the one for Blitz, but I could see the end this time. I was close to the front door, which had been closed. I could see people outside banging on the door, begging to be let inside. This was one of the few times I didn't see any Door Greeters nearby. I wondered how many people would have rushed in if I had opened that door.
Around 6:30pm, I rang up my last customer and watched her walk out the door. I started putting the money from my till into a zipper bag. Suddenly, I realized that my last customer had left a lot of merchandise at the register. It was about ten items and one of them was a mop. (Who was she going to give that to for Christmas?)
When customers leave items at the register, we have to take them over to customer service and log them in. We have to enter in the bar code from each item. (This is so they can be matched to the receipt when the customer comes back.) I was going to have to spend the next 15 minutes logging this stuff in. I really didn't mind. That just meant 15 minutes less I would have to work on helping to clean up other departments.
In the middle of this, the customer returned to the front door. Fortunately, no other people were outside banging to be let in. I was able to give her the merchandise and send her on her way. I'll bet someone was glad to get that mop for Christmas.
I went to the back to find out which area I was going to have to go to. There were a crowd of other employees back there asking the Assistant Manager if we could go ahead and go home. I guess this was something they did every year. They would schedule everyone to stay until 8pm, but let them go home early in case it took more than an hour to clear the lines out. The Assistant Manager agreed, and we all got to go home. It was rather nice. I didn't mind losing an hour's wages not to clean up someone else's mess.
The day after Christmas was also very interesting. Because this is when we get people returning stuff. In fact, there are so many returns, we had to use half the front end registers for returns. This meant that we couldn't use those registers for ring up customers buying new things. And those customers did not reduce by 50% just because it was the day after Christmas. This resulted in long lines AGAIN!
And I was looking forward to the whole shopping season being over. I expected that after January 1st, things would calm down and be a lot less stressful. I eventually found out how WRONG I WAS! It never really slowed down, at least at the store where I worked. We were consistently busy ALL THE TIME! It was not at the level it was at before Christmas, but there were very few times that I would reach a point in which I had cleared all my customers.
But we had good news as we entered the new year. All of the cashiers they had hired for Christmas were being retained and receiving raises because the California minimum wage had gone up. In a way, this was good. I didn't have to continue looking for a job for awhile. It looked like I was settling in.
But I did find out that the tree lot job I had been offered during the application process was the shaft position. The person I knew who had been hired for that was not asked to return as a regular employee. That could have been me.
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