A few things I didn't like about Walmart

Yesterday, I provided a list of positive aspects of working at Walmart. Today, we get into the negative.

(Again, these were part of my Walmart experience from 2001 - 2006. I don't know if policies or procedures have changed since then.)

1. The one-hour lunch

During my previous job at Aradiant, I took a 30-minute lunch. While I was working at a call center, I didn't need a lot of time for my meal. There also weren't any good places to eat nearby, so I had to either bring my own lunch, or get something out of the vending machine. It was something I got used to. At Walmart, I always had to take a 60-minute lunch. Admittedly, I absolutely needed all this time to recharge when I first started working there. But after a few weeks, I got used to the flow and didn't need a full hour after that. Even worse, once I was done eating, I would just go into the electronics department to do some browsing, which meant I would end up spending money most of the time. I would have rather been able to arrive a half-hour later or leave a half-hour earlier and get more of my personal time back.

But they were unnecessarily strict about it. Once, I was wandering around the store after eating and an Assistant Manager asked me if I was back from lunch. I said I wasn't. She said that was too bad, because they needed more people up at the front end so other cashiers could take their breaks and lunches. Since I had passed my half-hour mark, I volunteered to punch back in. She told me no, I didn't need to do that. (Then why did she tell me they needed help?)

Every once in awhile, we would be so busy that the CSMs would delay lunches by more than an hour. They would tell us to only take 30 minute lunches. Those days that my lunch was late, I REALLY needed 60 minutes, but was glad to take 30 since it meant I would get out earlier, especially if I was working to 1am. (The store closed at 12am, and I didn't like spending the extra time zoning.) But one time, we got the late 30-minute lunch and I started heading for the exit at 12:30am. The CSM said, "Hey! Where are you going?" "I took a 30-minute lunch." The CSM (who was the one who made me take a 30-minute lunch) said, "No, you were supposed to get 30 minutes of overtime." I said, "I didn't agree to that" and kept on walking. I did not get into trouble.

That brings us to our next topic:

2. Unauthorized overtime

Yesterday, I mentioned how Walmart paid by the minute and had holiday pay. I demonstrated how, if you clocked in a little early and clocked out a little late, that would result in a little overtime. During the CBLs, we were told not to go into unauthorized overtime. Clocking out a few minutes late was considered unauthorized overtime. I never got in trouble for unauthorized overtime, but the biggest consequence was that any unauthorized overtime you received resulted in that amount of time being pulled from your holiday pay. If you got five minutes of overtime prior to the next paid holiday, you only got 7 hours and 55 minutes of holiday pay. One hour of unauthorized overtime? Just 7 hours of holiday pay. If you managed to rack up eight hours or more of overtime, you got NO holiday pay.

And this happened so often to me that it was more than a year before I found out that we received holiday pay. How did this happen? The first year I worked as a cashier, I was usually either scheduled to work 3pm - 12am or 4pm - 1am. Anytime I worked from 12am - 1am, it went on the next day's pay. If I happened to work 3pm to 12am the next day, that caused me to receive one hour of unauthorized overtime. If that happened eight times before the next paid holiday, I wouldn't get that extra pay. No one told us that we needed to get that time authorized or how to get management to authorize it.

(I did work positions in Walmart later on in which ALL overtime was automatically authorized. Did they have a problem with people staying clocked in and racking up overtime? It seemed kind of petty to take it out of the holiday pay regardless of the reason.)

3. Walmart tried to be cheap on that Holiday Pay

Anytime we had a paid holiday, the schedule for every department in the store would go up on the bulletin board in the back. Soon after, we would all see that everyone had an "X" through one of the days they were scheduled. This meant that while we got Holiday Pay, we lost a day of work and weren't going to receive extra pay. This created all sorts of problems because it meant that we were short-staffed the entire week because we were missing 1/7th of our employees every single day.

But there was a rule. If the schedule at the CSM station showed that we were scheduled to work, we were supposed to work. The last 4th of July I worked in San Diego, the main schedule gave me the day off that day. But the CSM schedule hadn't been adjusted. I showed up, checked the schedule at the CSM station and then clocked in. I REALLY needed that extra pay. And there wasn't a thing they could do about it.

(And it should be noted that some of those employees who had been given extra days off probably didn't have Holiday Pay coming to them because they racked up unauthorized overtime.)

4. Consistent staff shortages

This had more of an impact on our sales floor associates. The cashiers typically make up 1/3 of the total staff for any Walmart. (At least, when I worked there.) I could see Assistant Managers who oversaw the departments look at the schedule on the wall and think, "If we could get all those cashiers on the sales floor, we could really run our departments well." And they definitely tried. Anytime there was any kind of slowdown in activity at the checkouts, Assistant Managers would go up to the CSMs and have them start pulling cashiers to go zone the other departments. The problem was that within minutes, the lines would get long again and the cashiers would all get called back. The Assistant Managers would then angrily demand to know why all the cashiers left the other departments.

Staff shortages on the floor affected our ability to provide customer service when the customers needed it. There were certain departments that required properly trained associates to be available. And if an associate wasn't able to assist the customer, people would yell and scream non-stop until someone finally took some action.

My thinking went like this: If we can't have someone always available in the Pet department to get live fish for the customers, maybe we shouldn't sell live fish. If we can't have someone available to mix paint, maybe we shouldn't sell paint. If we couldn't always have someone available to cut fabric, maybe we shouldn't sell bolt fabric. If we couldn't have someone always available to sell fishing licenses, maybe we shouldn't sell fishing licenses. If we can't have associates in the Toy department always be there to help get bicycles down from the rack, maybe we shouldn't be selling bicycles. Of course, all of this flies in the face of the image that Walmart wants to present in terms of them being a one-stop shop.

But the worst part about floor staff shortages is if we needed someone from a department to come up to the register for a price check, NO ONE would come.

5. The mysterious attendance policy

Almost every place I've worked had an official attendance policy. Walmart didn't seem to have one. At the very least, I never knew what the attendance policy was. And I had no idea whether or not I was violating it. There would be a few times that I would clock in late, but no one ever spoke to me about it. It made me nervous because if I had to call in sick (which didn't happen very often), I did not know how many more times I could do that without getting into trouble. Was anybody tracking attendance? I know I heard an Assistant Manager get upset at an employee who decided to come to work early because he didn't have anything better to do and he wanted to leave early.

6. Grass Roots Meetings

One of the videos we watched during Orientation explained how the Grass Roots meetings were very important to Walmart management to get feedback from the associates. Everyone in the store was expected to take part. I never got to take part in a Grass Roots meeting. In San Diego, they would schedule a few small groups of about 10 people each. They never announced when these were taking place. They would just announce that one was taking place and people could show up for the limited number of seats available. Once those seats were filled, associates who didn't make it would have to wait for the next meeting. In San Jose, they would just schedule one big one-hour meeting with the entire store only one time. If you weren't there that day, you missed it. And if you were a cashier, you missed it because no one could be spared at the Front End. And one hour was simply not enough time to get feedback from everyone who attended.

I did overhear part of a Grass Roots meeting while I was taking my break. I remember the Toy Department Manager suggesting that we should close the store at 10pm. He said that if the store closed then and had all the customers out, the overnight crew would be able to put more stock on the floor. When I heard that, I knew that wasn't going to fly. I guess that guy had never been in the store after 10pm, otherwise, he would have known how futile that was. The Store Manager didn't say anything in response at the time, but when he publicly posted the follow up notes, he came down pretty hard on that suggestion. Even if the guy was hoping to get a compromise to 11pm, it still would have resulted in our store losing thousands of dollars every night. He should be glad we weren't a 24-hour store. Imagine NEVER having customers out of the store.

7. Locking in the overnight crews

They didn't do this at the San Diego store. Even though our front doors were locked after closing, anyone could leave because one of the doors at the entrance had a panic bar. But in San Jose, Assistant Managers were the only people who could open those doors. Once the last customer left at 11pm, no one could leave. This caused a BIG problem when cashiers and other floor associates tried to leave at midnight. We had to wait for an Assistant Manager to come up to the front. Sometimes, it would take 15 or 20 minutes for someone to finally come to the front and let us out. That was time we were not getting paid. And I guess the Assistant Managers who were there always thought the other person was going to do it. WHY COULDN'T THEY ORGANIZE THIS SIMPLE RESPONSIBILITY?

And it was just as bad in the morning. We had about 15 floor associates scheduled to start work every day at 5am. Again, the Assistant Managers on duty couldn't get their act together so that everyone could clock in on time. We often had to wait 15 minutes or more before they let us in. I recall a couple of times that I was able to get in early because another Assistant Manager arrived at 4:45am and let me in. The other Assistants thought everyone was able to come in and didn't show up to open the door until 5:30. EVERYBODY asked for time adjustments. And still, they never could coordinate that.

8. Some employees did not want to work

I may not have loved working at Walmart, but I tried my best to treat the customers the way I wanted to be treated if I was a customer. This meant trying to ring items up quickly and accurately, asking the customers how they were doing and thanking them for shopping at the store. Other cashiers didn't seem to have any interest in getting their lines to move faster. I know we weren't getting paid a lot of money, but everyone should have a little pride in their work.

And that's just a FEW things I didn't like. Trust me, there's a lot more and I'll be going into more detail throughout the next several posts.