Walmart Culture

I'm going to start doing a deeper dive into my experience working for Walmart in the next few posts. But there's a few things you need to know about Walmart before I get into all that.

The first thing is that Walmart is different in every location across the US. You'll see regular Walmart stores, Walmart SuperCenters, Sam's Clubs and Walmart Neighborhood Markets. How do you tell them apart?

1. Regular Walmart

(Personal note: This was the type of store I worked in.) These were just general department stores. Every department has its own section on the floor plan. While there is a Food department and has dairy items like milk, cheese and eggs, they don't have groceries per se, because they don't have produce on a regular basis. (Sometimes, there would be bananas and they always sold pumpkins before Halloween.) They have services that don't exist at other department stores, like fabric cutting, paint mixing, key cutting, fishing licenses and live fish. You can't get those things at your average grocery store or Sears. Some of them also included garden centers, oil and tire service, portrait studios and an optometry and eyeglass service. Many had a McDonald's or an in-store "Radio Grill."

I remember the older versions of Walmart that were a part of shopping malls in Roswell and Clovis. They were practically K-mart. At the time, I never expected Walmart to become the behemoth it is now known as being. When I started hearing grumblings about how Walmart was coming into small towns and wrecking the economy for Mom & Pop businesses, I had no idea how these stores were capable of doing that. Eventually, Walmart got too big for those mall locations. In Roswell, they built a new store right across the street. And it was a SuperCenter! (AND they built a Sam's Club right next to it!) While I was working at Walmart in San Diego, I went into the Roswell location while it was still part of the mall the week before the new store opened. I wondered how that was going to impact the other businesses at the mall. I guess that mall's still around, but I know I haven't gone in there since Walmart left.

2. Walmart SuperCenter

The big difference here is that these stores have an actual grocery section. I remember when I lived in Denver. They had opened up a Bigg's in Thornton. It was a European-style department store with a grocery section. This model served as the prototype for what Walmart SuperCenters were all about. Having groceries was a big part of turning Walmart into the titan of department stores. Supercenters also included hair and nail salons, video game arcades and a lot of other businesses that rented space at the stores. It's like you never need to go anywhere else to make your major purchases.

3. Sam's Club

This is Walmart's version of Costco. It's a membership store where you can buy items in bulk. My employment at Walmart allowed me to get a discounted membership, but I rarely used it, except to get lower prices on DVDs than what I could get in the Electronics department in my store.

4. Walmart Neighborhood Markets

These started out as smaller Walmart stores. They had the same departments as regular stores, but didn't carry as much stock. Eventually, Walmart used the name to indicate that these were grocery stores, often setting up shop in locations that were abandoned by larger chains, like Safeway, so as to serve a neighborhood need. They no longer have clothing, electronics or any of the other departments associated with the SuperCenters. You don't feel like you're in a Walmart when you walk into one of these.

A big difference that people will notice from one part of the country to another is the staffing situation. In the middle part of the U.S., the stores appear to be amply staffed, with plenty of associates working in all the departments and plenty of cashiers with short lines. At the stores I worked at and shopped in California, there never seemed to be anyone available when I needed help looking for something. And if I did find someone, they had a line of customers waiting and following them throughout the department while one customer was being helped. In addition, there were plenty of registers, but only a third of them may be open at any given time (except for Black Friday, for the first half of the day).

For a lot of businesses (not just Walmart), California is considered a "get well" economy. This means that companies expect a higher profit margin for selling products in California, which helps to pay for expenditures of other locations across the country. In California, we were always understaffed with a low customer service rating. Yet, people still came and shopped at our stores because we still offered the lowest prices on the items they needed.

Another thing that is different among the stores is the existence of what is referred to as "Walmart Culture." In the mid-U.S., people have a different attitude about Walmart. Customers love the store so much that they act like employees, particularly in the smaller towns where Walmart is the hub of commerce. Customers help straighten up items on store shelves. If something gets spilled on the floor, a customer will volunteer to stand guard while an employee goes to get someone to clean up the mess. If a price check is needed at a register with a long line, a customer will offer to go look for the price. If a customer sees a shopping cart on the outer rim of the parking lot, he'll go out of his way to move it over to the cart corral. And if someone from out of town loudly and unnecessarily berates one of the more popular cashiers, other customers will follow him out to the parking lot and beat him up. That's Walmart Culture.

In California, we didn't have Walmart culture. It was always funny when we got Assistant Managers who transferred from locations in Texas. It seemed like when they set foot in the store for the first time, they all immediately regretted the decision. Comparably speaking, our stores were a mess! Everything was out of place, there were clothes in piles on the floor, and the new Assistant Managers were being expected to get our stores up to Walmart standards, which had been easy to accomplish at their old stores. The big difference was our customers. The customers really didn't care about helping the store run efficiently. They just came in, browsed through our selections and left stuff all over the place. The Assistant Managers would ask about the shopping carts full of merchandise next to the Return desk. "Those are Go-Backs." "What are Go-Backs?" "Customers are always returning items that can be resold, so they have to Go Back on the sales floor. Often, customers bring stuff to the checkouts and then change their minds about buying them, so those have to ALSO Go Back." "What? We hardly ever have customers return purchases in Texas. And nobody puts stuff in their cart that they don't intend to buy! What the hell?"

And I'll bet those Assistant Managers got a bigger shock to their system when they were offered more money, only to find that California State taxes ate up the majority of that increase. They were not being properly compensated for having to work harder.

But if the stores in California were properly staffed and didn't treat customers like they were only good for giving us money, we could have Walmart Culture everywhere.