I had previously posted a list of things that made working at Walmart a little less desirable compared to other jobs I'd had in the past. Here are a few more things to gripe about.
1. The bonus program
Every Walmart store had a profit sharing program. All the employees would get a year bonus based on the profits generated by the store. At the stores I worked at, it was generally about $600. But there were things that could affect the bonus, like if there were injuries to customers or staff. Those would reduce the amount significantly. This wasn't necessarily the problem. (We have to work hard to ensure a safe shopping and working experience.) The issue I had was the timing. Those bonuses would generally come out in March. In order to qualify for the bonus, you had to have been working for about the full year before. If you were hired for the holiday season, you wouldn't qualify for the bonus until the next year. However, if it was too early for you to get the bonus, you still benefited because they brought in a catered lunch for everyone the day the bonus checks were distributed. BUT, if you were hired between the end of January and March, you wouldn't qualify for TWO YEARS! So, this means that if they hired you in February, you had to watch everyone else get bonuses that first year. When the next March rolled around, you STILL didn't get a bonus. That free meal was not going to suffice. I don't know why the store didn't just put a freeze on hiring between the beginning of February and the time the bonuses were distributed. I had to field a call from an employee who had to watch everyone else wave their checks around two years in a row without getting anything. If they couldn't freeze hiring, they should have been able to at least give those employees left out some gift cards or something.
2. Revolving Assistant Managers
It was very common for Assistant Managers to be put in charge of different departments and eventually move around from store to store. I mentioned how we would frequently get Assistant Managers from other parts of the country to straighten up our stores' operations, which was really having to clean up the messes left by the previous Assistants. The really irritating thing about this is that we got very little heads up when an Assistant was going to be moving to another store. An announcement would be made during the daily store meetings (which cashiers were generally left out of). That announcement would come on the last day that Assistant Manager would be working at the store. This means that if you had some unfinished business with an Assistant Manager, it needed to be addressed that day. This would be difficult because the Assistant would typically have a lot of details to attend to before leaving for the next store. And if you happened to have the day off or were unable to attend that meeting, that meant you didn't find out about the departure until it was too late and you would have to start all over with your new Assistant Manager, who may be someone coming from a different part of the store, or a different part of the country. Why couldn't they give us more advance notice of these changes? What's even worse is that the Assistant Managers must know WEEKS in advance regarding their transfers and they should be sharing this with their Department Managers to avoid these hassles.
3. The Garden Center
Most Walmart stores have check out stations at their Garden Centers. This is supposed to make things easier for people buying plants and bags of soil and seeds to be able to buy their merchandise and quickly go out of the store. However, a large number of customers decide to use the Garden Center as an express check out (because the lines are typically shorter) without buying anything related to gardening. It's not a problem when we're not busy, but you'd think that if customers approached the check stand and see there's a line all the way to the back wall of the Garden Center for the two cashiers who are currently working, they would change their mind and go through the main check out. Once, I was working the Garden Center and needed a CSM to do an override and we couldn't make any progress for a full half hour because we could not get anyone to come all the way to the Garden Center.
4. Some of the Assistant Managers didn't seem to know the rules
When working as a cashier, we were told to not leave the check stand under almost any circumstances. If I needed to quickly assist a customer with something that didn't take me too far away, I would get yelled at for leaving the check stand. Sometimes, I would get an Assistant Manager who needed assistance with customers (because they didn't know how to resolve the issue themselves) and ask me to leave the check stand for an undetermined amount of time to attend to them. If I told the Assistant Manager I wasn't allowed to leave the check stand, they would yell at me for not doing what they asked. Yeah, you just couldn't win.
5. Sometimes, Assistant Managers could be helpful, but most of the time, they weren't
When I worked as a cashier in San Diego, it was not uncommon for an Assistant Manager to come to your station if you turned on the flashing light for assistance. If you needed an override, they had a 52 key and could resolve the issue. (They couldn't help with change.) However, I remember at the San Jose store, I saw a couple of Assistant Managers standing and chatting at the front end while all the cashier stations were going off like Christmas lights. And they just continued to stand there and chat while the CSMs were running around trying to take care of everybody.
As you will find out later, there was some other garbage that took place during my employment with Walmart that caused me to kind of burn my bridges with them. Those will be discussed later on in the blog.
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