I just spent a month as a temporary employee re-modeling the Wal Mart in Storm Lake , Iowa
First of all, there are some genuinely good people who work at Wal Mart. The first person I met when I got there to report for the orientation was a lovely little old lady named Carla. She was bubbly and friendly, and the cynic in me couldn’t help but wonder what management was putting in her oatmeal to make her that way. As I got to know her better, I realized that that was really the way she was. You could see why Wal Mart liked her; she was able to spin everything they threw at her into a positive. I will admire her forever.
Then we came to the Orientation meeting, where we got to meet Scott, the man in charge of the re-model. Scott is Dom DeLuise with a nasally voice and an ego you dare not question. On the surface was a professed positive attitude, but under the skin was sheer arrogance – an air of ‘the only thing you need to know is that my ass needs to be kissed non-stop if you and I want to get along’.
There was no shortage of people ready to do this for Scott. As part of the re-model, the chain brought in people from other Wal Marts to assist Scott and his crew. I have labeled these folks ‘Lifers’ (like the ‘lifers’ I served with in the military; they accepted Wal Mart’s terms for their careers) and ‘Wannabes’ (who wish take advantage of their personal lack of conscience to brown-nose their way up the Wal Mart management chain). Both groups were very willing to accept and reinforce their roles in the service of the corporation.
The first problem with this is that from Scott on down, these are not very smart people. Over and over again, history has shown that if you want to manage a large endeavor, you need to have the intelligence to handle all the details. This was simply not the case.
One of the major parts of my job was to re-locate merchandise from one section to the next, and on the first day I started to recognize what people were saying about this company. Store counters consist of ‘mods’, for modules. They are 4-foot sections of fixtures that consist of shelving, or pegs on a pegboard, or a combination thereof. Every mod has to have a sheet taped to it, explaining how it gets set up, and which merchandise goes on it. This gets done in ‘Wal Mart-speak’, with special terminology for everything. Management did not brief us beforehand on any of this terminology. You have to ask the Lifers or Wannabes what this stuff means, and then they just look at you like you came from Mars. ‘What do you mean, you don’t understand? What’s wrong with you? Do you have a PROBLEM?’
Another problem is that there was never a day that a needed item was not missing. Store fixtures that we needed to put merchandise on either were the wrong ones or had not shown up yet, or the merchandise that we were to place in a particular location was not in stock. As I’ve said, this happened several times every day. The co-ordination of this process was abysmal.
This was just one of the root causes of a considerable amount of tension during the re-model. Because of Scott’s inability to effectively co-ordinate and manage the entire affair, the Lifers and Wannabes all had different solutions to the problem. Use the fixtures the store already had until the new ones show up? Not cool with some of the other Lifers. Put some similar merchandise there to at least give the customers some choice? Not cool, either. No acceptable solution to any of this? Most definitely.
And then when it came time to ‘set a mod’ (put one of each item on a new mod, and then beg for the supervisor’s approval for it before you finished filling it up), there was no direction given as to just how to find the merchandise in question. If you were lucky (which wasn’t very often), the new mods would be set up like the old ones, and you could breeze right along. As was usually the case, however, the layout of the new mods was so radically different from the old ones that it ultimately ended up taking about five times as long as it should have. The merchandise you would have to find and move was scattered all over the place, with no clues as to how to locate it, and with no one who could be bothered to help you. The Wal Mart practice seemed to be that once you totally screwed up a mod setup, only then were you advised as to how they wanted it done, and that was done with considerable disdain. This happened far too often for it to be incidental. My guess is that the humiliation was part of Wal Mart's psychological strategy.
Another problem was that management was simply not able to decide just where a lot of the merchandise was to go. One example: At the end of most aisles was what they call an end cap, where Wal Mart puts together what they call 'features'; special purchases from its suppliers that Wal Mart can use to pass the savings on to the customers (or what is more likely, generate a larger profit margin). I would fairly assert that only about 25% of the time, the end caps I went to great lengths to thoughtfully arrange actually stayed that way. I’d come in any given morning, and as I was walking down the aisle I would see that someone came in and moved it all around. It’s not a good way to build trust amongst the employees.
And there was no shortage of the Lifers and Wannabe’s making pleas to ‘make Scott happy’. Store re-model managers work 17 days straight before taking a 4-day break, completing a three-week work cycle. When it came time for Scott to take his break, I was bombarded with people demanding that I work twice as hard to complete my tasks in order to ‘give Scott a nice farewell’. They didn’t like my response: ‘What’s in it for me? A raise? Some donuts? A pat on the shoulder?’ My answer was just another pithy glare.
Indecision ran rampant throughout this project. Many, many times we were given the directive to set up fixtures in a given location, just to have Scott come through and shake his head while he was telling us that those were the wrong ones. The record while I was there was a mere twenty minutes into the work day. The Wannabes couldn’t understand why I was laughing about it. Well, what other choice did I have?
I haven’t mentioned meetings yet. The first thing we did on the clock every morning was to have a meeting, usually with Scott, explaining the upcoming day’s required tasks. What this actually entailed was Scott telling us through his thinly-veiled smile how proud he was of what we had done the previous day, followed by something like ‘Now just give me 25% more today’, then repeating himself ad-nauseum for another 15 minutes. We did do a short series of stretches, which I liked, although for them to really be effective we should have done them for 20 minutes instead of the three we actually did. I’ve run six marathons – I know what I’m talking about. This would be followed by the Wal Mart cheer, despite the fact that the likelihood of me ever becoming an actual employee of the company was nil at best. ‘Give a W! Give me an A!', etc. This included the ‘Squiggly’ between the words Wal and Mart, where you have to bend down and shake your butt. I always did my best to shout this out, because just about the only thing more humiliating than having to do this damn cheer was having to do it again because Scott didn’t think you were trying hard enough. This cheer was followed by the question’ ‘Who’s Number One?’ at which you were required to yell back, ‘The Customer! Always!’. Then came ‘What do we want to be?’ ‘Accident free!’ I’ll mention more on this topic later.
Even though we were not real Wal Mart employees, we were required to wear Wal Mart name tags. To me, this was like putting on my game face: ‘I’m not really me any more, I’m the face of Wal Mart’. Carla, in our Orientation, specifically stated that we were to assist the customers when necessary. I didn’t mind this so much, as I had six years of department store experience in a family-owned business previously. It was time for me to see just how well Wal Mart backed up its claim that their customers really did come first.
There was no shortage of perplexed customers entering our store and questioning the logic of this re-model. People, many of them older and/or having a bit of trouble getting around, would ask either about finding items they were used to seeing in the particular location we were working on, or about product information. As I said, I was happy to help them, and my assistance was always gratefully acknowledged by the customers. But on more than one occasion I was taken to task by either my re-model supervisor, or by one of the Lifers or Wannabes, chastising me for spending too much time doing simply what I was instructed to do when I started this project. It used to be that Wal Mart employees would actually take a customer to the required area and assist them with their needs. That apparently no longer happens. I saw several of my peers and superiors try to blow off customers by verbally explaining where they needed to go, with the customers reluctantly trying their best to figure out just what my co-workers were talking about. It was very commonplace to overhear customers decrying this practice. I felt it was my duty to assuage their concerns, which I did whenever I could.
This ties in with another comment about meetings. Wal Mart management considers it completely appropriate to take all of its employees off of the floor at any point in the day for up to about a half hour at a time, so it can hold store meetings. From what I was able to ascertain, the subject matter of these meetings was nothing more than a rehash of what the employees should have learned in their orientation and been practicing all along: Help the customers, promote safety, learn your product information, etc. In the meantime, over and over again I saw customers forlornly walk the store in need of some assistance from someone who had to attend one of these stupid meetings (complete with Wal Mart Cheer at its conclusion): some one in need of a can of paint, a fish for their aquarium, a fishing license, some ammunition, a big-screen TV; all sorts of things. I finally had a customer show ME how to get a fish from the fish tanks, put it in a little bag, and mark it for checkout. That was fun – she was very attractive.
The story we got from Wal Mart management as to the necessity of this re-model (after this particular store being in business for only six years) was to make the store more customer-friendly; wider aisles, lower shelves, better lighting, and overall easier access to the merchandise. What they did not tell us was that they were also substantially reducing their inventory. This was verified by the customers as they spoke with us. Many people spoke of the things that the store no longer carried. Their dismay was palpable and very understandable. I am sure management was disturbed by my empathy towards them.
I previously mentioned that I had six years at a family-owned department store; this was Schroeder's in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, capably run for many years by the late John Schroeder. John was as tough a boss as you will ever meet, but he was fair, and he taught me the importance of being methodical and of taking care of the customers. I thought of John every day I was in this store, and of how strongly he would disapprove of the gross way Wal Mart treated its employees and its customers.
All this of course took its toll upon us workers. About halfway into our re-model assignment, I finally had a scrape with a Wannabe, who demanded, without any type of logic, that I set a mod according to his wishes, rather than on the specific instructions of my supervisor. I knew that I was going to lose any kind of argument I would have in front of Wal Mart management, so I walked out of the store and reported my story to the temp agency. To their credit, the temp agency handled it with a most respectable professionalism; even though I ultimately was not allowed to return to my job, I felt that my involvement in this affair had run its full course.
There has been much documentation throughout the blogosphere about the malfeasance of Wal Mart, from the way it treats its workers and customers to the way it bullies and manipulates the supply chain. Those are well worth checking out. My example is just one story. My bottom line is that I do not feel Wal Mart really gives a shit about either its customers or its employees. I saw this first hand in my experience.
I will be amending this post as further recollections dictate. Please stay tuned for updates. Comments are welcome. Thank you for reading this.
Terry Miles
