Hating on Wal-Mart is a popular thing to do. I've indulged in it once or twice myself (that last link, one of my better blogs, will take you into "my" store, six years before it became "my" store, for the 2009 incarnation of the anniversary sale that's currently running--not to mention a Sobeys store I had yet to work at in 2009 as well).
I have worked for the big blue behemoth for five and a half months now...just long enough to have some genuine insights into the culture of the place.
I should tell you first off that the Wal-Mart Supercenter I work at is atypical, just as the FreshCo I worked at is atypical. Both stores have a solidly middle-class clientele, a far cry from the stereotypical 'trailer trash' Wal-Mart (and FreshCo, for that matter) customer base. My Wal-Mart has two other peculiarities: As Supercenters go, it's quite small; and it's also one of five Canadian 'inbox' Supercenters, which for the customer means the grocery part of the store is front and center as you come in. (Most Wal-Marts keep their groceries towards the back of the store, "shielding" them with higher-margin general merchandise and clothing. Not in our store.)
Wal-Mart Canada pays its full timers a trifle below industry standard. Coming from a place which paid significantly above that standard, it's been something of an adjustment. There are, however, quite a few perks which many of my colleagues take for granted, but which are unique (or nearly so, in my experience) to Wal-Mart.
The biggest perk is the ten percent discount on virtually everything, immediately upon hire. You AND YOUR SPOUSE get ten percent off everything in your cart (virtual or real) so long as it isn't a clearance item. Ad-matched stuff included. It may not sound like much, but it adds up quickly. I think I have saved over two hundred dollars so far. By comparison, I saved the point equivalent of less than eighty dollars in three years of working for Sobeys: substantially less, when you consider just how much I had to overpay to buy some of the things I bought at Sobeys.
Other benefits (which, again, are sadly taken for granted by many) include free meals on stat holidays; popsicles and other treats seemingly whenever the mood strikes; a safety program which rewards accident-free days with successively more extravagant gestures (thirty days without associate or customer accident gets each employee a coupon for a free coffee and muffin at our McDonald's, and if we manage to go a year without such an issue we'll get a steak and lobster dinner catered by management...they almost made it one year, from what I heard).
But maybe the nicest thing about working for Wal-Mart is the recognition for a job well done. I have been both privately and publicly thanked, with real sincerity, more frequently in the short time I've been there than in the preceding fifteen years. I can only speak for my store, but at the same time it does seem to be imbued into the Wal-Mart culture: "Respect for the Individual" is a core value, and they live it there.
They make a conscious effort at a diversified workforce: our associates are of all ages and every colour under the rainbow. Our backroom manager is female; as is about half our stocking crew on overnights. That's rare in retail, for reasons I've never really understood.
Only once have I been given more work than I could accomplish...and that was acknowledged before I started and my efforts were roundly praised afterwards (even though I felt terrible leaving the department in the state I had to leave it in). If I had been permitted to work straight through my shift, without breaks or lunch (as is -- cough, cough -- expected in more than a few other places) I might have actually got it all done. But you MUST take breaks at Wal-Mart. It's an absolute requirement, part of a health and safety focus that they take extremely seriously. You can trust your food hasn't been sitting outside the cold chain at Wal-Mart...not something I can say for other places. I miss not being able to listen to my music at night--that's part of the safety thing, they think I might not hear somebody coming by with a pallet, or the Zamboni cleaning the floors. (Wal-Mart doesn't contract out its floor cleaning: its own staff does it.)
Most of the assistant managers have spent some time on the night shift, as has my department manager, so there is a little more respect for what we have to deal with than I have found elsewhere. There is still some grumbling about days vs. nights "not doing anything", but grumbling is all it is. I've seen that fester into civil war.
I'm going to miss profit share this year (not eligible until I've been there twelve months) which is a real shame, because our store is going (growing) great gangbusters.
Okay, so those are the positives, from an employee perspective. There are a couple of negatives that are unique to Wal-Mart. I will keep them as diplomatic as I can.
One, the turnover on all shifts is ridiculous. This is partly generational (there are, sadly, more than a few younger people who seem surprised that they are expected to work at work)...but only partly, and Wal-Mart doesn't do much to mitigate it. My store hires in waves, three or four times a year. Each wave corrects what's been let to slip for lack of labour, and all runs well until attrition sets in; then, for a month or six weeks you're increasingly expected to do more with less until the next wave comes along.
I can't really tell what's worse, because other chains hire fewer people, pay them better, but give them crazy workloads all the time. From a business perspective, you want to keep your employees. Training costs money; training over and over again wastes it. For the customer...Wal-Mart simply needs more staff, I think we can all agree on that. An employee can be hard to find.
The other thing that's unique to Wal-Mart is paradoxical. In one sense, we are micromanaged to an absolutely crazy degree, and in another sense we are largely left to fend for ourselves. Every night, for some reason, we are reminded that we are to "zone" (face) the store, as if we didn't do that last night and every other night we've worked there (or anywhere else in retail). The maintenance crew is reminded at least three times each night that they have to pull empty pallets off the sales floor before the store opens, as if that wasn't a basic part of their job.
But if you want specific feedback on how you can improve your performance...good luck with that. I haven't even been told what expected performance is for my position, let alone where I stand, statistically, in relation to it. (I have a good idea, having been in charge of monitoring night crew performance in my previous job, but still...)
No, here's micromanagement for you: The break times at Wal-Mart are rigid, and it's my job to call them. 1 am break, 3am lunch, 5am break. Unless we're receiving a truck, there is maybe a minute or two leeway given, that's it. I didn't fully appreciate this when I started--I was used to not taking breaks at all, and if I had to, doing it when it was, you know, convenient--and my manager gave me crap for finishing off six cases of a frozen pallet before calling lunch. "I've got associates milling around here, they all know it's lunchtime, we're losing productivity, because you haven't called lunch."
I stared at her. I couldn't help it.
"If they know it's lunchtime, why don't they just...GO PUNCH OUT FOR LUNCH?"
"Because you haven't called it."
I am not making that up.
I've been waiting now nearly two months to activate my Individual Development Plan and get my career going, and there never seems to be a good time to do it. I'm not allowed to stay after a shift, or come in on my night off, and there's too much to do on shift each night. Or my manager (the only one who can review my plan) is on holidays. Or she's just too busy in some other part of the store. As soon as this current sale is over, I'm going to respectfully but forcefully demand we get it in gear. It's not that they don't want me advancing...it has something to do with that chronic understaffing problem I mentioned earlier.
Wal-Mart announces store sales and comp sales to last year twice a day...anyone who cares to listen will hear what, in every other chain I've worked in, is considered highly confidential information. This is intended as part of a team building exercise, to foster care in your own store. For most of us, it works. For some...really not. Just like the Wal-Mart cheer, which is almost universally hated online but which, viewed through the proper mental lens, is a great way to increase team spirit:
(We add our store slogan--"a foot in the city, a foot in the sticks" and also add, at the end, "Waddaya wanna be? ACCIDENT-FREE!")
I love leading this thing. It imparts sooo much energy.
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Their computer system looks like something out of the 1970s but it is immensely powerful, far beyond what other chains have. I can check whether another store has a given item using my handheld computer; I can also tell you where exactly that items is located in my backroom/cooler/freezer, to within three square feet. The annoying corollary: at other stores, if I bring a skid of overstock back to my cooler, the routine goes like this:
- find an empty spot on the shelf
- put an item in that spot
- repeat as necessary
At Wal-Mart, I must
- go get a printer and ensure it's loaded with blue label paper
- turn it on
- wait for 3.6 eternities for it to boot up
- log into my handheld
- sync it to the printer by scanning a label on the reverse side of said printer (it often doesn't read properly so you have to log out of your handheld, log back in, repeat and perhaps enter the printer code, which looks something like ACA40DC50A, manually)
- page through some menus to get to "Bin Merchandise" (shelves are called "bins" at Wal-Mart for some reason nobody has ever explained to me)
- NOW find an empty space on a shelf
- scan a label on the shelf corresponding to the "bin" I want to put the item in
- scan the item itself (most of the dairy and frozen stuff has a label on the outside of the box, but you have to rip open cheese and a few other things to scan an individual unit)
- print a label
- mark on that label with a Sharpie marker the number of units in a box (even though it's already ON the label!)
- mark the expiry date in the upper right corner of the box you are "binning"
- affix the label to the upper left corner
- put the item away
- repeat the last eight steps as necessary
Actually stocking something from the cooler doesn't require a printer, but God help you if you just grab it off the shelf and put it out, as I did my first night. You need that handheld and you have to "pick" your items out of the "bins"--scan the shelf code, scan the item, or alternatively pick from a list of what the computer thinks is needed, or create your own pick list.
What takes thirty seconds elsewhere might take closer to fifteen minutes at Wal-Mart. It's understandable out in the backroom proper, which seems to go for miles and which is three pallets high the whole way. But in my cooler, where I can at a glance see everything in it? Colossal waste of time.
That said, given proper data integrity (a problem anywhere computer systems exist), the system works remarkably well. I'd like to see more attention paid to out-of stocks--I've been trained to loathe "holes" on the sales floor--but I don't know as yet whether that's a computer failing, a personnel failing, or a little of both. I'm not encouraged to know this stuff. And I really want to.
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Some of the things I have berated Wal-Mart for in the past aren't viewed the same way when you work there. Anti-competitive practices are becoming de rigueur, for instance, in response especially to the fact that southern Ontario is one of the most competitive grocery markets on the entire planet. Much as you'd like to, you can't blame companies for taking every advantage they can manufacture.
Grocery chains are forever at war with their suppliers, trying to preserve a precarious balance between sales and margins. Because of sheer heft--Wal-Mart employs 2.2 million Canadians last I checked and serves, well, damn near everyone--they can and do set the market on many items.
I will grant you that Wal-Mart customer service is not where it needs to be. The same can be said of any generalist, really: how has your customer service been in Costco? Or Canadian Tire? Not to defend Wal-Mart here. During my training, when I was working days, I had an assistant manager actually chide me for taking a customer to an item she wanted...I was told I was supposed to just tell her what aisle it was in. I told that manager, as respectfully as I could, that I come from a customer service culture. She hasn't liked me much, since. Customer service is one of my strong suits and it's something I mean to fully mine when I finally get off graveyards in a year or two.
Labour: yes, they do pay pretty poorly below the level of store manager. I was making $20.03 an hour at Sobeys to do essentially the job I do now for a lot less.
Wal-Mart has a reputation of being viciously anti-union. It's my contention that any workplace which treats its employees reasonably has no need of a union; the problem is that "reasonably" is subjective and in any case varies from store to store. I would like to see a little bit of a pay boost to full time Wal-Mart staff in Canada, similar to what was granted in the United States last year. That's not just self-serving: I think the turnover merry-go-round would slow down with increased pay.
Many of the people there are wonderful: hard workers who are also friendly. I mean, I'm starting to actually make friends there, one of those things that still manages to surprise me every time it happens. They know I'm strange, and they accept me for it. Feels good.
In short, there's a lot to like and some things I can help to improve. And isn't that the ideal kind of job?
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