A very eye-opening article about the very serious problems at Walmart.

[The Fly]

I have never been in a Walmart.

 

[refujiunderground]

well, things are going to get worse. america is long past it's prime and it's not going to pick back up to where it once was. our future will probably be a damn third world country.

 

[Telstra]

Is this what Walmart looks like ?

 

[jdcnow]

What Walmart needs...what Walmart truly, truly needs is a turnaround artist in the vein of the late Jim Cantalupo, the then-CEO of McDonald's, who brought that chain back from the brink after it was in dire straits, back in 2003. Walmart needs a true turnaround artist, and fast!

At the one Walmart I used to work at, I actually met some of the store's older coworkers, some of whom were there when that particular store location opened in 1982. And they actually met Mr Sam. And they would tell you that if Mr Sam came back from the dead, and saw the store chain he founded as it is now, he'd be absolutely furious! Just fit to be tied.

 

[Beachguyj]

I agree that Walmarts are very poorly restocked. I shop at a Walmart Neighborhood Market and love the prices but I often have to buy a different food item or brand from what I wanted because the item I need is out of stock.

 

[Beachguyj]

I was at Asda/Walmart here in the UK last night at 1;30 in the morning, the place had about 20 people restocking the place and one guy dealing with customers, of which there was about 5.

Asked one of the guys how long his shift was, told me he worked from eight in the evening through to 10am the following day.

There are different rules when it comes to a lot of Europe, the people have decided that their governments want decent paying jobs with benefits and some with generous vacation time.

In the US things are different. Big business controls everything and they don't care about workers. Shitty jobs are hard to come by and most are "at will" meaning they can fire you for whatever reason they want.

 

[evanrick]

i just got back from a (5) years of service banquet that was held at a new local convention center.

where we were served drinks, dinner, dessert and i got to meet our new president, talk with my old manager and meet all the other corporate people. do they do that for wal-mart employees?

wal-mart did come up as a topic, and they are running local ads targeting my employer. however our part of the country is probably the only area that has the kind of store that we have. we sell everything, they just built two new stores that are over 100,000 square feet, and ive been able to work in 5 different stores.

we have places to charge electric cars and the new store has things to encourage biking to work. check out times are usually faster than a convenience store.

its pretty unique in that you can start from the very lowest job and eventually run the whole company. its that kind of idea that makes working here a dream - if retail is your thing.

 

[mark1111]

I started working at a big box retail store and it is just as most described here. I was promised full time, I barely make 15 hours a week now. We have a new store manager that believes in the stick approach to employers, no carrot. He screams at everyone and has no respect. I tried to help customers find what they are looking for and he told me if customers are to stupid to find things on the shelf or don't know how much it costs, he doesn't want them in the store! Most of us now look the other way when we see shoplifting. We don't care.

 

[Telstra]

I started working at a big box retail store and it is just as most described here. I was promised full time, I barely make 15 hours a week now. We have a new store manager that believes in the stick approach to employers, no carrot. He screams at everyone and has no respect. I tried to help customers find what they are looking for and he told me if customers are to stupid to find things on the shelf or don't know how much it costs, he doesn't want them in the store! Most of us now look the other way when we see shoplifting. We don't care.

wow, how can he be a manager.
Are each head manager responsible for the store making a profit or lost ?

 

[jdcnow]

^ Yes they are. In many retail jobs, store managers are given several quotas they have to regularly meet, in order to keep their job - sales, profit margins, and a labor/manpower hours budget that they're expected to keep under control. My supermarket in particular is a prime example - April 17th is our store's annual inventory - 3 weeks from now. Inventory is one of a store's most important and critical times of the whole year, second only to the Chrismas/Holiday shopping season, and usually retail companies might actually splurge a bit on the payroll/manpower hours budget, so that we have the manpower and people we need to get the store ready for inventory ahead of time. Not so, with my store. Sales are down, so we've been told, "No Overtime". And if they have to send you home early or give you an extra day off to cut the OT you've racked up, they will do it. We're just expected to skimp by on less, and still expected to get more done.

As the article said...

Retailers consider labor -- usually their largest controllable expense -- an easy cost-cutting target...

Foolhardy and wreckless to be sure, but that's the way they see it.

 

[borg69unimatrix]

^ Yes they are. In many retail jobs, store managers are given several quotas they have to regularly meet, in order to keep their job - sales, profit margins, and a labor/manpower hours budget that they're expected to keep under control. My supermarket in particular is a prime example - April 17th is our store's annual inventory - 3 weeks from now. Inventory is one of a store's most important and critical times of the whole year, second only to the Chrismas/Holiday shopping season, and usually retail companies might actually splurge a bit on the payroll/manpower hours budget, so that we have the manpower and people we need to get the store ready for inventory ahead of time. Not so, with my store. Sales are down, so we've been told, "No Overtime". And if they have to send you home early or give you an extra day off to cut the OT you've racked up, they will do it. We're just expected to skimp by on less, and still expected to get more done.

As the article said...


Foolhardy and wreckless to be sure, but that's the way they see it.

I've worked for several companies that do this hour cutting and pushing the few remaining employees ... they've all gone under and closed down.

 

[Stoowii]

I, myself, am a Targé kinda guy. Quality over quantity.

 

[crimsonpaine]

Finding anything at walmart is a kind of a game. We have a friend who works there (yeah I know, who doesn't) and she says that a lot of the merchandise that they receive is stuff corporate just sends them, not stuff that is needed or that sells in the store. so it sits collecting dust. With walmart, it has seriously gotten to the point where is you find something you like, you better get as much as you can, because it may have been something corporate sent and not something the store will ever get again, because apparently it doesn't matter what sells vs. what doesn't.

 

[roadtripboy]

If you can find it, check out a book called "The Big Store". It's about what happened at Sears in the 1980s. It shows clearly how every "superstore" will fail at some point in it's lifespan. Wal-Mart may be on the verge of that failure.

 

[jdcnow]

If you can find it, check out a book called "The Big Store". It's about what happened at Sears in the 1980s. It shows clearly how every "superstore" will fail at some point in it's lifespan. Wal-Mart may be on the verge of that failure.

Methinks that, honestly, Walmart is actually a ripe takeover target for another retailer. And maybe a hostile takeover, at that.

 

[maxpowr9]

If you can find it, check out a book called "The Big Store". It's about what happened at Sears in the 1980s. It shows clearly how every "superstore" will fail at some point in it's lifespan. Wal-Mart may be on the verge of that failure.

Sears I feel is a unique problem because I had to do a massive case study on them. It wasn't just an inventory problem. You look specifically at their auto-division and how they deliberately gouged people, that is a sign of a retail business destined to fail. Kenmore and Craftsman used to be great brands as they were both made in the USA and of high quality. Now, they are pretty much Chinese garbage which is what most of Walmart is.

Candidly speaking, if I truly want to buy "crap" [as in cheaply-made goods], I will head to the dollar store and spend my money there instead of Walmart.

For example: I never understood why people buy name brand soap, [detergent is another matter as that shiz is so watered down at the dollar store] especially dish soap like Dawn. It's the same morons that buy the name brand aspirin instead of the generic version which has the same ingredients but is much cheaper. Stupid people are stupid I guess.

 

[jdcnow]

Hey, Walmart Management - Why do you allow this to go on?

OK, so about 730ish tonight, I make the mistake of going to the Supercenter closest to my apartment, and it's on the same public bus route as my apartment. So it's convenient to go to. But once you get inside, it's anything BUT convenient. Especially at the front checkouts. By 815pm, I got up there - and my bus to go home was supposed to come by at 830pm. So I had 15 minutes to get checked out. This was what I came to, when I walked up to the frontend...

This right here is not the fault of the cashiers - they're just there in the line of fire, and probably taking heat and smack off the customers for the backup being like it is.

This is not the fault of the front checkouts supervisors, who are simply following a staffing schedule they did not write, and are there busting their asses trying to manage this 3-ring circus that would even make the late 19th/early 20th century circus promoter John Ringling shake his head in shame.

No, folks, this is the fault of management. A management who will not properly staff their frontend with enough cashiers to meet the demand on a busy Saturday night. A management that doesn't give a good goddamned how long you wait in line. A management that doesn't care if anybody walked out the store with merchandise - Literally, there was so much of a crowd, that if I actually wanted to take my shopping cart and the unpaid for groceries in it, and walk out the door with it, lock stock and barrel just as big as you please, tell me please, who would have stopped me?

I didn't want to, but I left my cart standing there with the stuff in it - I had a bus to catch, and had no choice but to leave it behind. I ended up going to the Kroger down the street from this store, on the same bus line. At that Kroger, there were 7 out of 10 lanes open (5 regular lanes and 2 express lanes), along with the self-checkouts. The checkouts were each double-staffed with a cashier and sacker at each lane, and there was barely a line in the place. I was literally in and out of the frontend in less than 2 minutes.

Are you listening, Bentonville? Just sayin'...

If you look closely, the woman in the brown, just to the left of the battery display summarizes the whole picture quite clearly.

 

[Draven]

Having worked at Walmart many times in the past, these things mentioned are very very much true. In fact at the electronics department where I worked at my last Walmart job would have been handled better if it were ran by a pack of chimpanzees. The mindset of the morning people was always "It's too early for this shit, I don't want to deal with anyone at 6:00 AM" and it was always the same mentality later in the evening only on the flipslide. Then you have some employees who conveniently need to go on break or take their lunch just as things are picking up (12 PM - 5 PM rush) leaving the area with maybe 2 employees and a shitload of confused, angry and disgruntled customers (who were already angry because employees had been actively avoiding them throughout the store).

As for the barren landscapes, my particular store didn't seem to have much of this problem. In fact other than customer service/hospitality, making the store look presentable was number one on the priorities list so anything that really looked "raided" or deserted was usually a seasonal/half off/bargain bin/endcap type of thing.

I'm not trying to defend Walmart at all by any means of the word, in fact the core of these problems lies within upper management and Human Resources. The employees don't feel like they are being paid enough for the workload that is being dumped on them and are taking it out on the customers by avoiding them (and I'm not condoning the employee's behavior), poor communication and attitudes within personnel and management can greatly affect the atmosphere of a store, I remember going to a Big K-Mart recently and it felt like a ghost town.

Walmart is notorious for treating its employees like crap and then having no problems with having them replaced if they don't suck it up 100% I got along pretty much with everyone at my last Walmart job (except for one or two associate managers) but it was a very superficial and a very FAKE relationship. I hardly acted like I would in real life, normally I wouldn't smile 24/7 to the point of resembling the Joker, or dote on people hand and foot to the point of suffocation, and I wouldn't double & triple check things for someone because I just wanted them to accept the first answer they got and move on. I did all of those things because that's what I was being paid to do; provide a (fantasy) pleasant experience which (imho) isn't asking too much from a paying customer's POV. Attitude is everything, and even in a deserted-like Big K-Mart can be a great place to shop if at least one person is at least trying to be personable.

 

[rareboy]

If you can find it, check out a book called "The Big Store". It's about what happened at Sears in the 1980s. It shows clearly how every "superstore" will fail at some point in it's lifespan. Wal-Mart may be on the verge of that failure.

I think that this syndrome is called 'Too Big Not to Fail'. We have seen it with almost all the retail 'Giants' in North America.


In the case of Walmart, this failure can't come too soon for me. Time for North America to re-think the whole philosophy of loading up on cheap plastic shit made by virtual slave labour in China.

 

[The Fly]

This is NOT Walmart's fault/problem. People have known what Walmart's all about for years, but they/you keep patronizing them...so it's they're/your fault.
If I receive service or products that are below par, I quit using them and move on to their competition.
People who shop Walmart do so for the "Low, Low Prices". Well along with "Low, Low Prices" you get low quality, low service, and low availability.... but on the positive side they have smiley faces everywhere.
I have never, and will never, shop Walmart because of their business philosophy.