Wal-Mart culture creates low morale in its stores
“The last straw for her was on Halloween. I was 14 at the time and it was my favorite holiday. My mom asked her manager if she could go home an hour early so I could go out with her that night, and he gave her the ok. However, he told her later that she had to stay because one of her fellow co-workers requested to go home early to attend a Halloween party. This associate was the same one my mother often had to pick up after when she didn’t finish her share of duties. She had enough of that and walked out. That was the end of her time there.
I was employed by Wal-Mart back in 2001 as an overnight stocker. Wages at that time were $8.00 an hour. It seemed fine to me at the time, but I often wondered how those with families managed to live off such small wages. It was to my understanding that raises were generally .35 - .45 cents an hour. However, in order to get the BIG raise, you had to be “outstanding” for a year. Even if you did qualify for this raise, you’d never get it as your supervisor or the store manager would block it. The excuse was it wasn’t in the budget or they’d find something to deny you the raise. Often times people would get stuck with the .35 cent raise. Just think. If you work for Wal-Mart for 3 years, you’d finally have enough raises to earn a $1. I remember my first evaluation. I qualified for the .45 cent raise, but I didn’t get it. You know why? My manager wrote down in my “needs improvement” section I spoke “too loud” over the intercom and that alone denied me the high raise. Speaking too loud on the intercom?
Around my second year working for Wal-Mart, I was put in the toy section and my duty was to stock all the Christmas merchandise. The manager and I made a deal that if I killed a lot of pallets, worked some overtime, and had excellent attendance, I would get one of those “unheard of” raises. I came through with my end of the bargain, but that manager never went through with his. I brought it up to higher management and the local manager denied ever making the promise to me. Management wonders why employees never push themselves to do more than what’s expected of them, but is it really that hard to figure out why?
Working nights wasn’t so bad, but often times our managers would have unreal expectations of their workers. They’d treat us often time like robots and if we didn’t have a certain amount of pallets completed, they’d waste our time asking why and then demand we hurry up so we could move on to another area. Most people were expected to stock more than one area per night, and if there were too many pallets for those areas, rarely would you get help and if you did, it was usually too late.
After awhile, I wanted to see what working day shift stocking (or ICS as it was called) was like. HUGE mistake. Our manager at the time was a huge a**hole who was too busy trying to kiss up to the store manager than pay attention to the needs of his crew. There were many times where he and I butted heads and when I tried to use the store’s “Open Door Policy” to speak directly to the store manager about the troubles I was having with him, the store manager turned around and blamed ME for the problems I was having. Why do they have the Open Door Policy when management doesn’t want to deal with your concerns or problems?
Wal-Mart will argue until they’re blue in the face about how a union won’t solve anything. But we all know that if employees are allowed to form a union, soon Wal-Mart will have to pay those workers what they deserve.”
- Anonymous
