Let me give you some examples of things I witnessed working at a single Wal-Mart store:
- Overnight manager wrote up a clerk for working too slow. She was on light duties at the time.
- Employees fill out an annual, anonymous survey on the quality of their store manager. Entire store was asked to take the survey again because the results were so overwhelmingly negative, they thought it was a joke. It wasn't.
- Another overnight manager stood behind every night crew clerk, watched them take said survey and made them choose all positive responses the second time around.
- Department managers are full time, hourly employees, subject to getting their hours cut. All full-time employees were working 28 hours a week for a few months.
- Cosmetics manager (full time, non-salary worker) was written up for refusing to work during her unpaid lunch break, after she had punched out for said break.
- Every employee was scheduled a time to take their lunch break during their shift. This was enforced regularly. When two neighbouring departments took their lunch breaks at the same time, the on-duty manager attempted to get them to leave to help them do something. When they refused, the manager stood in the lunch room and waited for them to finish their break.
- Night crew members are given a quota of how many skids of merchandise they should be stocking during their shift. Managers would frequently lie about workers not fulfilling this quota to write them up (fuck you Britney, glad you got fired, you fucking bimbo)
Then you've got entitled customers who demand things their way because "THIS IS WALMART!" as if Walmart doesn't have their own policies and standards in place. Employees are expected to work like dogs by their superiors, taking abuse from horrendous excuses for human beings, for money that is less than liveable.
Yeah, Walmart is pretty great.
The 2 years I put in at Walmart were hell on Earth.
I never understood how such incompetent management can lead to a store making money hand over fist but it does. Their business model is such that you don't even really need any sort of management and they'll make moneys.
Some of the things I saw in my short time there;
A manager telling an employee who lost his ID Card that he'll take care of punching him in/out of the system for the day. The next day he was in, he was terminated for a meal exception, he claimed that the manager told he'd take care of the punching in/out, manager denied it. The guy was kind of slow at doing his job, but he always came in, and did his best, plus he seemed like he had early on-set Alzheimer's.
The fact that any request is considering a reasonable request according to management, so if you do one job that only pays $8. They can force you to do another job that pays $10 but they don't have to pay you the difference.
Saw a manager berate an employee for not cleaning feces out of a sink in the bathroom.
Management didn't like my request to put an undercover LP associate outside the bathroom on Black Friday. By 10AM that morning I found about 20 gutted copies of video games. They also didn't like the suggestion of keeping the display cases locked, they claimed they would rather have things get stolen than make customers wait for someone to open the case for each customer.
Management didn't reward the employees who were stars, and kept too many people who absolutely did nothing. There was a time where I was wrangling up carts, and I would keep my half of the parking completely spotless, the other side had BOTH of the cart retrieval machines, and their side would be littered with carts. I was reprimanded for not helping them despite there being 3 people on one side, with 2 machines. One of the CSM's came out and found one of them sitting on the cart corral smoking and being on his phone, did he get in trouble? Nope, just told to finish his smoke as soon as possible.
