This summer, I worked the absolute worst job that I’ve ever had in my life thus far -- I worked at Walmart for five days (well, four and a half). Long story short, I was so upset halfway through my first official shift (which was 9 hours long, what the heck) that I ended up going to management and telling them that I didn’t like the way I was being treated. From there, they told me that if I “can’t take the heat, I should get out of the kitchen,” so I went home. But you know what? I learned a lot, and I feel the need to share the 15 things that I learned from working at Walmart for five days.
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Anyone, I mean anyone, can get promoted to management type positions -- and it’s not a good thing for the people who work there. Like, I’m pretty sure most of the managers who were above me for those five days did not even graduate high school.
In the back of the store where the employee lounge and offices are, there are different boards that keep track of how many days it has been without an employee accident, or a customer accident. I learned very quickly that these accidents usually happen on a daily basis. Even with Walmart offering their lame incentives to their employees, like having ice cream sandwiches if you go a month without an injury, the workers don’t seem too motivated to make that happen.
Working part time at Walmart doesn’t really mean part time hours, and for someone who was looking for a part time job it quickly became something that wasn’t going to work for me. Of course, they give you less than 40 hours so they don’t have to give you the benefits of working full time, but they give you tons of hours that basically make you feel like you’re working full time. For instance, I was scheduled to work four days a week, eight hours a day with a one hour lunch break, and one day was seven hours, so they technically only gave me 49 hours. For a part time job, that was definitely a little much.
Most of the time, your managers will just be on their cellphones and walkie-talkies speaking to one another, usually about their own personal drama. Yet the minute they even notice that there’s a cellphone in your pocket, even if you haven’t checked it all day, you get yelled at. As if I’m going to leave my iPhone in a locker that anyone could easily break into!
Speaking of personal drama, the workers of Walmart don’t understand the concept of “keep your personal life and your work life separate.” During my interview, I mentioned one of my strengths was that I keep my work and personal life completely separate, and I don’t let me personal life affect how I work. Yet, literally, before I could even finish what I was saying, the interviewer cut me off talking about how his sister-in -aw just got into a car accident, and how she’s in the hospital. Talk about unprofessional!
In case you were ever wondering, Walmart doesn’t bake any of their bakery products from scratch, or even mixes! They have one walk-in oven where they bake off frozen blocks of bread, but that’s as close as you’ll get to freshly baked in that store. Everything else is pre-made and frozen, and kept in this huge walk-in freezer until it’s time to put it on the floor.
Unfortunately, and not a lot of people know this unless they’ve encountered it, Walmart puts out completely frozen product on their sales floor and lets it thaw out while it’s on the floor. There are so many problems with this situation, but the biggest being that it leaves the products soggy with a huge puddle of melted ice on the floor. Talk about a huge injury (and probably lawsuit) just waiting to happen on a daily basis!
Walmart is very incredibly strict when it comes to their dress code for their employees, and any member of management will be totally happy to call you out on it if you’re not completely dressed how you’re supposed to. So even when it’s hot and humid back in the bakery near a 400 degree oven, you’re forced to wear your thick polo T-shirt, Walmart vest on top, plus the bulky chef coat that you can barely even move in. For someone who hates being hot, it was torture -- especially since it was the summer time!
You’re forced to do way too much computer based training for the job that you’re going to be working, and none of the managers, or other workers, abide by any of the rules and information presented in any of the computer-based training. It’s 10 hours of computer training about things I know I won’t need to know to complete the job before you’re even able to step foot inside of your department. Also, if you have any questions about said computer-based training, none of the upper management and human resources team will be able to answer your questions.
Everybody’s in a clique, and if you’re not already in one then it’s hard to work your way into one. I learned very quickly that working at Walmart is basically like being right back in high school, except that most of them really didn’t have a high school education.
The management team makes a very big deal about making sure that new employees are aware of the stealing problem in their store, and that they should be aware of customers stealing from their store. Although they mention it in the orientation speech, they don’t spend much time dealing with the fact that more employees actually steal from the store than customers.
What they do say about employee stealing is that they, basically, want you to be a rat. They will compensate you for squealing on other employees if you catch them stealing. It’s like $50 per person that gets in trouble for stealing because of you telling on them, which they encourage you to do as much as possible for that number to go up.
Management will assume that you know how to do everything that your job entails on your first official day at work. My first day of work consisted of an assistant manager handing me a u-boat full of frozen products that I somehow had to figure out how to price and put on the shelves. It’s not a hard task, I know, but considering how I didn’t know how to use the price gun I was given, nor did I know what the prices of each of the products were, it was a struggle.
Specifically in the bakery department, they throw away so much product. I wanted to cry seeing how many perfectly good donuts, cakes, bagels and loaves of bread were being thrown away in the garbage. I literally spent a good hour and a half on my first day just taking products out of their containers and ripping them up to be placed in a compacter. I was very upset because I was so used to giving our outdated but still edible products to charities and churches, because they can easily still feed a lot of people in need. When I asked someone why we don’t do something like that at Walmart, they told me that we would be losing money by doing that. Yet, they’re losing just as much money throwing the products away in the garbage.
Management also does not like when you’re just standing around, but a lot of the time, unfortunately, you’re standing around waiting for them to give you a task to do. Multiple times throughout my first day on the floor, one manager would tell me to stand there and wait for him to give me a task, and a few minutes later I’d get yelled at by another manager for standing there and not working. Talk about mixed signals.
