Retail Stories Archives - Page 54 of 63 - I Hate Working In Retail

Jan
24

By

Why I hate Walmart

Category: Retail Stories, Walmart Tags: Leave a Comment

Let’s talk about why

I
 HATE
 WAL-MART

I don’t like whips, I don’t like chains
I don’t go choppin’ up my neighbors’ brains

 

UP AGAINST THE WAL-MART

Wal-Mart is the nation’s (and the world’s) biggest retailer. But the problem is not just Wal-Mart – Toys R Us, McDonalds, Microsoft, Barnes and Noble, Starbucks, the Gap, Kinko’s, Circuit City, Home Depot, Nations Bank…all wipe out the smaller, more local competition. Why? Because they can. McDonalds in the Eiffel Tower, K-Mart in Greenwich Village – is this our destiny? Read on….

Only a company of their size can buy direct from manufacturers, cutting out the distributor. They buy so cheaply they can resell to other stores at cheaper than wholesale. Thus they can ruin the competition through PREDATORY PRICING.

WAL-MART REPORT CARD

Human Rights
Diversity
Community
Ecology
Spirituality		 0
0
0
0
0

The trend of mega-mergers and huge chains is wiping out small business everywhere, and with it the distinctiveness of local cultures. Not just in the U.S., but all over this great varied planet. Chains are everywhere, and who benefits? Not the small business, not the small town, not the individual – only a few guys pretty high up in the chain’s food chain. Consider: Wal-Mart’s annual sales are larger than the entire Gross Domestic Product of 161 countries! Do the Wal-Math: They are bigger than most nations, yet they have no government that answers to the people it affects. They are unaccountable to anyone. Democracy must include the ability to control those who control us!

WAL-MART RULES

If a town declines to welcome GodzillaMart, the next town over will take it, pulling trade and tax dollars out of local coffers. The town has no choice – the terms are dictated by the retail giant from afar. Is this right, fair, or decent? Is this Middle American family values? No more mom and pop stores here. The nation is being covered by a Wal-to-Wal-Mart carpet, the nation blanketed not with daisy chains of wildflowers, but something more like kudzu. Welcome, Weed-Mart.
Big businesses put their money in big banks, taking it far out of town. Money spent in a chain store leaves town on the next electronic transfer, while money spent in a local store circulates in the community seven more times before leaving. In other words, chains use local workers and consumers as a colony, extracting their wealth and exporting to the mother country. Sound familiar? Can you say American Revolution?

BUT IT’S CHEAP AND CONVENIENT!

YES. For shoppers. But guess what: Democracy, human rights, and social justice are never cheap, and seldom convenient. If we shop conveniently while Rome burns, we’ll have only ourselves to blame when they’ve reduced our workforce to workfare and our towns to malls, our culture to cookie-cutter sameness.

YES. IT’S CONVENIENT TO HIRE CHEAP LABOR.
But there are harmful, hidden costs to convenience.

SMALL BUSINESS PEOPLE…

…end up working in a department of Wal-Mart, nostalgic for their homey store and friendly neighborhood shopping experience. And lots of these jobs are part-time and without benefits.Who are the pillars of your community? The merchant, the banker, the principal, the poet, the police chief, the alderman…..None of these people can decide what sort of town you’ll have. ONLY Wal-Mart CAN. Megastores tear the social fabric.

SMALL TOWN LIFE ALTERED

Downtowns destroyed, the shopping experience robbed of its community flavor, reduced to Downtown in a Box. Shopping malls are all the same – you could be anywhere in the country (or world), except where you really are – your town.

THEY’VE GOT US…

…filing through their aisles and checkstands in orderly fashion, buying their wares and buying their revision of the flavor of our lives. Perhaps we’ve forgotten what it was like to walk instead of drive, to encounter our neighbors on foot instead of in traffic. Perhaps we’ve forgotten the vibrancy of civic life – the discussion of issues, the (God forbid!)…

POLITICAL ACTIVITY

that takes place on city streets. In a privately owned shopping mall, it’s illegal to pass out leaflets telling shoppers about the suffering of the workers who picked the strawberries, sewed the sneakers….This separation of commerce from social responsibility means that we don’t get to vote on basic human rights where it really matters, where we have power: at the point of sale.

STAY IN YOUR CARS.
DO NOT TALK TO STRANGERS.
DO NOT QUESTION THE WAY WE’VE ORGANIZED
YOUR SHOPPING FOR YOU.
SHOP TIL YOU DROP.
HAVE A NICE DAY.

WHAT ABOUT THE WORKERS?

The concentration of ownership and power, along with treaties like GATT and NAFTA, means more and cruder exploitation of workers everywhere. Jobs flee America as manufacturing is done by people like Wendy Diaz in Honduras. Diaz told Kathie Lee Gifford what it was like to earn 31 cents an hour, allowed to go to the bathroom only twice a day, be cursed and screamed at, and be able to do nothing about it. There is one unionized Wal-Mart – it’s in Ontario.
Wal-Mart’s “Faded Glory” t-shirts were made by workers earning 23 cents an hour. Faded Glory indeed! One wishes to ask Wal-Mart, in the famous words asked of Senator Joe McCarthy, “Have, you, at long last, no human decency?”
Most of the workers in these cheap or slave-labor factories around the third world are WOMEN – or GIRLS!. Think FAMILY VALUES here. And two-thirds of employees in the retail industry are women. Retail is marked by low wages, low benefits, poor health care, and powerless employees. The United Food and Commercial Workers led a Women’s Day protest against Wal-Mart; according to UFCW Vice President Patricia Scarcelli,

“We cannot change the economic condition of women until we change the wages and working conditions in the retail industry. And we cannot change the retail industry until we change Wal-Mart. They will not have our consumer dollars to wage war on our paychecks.”

The White House, under pressure from workers’ movements around the world, has instituted a Task Force on sweatshops, pushing for independent monitoring and a living wage. Wal-Mart has refused to join in. They have also opposed health care reform and minimum wage increase, and defied the embargo on Haiti’s former military regime, paying workers 14 cents an hour. Why? That’s their job. What’s ours?

MUSIC

Wal-Mart tells the record industry what they don’t like, and the industry produces special “clean” versions for sale by Wal-Mart – versions which are then resold to other retailers. Not to defend obscenity, but look who’s deciding what’s obscene? Is Wal-Mart your daddy? They are the biggest music retailer in the country – in many places, the only music retailer. Wal-Mart has become the W-chip, blocking or altering album covers and lyrics – not on your home television, but at the global level. Such power is never restricted to obscenity – it always leads to wider controls. They cause musicians to censor themselves in advance. Get Wal-Mart out of the censorship business!

THE ENVIRONMENT

The more concrete we lay, the more we get in a motorized box to drive to a great box to buy things in boxes to take home to our boxes…the more we box ourselves and the environment in. Mall means sprawl. Look at the landscape that is our heritage, our birthright, and decide if you want it malled. Do you want America to become Generica? Stop Sprawl-Mart.

IT’S INEVITABLE – IT’S PROGRESS.
YOU CAN’T STOP IT. IT’S MORE EFFICIENT.
IT’S CONVENIENT. I LIKE IT. GET OVER IT.

Well, God help us. Convenience and efficiency do not make it right. Placing a high value on economic effectiveness and a low value on human fairness and diversity is not the American way. It’s not any way at all, except the survival of the meanest.

IT’S NOT PROGRESS!

Wal-Mart may have won this round, but David did beat Goliath in the end. Among those opposing Wal-Mart are the UFCW, FIEF (an international labor organization working against Wal-Mart’s exploitation in many countries), and community organizations from Gig Harbor, Washington, Santa Clarita, California, De Land, Florida, Bath, Maine, Guelph, Ontario….to the fine folks at “Save Our Small Town Way of Life” in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

When you make decisions as a consumer, you may be cutting your own throat as a worker.

BE A CITIZEN

think, learn, and act. It’s a matter of community vs. consumerism…..

BRAINS VS. CHAINS

 

Sourced from Davelippman.com

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Jan
23

By

Everything I Learned In Life I Learned From Working At A Supermarket

Category: confessions, Retail Stories Tags: , , Leave a Comment

cashier

 When I was 16, I secured a position as a cashier and bagger at Stop and Shop, a chain supermarket located in a renovated plaza in Warwick, Rhode Island. It was an eight minute drive from my house, and a two minute drive — pretty much across the street, actually — from an all boys high school – the brother school to my all girls high school — where I spent most of my after school hours doing theate

By all accounts, it was a pretty terrible experience. I worked there for just under a year, from the start of my senior year of high school through the summer before college. I made minimum wage, worked until 10 or 10:30 pm on school nights (school nights, Jesus) and wore a long sleeve polo shirt and name tag. One of my coworkers was named Donna. I still think of her every time I smell Menthol or see a 40-something in a leather jacket with an adjustable waist belt. My manager Nancy thought I was a huge dumb ass, and treated me like a huge dumb ass. I was.

Here’s what I learned.

Don’t ask for permission to do what you need to do. Don’t invite people to make your choices for you.

It was around Christmas. I was on register, and I had the flu. Anyone who’s ever experienced being sick on the job in some service role (restaurant, retail, whatever) knows how unbearably shitty it is to stand for several hours, usually near a clock/register/receipt with a timestamp, counting down the hours until you can go home and not shiver standing up. Or cough on people. Or their food.

You could end your shift early, but here’s the thing. Once you’re at work, clocked in, it’s pretty hard to go home. It’s partly a fear of sounding like a liar to your manager, who makes the schedule; partly that you think you can make it (the clock is there, just a few more hours); and partly that since your job is so terrible, you start to second guess yourself on the severity of your illness. That is, since most of the time you spend at a service job feels like bullshit, you question whether you’re just exaggerating how sick you feel to yourself to justify punching out early. You decide you are making too much of it.

So at some point over the course of a checkout during this particular shift, I realized: Jesus. I am definitely going to vomit. So I hit my help button. You hit the help button (located directly below the service light indicating whether your lane is open) when you screw up a sale, need a manager key, or have to go to the bathroom.

I hit my help button. I hit it again.

One of my managers told me to hold on, they would get Joel, a junior manager, to cover me.

Just hold on.

I could not.

I remember it almost going black, but not going black. Instead of blackness, I always come back to this image of a Foxy brand cabbage, sealed in plastic, rolling in slow motion down the conveyer belt. I remember the cabbage — that robust, Foxy cabbage — seeming beautiful, but useless.

Check out was still happening, but I was not.

I ran to the bathroom.

I entered a stall and crouched on the floor by the toilet.

I threw up.

When I came out of the bathroom, Joel approached me and asked if I had to go home. I said, I’m fine, in the way kids with good parents say it. Like, I’m fine in theory, but I want you to make the decision for me that I’m not.

Joel looked at me and said, Okay.

I went back to my shift. I hated myself. It was shitty.

No one cares about your fucking birthday.

Your birthday is not a national holiday. It’s not an occasion for people to be nice to you, or give you special treatment, or ask you fun questions about yourself, your plans, and your day. It’s a day of the week, part of a month, part of a year. To everyone other than your mother, it literally means nothing. When people wish you a happy birthday, they are either your friend or acquaintance, and are marginally interested in the prospect of a party where they can drink/meet people to fall in love with/seem interesting to, or, they work with you in a white collar job and don’t want to seem like an asshole.

Jobs that don’t involve Excel are not like this.

My first week or two of work, as a bright-eyed and chipper young asshole, I wrongly assumed that since I was scheduled on my birthday, I was entitled to not work on my birthday. I said to my manager, Nancy, something stupid and hilarious and open-ended, like, I noticed I am scheduled on my birthday, assuming she’d be like, Oh. That’s fine. Switch your shift with someone.

It was not fine.

When I worked on my birthday until 10 p.m., as I was leaving, Nancy looked at me and said:

Oh yeah, happy birthday.

It was more about the first part.

There is a gender divide. There are also outliers.

I’m a progressive enough person. I live in New York. I have a cool job that I work hard at. I have vague goals related to intellectual progress, alternative entertainment, and inserting myself into the new American intelligentsia. I have brilliant female and male friends, and measure each of them equally on the merits of their work, character, and intellect. They are impossibly impressive to me. They are women and men, and in my eyes, they can each as individuals do anything.

Here’s the thing: in the scope of the world, and the scope of possible jobs, that’s only sort of true.

That is, at a grocery store, there are things men can do that women cannot do. Men are capable of things there women aren’t.

Cart duty is one of those things.

In my understanding of the role, cart duty is pretty much a subdivision of the bagging shift, with a few produce guys also participating. Male baggers or produce guys would take turns on cart duty, which meant going outside to the parking lot, usually in a Stop and Shop branded vest or sweatshirt, to organize the shopping carts people left by their cars, in parking spaces, and around the general area.

This was a man’s job, because it literally meant pushing several carts, sometimes 20 or so at once, inserted into one another, and depositing them at an appropriate location (those metal bar-like structures in the parking lot).

I am not strong. Donna was not strong. Nancy was a bitch (and a manager) but also, not strong. So we could not do this.

Male grocers had the upper body strength cart duty required.

There was one girl, Liz, who was occasionally on cart duty. It was literally because she was strong. True, it could have partly been based on perception (she wore a thick leather strap bracelet and worked in deli). But apart from her in-group behavior, Liz was included in carts because when Liz did carts, carts got pushed. In the narrative of Stop and Shop, she was someone who could handle heavy lifting, so she did heavy lifting.

You can’t talk people into believing you’re more than what you do, because you aren’t.

When you’re behind a register, you are literally a step in the process of a consumer making payment for a good or service. Even if someone (the consumer) is looking at you, and smiling at you, and talking to you like a person, they don’t actually care. They are completing a step (making payment) toward some end. You are part of it.

This isn’t about Marxism.

One time, around early fall, a man came through my line wearing a Georgetown sweatshirt. I was extremely, intensely excited to mention to him that I had just completed a summer program there. It was called the Junior Statesmen Association, I said. He nodded and looked away.

I felt embarrassed. Not for him ignoring me, or because of the content of what I had said. But for both of those things, and for what I meant. And most significantly, for where I was when I meant it.

Here’s the thing: If I were somewhere else, I probably wouldn’t have mentioned it. It would have seemed unnecessary.

For one, yeah, I love talking, and I was really bored. But I wanted something from him. I wanted this guy to make it seem like I wasn’t exactly where I was, working the job I was. I wanted to express: I just work here as an after school job. I am smart. I am going to be a great American writer.

Or, worse, I am not this.

I gave him his receipt.

There’s this thing that you do when you’re young, and it’s stupid. I did it. I’m 24. I still do. You include yourself in a culture just enough to separate yourself from it. You stay on the surface. It makes you feel like you’re not what you do. You’re what you think. It makes everything you’re not doing seem so possible, and it’s because you’re not actually doing it.

Don’t do that.

 

Sourced from thoughtcatalog.com

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Jan
18

By

10 things I hate about working in retail by Bonnie Rideout

Category: Retail Stories Leave a Comment

10 Things I Hate About Working Retail

I work at Target Canada. This is my first retail job, and like every job there are a lot of things to be disliked. Since I have officially been at Target for a year, I figured I share with you how my experience working retail has been so far; so here is a list of the top 10 things I hate about retail.
10) Cleaning up after people.
I get it, a lot have people haven’t had the chance to work retail to realize how irritating it is when people put things in a spot right beside where they go. But seriously, it’s not that hard to put something away when you’re in the same isle. Same with your kids; teach them some decency and have them put things back where they belong.
9) Screaming Children.
I understand that sometimes your kids are going to cry, and there is nothing you can do about it. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t drive me crazy.
8) Friday nights.
When I was a teenager, the way I liked to spend my Friday nights was playing stupid games with my friends, hanging out and drinking at the skate park, or having a campfire at the beach. But that could also be that I grew up in a small town where malls didn’t exist.  However I still don’t see the appeal of hanging out at the mall. They also like to play “pranks.” I remember this one time some kids took an entire box of chocolate bars and left them in random places around the store… seriously? That’s how you want to spend you’re Friday night?
7) Crazy Couponers.
Ok, I do understand the appeal of saving insane amounts of money. But some people just get out of control. I once watched a crazy couponer let her child run bare foot through the store, and left her in charge of her baby, please have some decency. Also, please understand that ringing through your items takes a lot longer when you have coupons, and sometimes our machines don’t agree; and don’t get bitchy when your read the coupon incorrectly and I point out your error. Thankfully I am not a cashier and I only have to deal with this occasionally, but still. Overall, just be nice if you are couponing, I’m already not pleased that I have to deal with your coupons, please don’t make the experience any more unbearable.
6) When products are sold out.
Alright, you need to understand that yes, we are going to sell out of products. It happens, and no there is not a secret stash of magical products hidden in the back, nor will any amount of complaining you do suddenly make the product appear; and no, just because it’s on sale, it doesn’t mean we will have an unlimited supply. Sorry. Also, threatening to shop elsewhere because we don’t have a product in stock doesn’t bother me either. I recently had a customer say to me “Well I guess you’re not getting a sale from us” because we didn’t have the product they wanted in stock, and were not willing to consider a different product; this also will not make the product magically appear, so by all means, go somewhere else. I will try to help you the best I can by trying to find another product to suit your needs; but at the end of the day it doesn’t affect, I am not on commission.
5) Opening products.
This I also understand; some people need to see the whole product to be able to decide if they like it or not. However there is a right way and wrong way to do this. The right way is to gently open the packaging and try to avoid destroying it so that the product can be put back in its packaging, if you do not do it yourself; which as much as it annoys me to find random products unpackaged, it doesn’t bother me as much as people who open packaging the wrong way. The people who do it wrong way make me think I live in a world of savages. These “savages” like to violently tear open the packaging (seriously, its only tape not vice grips keeping it sealed) ultimately destroying it making it nearly impossible to assemble the scraps you left me with into something that kind of looks like the packaging that once contained the product. It’s almost like the get their joy from tearing packages to unrecognizable shreds of cardboard. Please, channel your destructive urges into something else… please….
4) Yogurt in the towels.
Alright, I do understand then while shopping you do change your mind sometimes. I get it, I do too. But seriously, please don’t leave refrigerated or frozen products elsewhere in the store so they can sit and go bad. It’s a waste because we can no longer sell them after they have been sitting out for some questionable amount of time. You can simply hand it to an employee you pass by while shopping, or even keep until you go to check-out and tell the cashier you don’t want it anymore (as well as with any other product) and they will ensure it is promptly returned to is proper place. It’s really that simple. No one likes finding a container of spoiled yogurt hidden behind some towels…
3) Target Canada vs. Target USA
My Target is in a border city, so we experienced this more so. Customers were always complaining and comparing our prices to those at am American Target. I’m sorry that we are in a DIFFERENT COUNTRY and our prices are not the same, the costs to run a business here are a lot different than in America. Just because we are a company that originated in America, does not mean we will be exactly like it is in America.
2) Complaining about prices.
Yes. I am aware that Target’s prices are not as low as Wal-Mart’s. However we carry better quality products, and if you’re not willing to pay for good products, then go to Wal-Mart. No amount of complaining about our prices will allow me to change them or make them magically lower.
1) Wal-Mart vs. Target
I hate when people say “Fine, I’ll just go to Wal-Mart.” Seriously, go right ahead. If you like trying to shop in poorly laid out store, with random shelves in the middle of the main isles and you feel like waiting in line for half an hour, or having to walk across half the store to find someone to help you only for them to tell you that they cannot help you with what you need help with; sure, by all means, go to Wal-Mart
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