cashier Archives - Page 3 of 3 - I Hate Working In Retail

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8 Types Of Cashiers To Avoid. Which One Are You??

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When I go shopping I’m usually in a hurry to pay for my crap and get going onto my next errand. All I ask is for a cashier to be competent, friendly and efficient, and thankfully most are. Yet sometimes I’ll find myself standing in a checkout line in which the cashier is lacking in one or all of these qualities. If you ever see that you are dealing with one of these types, do yourself a favor and change lines!

1. Roboclerk

“Cash, check or charge? You have ten seconds to reply!” This cashier has become a cog in the big retail machine, so much so that he functions slowly and methodically like a mindless, mechanized part, with the personality of a fried circuit board. His robotic manner would be tolerable if he was an entertaining and flamboyant robosexual like C3PO or drunkenly outrageous like Futurama’s Bender. Instead, with his blank expression, emotionless interaction and monotone delivery of “hihowareyou?” and “thankyoucomeagain,” he’s more like the Terminator. He must have heard that he’s going to be replaced by a robot in the near future, so to avoid the inevitable he’s already turned himself into a one.

2. Bad Bagger

Watermelon on top of the eggs? Check. Apples and yogurt with the bleach? You bet. Clothing yanked off the hangers, wadded up and crammed into too small of a bag? Definitely. While you’re at it, why not put everything in one bag so I dislocate my shoulder on the way up to my apartment, just before it splits open and sends my $50 worth of groceries cascading down the stairway and into the grease-stained parking lot? Or go the anal opposite and bag each of my 47 items separately, making me look like a homeless person on my way to the bus. By the way, nice job increasing your carbon footprint by wasting all that plastic. You just killed a polar bear.

3. Company Spokesperson

I always get this gung-ho gal when I’m dashing in for a gallon of milk. She’s chugged the company Kool-aid and is onboard with every last ditch sales tactic and marketing ploy they have to offer. So before I get my change I have to listen to her brainwashed blathering about rewards cards, bonus buys, weekly promos, donation drives, online surveys (where I can win a $5000 gift card!), and did you know how much SpendMart gives back to the community? Oh, and can I have your zip code? It’s strictly for our own in-store demographic purposes. We don’t sell your personal info. Honest. At this point, the milk has gone sour and so have I.

4. Psyched Up Psycho

Opposite of the Roboclerks are these super-happy, mega-hyper balls of giddy energy. Apparently they had three Redbulls and a bag of meth for breakfast. All amped like a lonely puppy when his owner gets home. So overly upbeat with an enthusiasm that goes to 11, I don’t know if they’re trying to convince me, or themselves that this crappy, minimum wage dead-end trench work is the Best. Job. Ever. If they were anymore excited about ringing up my groceries they’d be humping the register. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate people enjoying what they do, but I’ve done my time in retail and it ain’t no Disneyland. Heck, being a cashier at Disneyland probably ain’t no Disneyland.

5. Unmotivated Public Sector Drone

In the private sector, businesses strive to stay profitable and avoid losing customers to the competition. Workers are expected to be fast-paced and productive. Not so with places like the DMV or the county courthouse. They have no competition. You can’t say, “Well, this clerk sucks. I’ll just go pay my license fee at the DMV across the street.” That must be why so many of these office drones work at an excruciatingly slow pace that would make a snail cringe. Actually, to call this clerk a drone is an insult to all the diligent worker bees out there. Their pay raises aren’t tied to performance (or worse, their pay has been frozen), so they have no motivation to go above and beyond. Ever been so late on your gas or electric bill that you had to pay it in person? Or had to go downtown to pay a parking ticket? You better ask Siri to block out a big chunk of your daily schedule. But look on the bright side, now you’ve got an excuse to play Candy Crush Saga for 3 or 4 hours while you wait.

6. Cashier Creeper

I’m sure all you ladies out there have run into this dirty old clerk. I’ve seen him in action. When he’s not making some poorly conceived double entendre about your purchase of Sweet and Low, he’s staring down your scoop neck as you unload your cart. He doesn’t even try to be sly about it! Don’t get too distracted by the debit machine or you’ll miss him ogling your teenage daughter as well. There are also young creepers manning the registers. These 20-something dudes think that every female customer is a speed-dating opportunity, trying out pick-up lines as stale and cheesy as the popcorn balls in aisle 32. In either case, now you’re wishing you’d picked up some Dove, because you feel like you need a shower when you get home.

7. The Occasional Cashier

This situation occurs when a parking lot attendant, fitting room associate or some other employee who seldom runs a register is “volun-told” to help with cashiering during a rush (because management cut payroll to the bone and won’t schedule enough full-timers). After a bunch of people move to her lane, sure enough the first transaction goes horribly awry. Instead of a simple single item paid with cash, this one involves rain checks, coupons, some sort of complex rebate voucher and payment in Canadian money orders. She knows just enough about the checkout process to foul the whole thing up, pecking hesitantly at the keys, as if one wrong button press will cause the register to explode. All the while craning her neck frantically left and right like a panicked, lost ostrich, looking for a supervisor to bail her out. It’s not her fault and I feel her pain, but do I want to be stuck in her lane? Not so much.

8. Skeptical Scanner

This cashier missed the memo about employee empowerment and believes that the old adage says, “The Customer is Always Wrong.” He questions every price discrepancy and creates unnecessary delays as he calls to confirm if an item ringing at $29.99 is advertised for $27.99, constantly making a big deal about it, as if his personal paycheck will be garnished to cover the two bucks. He scrutinizes each coupon for several minutes, fearful that he might redeem one for Crest Fresh Mint Gel rather than Fresh Mint Paste and cost the company 25 cents. I get it. You don’t want to give away the store. Sure, lost profits do affect the employees. But unless I’m claiming that a 60” LCD TV is on sale for $13.99, just honor the price difference and move on to the hapless sap in line behind me.

Sourced from thoughtcatalog.com

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Why Do Walmart Workers Walk Out? Let Them Tell You.

Why Do Walmart Workers Walk Out? Let Them Tell You.EXPAND

Last month, the National Labor Relations Board charged Wal-Mart with illegally retaliating against workers trying to organize. Wal-Mart says those workers’ activities don’t deserve legal protection. This seems like a good time to hear from some actual Wal-Mart workers.

The current NLRB case, as the Wall Street Journal notes, is somewhat of a test case (although union busting is nothing new to America’s wealthiest family). Wal-Mart claims that it was within its right to discipline workers because, rather than engaging in a traditional union-organized strike, they were participating in “intermittent” actions like temporary walkouts and protests, which are “hard to distinguish from absenteeism.”

Many Wal-Mart workers have willingly taken a very real risk of losing their jobs in order to participate in the recent protests and walkouts. Why? Here are four stories that were sent to us in the past several months by current and former Wal-Mart employees.

“Go chill out”

I had worked for Wal-Mart once before and quit due to a manager that constantly gave me shit. But I needed a job and figured if I worked for the Wal-Mart on the other side of my city it would be fine. I was hired for maintenance orginally. It was hard but I worked on my own so I didn’t mind. It was overnight so there weren’t even reallly any customers. Then the stockers needed help one night and they pulled me in. Again, I didn’t mind. Work was work.

Well I was so quick and helpful they asked me to stock full time with a 25 cent raise. I said yes. That was when shit went down. They didn’t train me at all. I’m a slender female with knee problems and they had me lifting boxes that were 50 or more pounds. I asked, ASKED, for training to do my job correctly and safely. I had never had a job like this so I was just lifting things however. They said they would train me and never did.

Then one night, lifting a heavy box, I twisted wrong and tore the tendons in my knee. They sent me home. No hospital. The next day I tried to call in so I could go to the doctor. My knee cap was the size of a baseball. They insisted on me coming in and filling out forms and them taking me. The only reason I went is because they said they would pay me for it. I was allowed to go to work but had to be sitting or using my crutches. They insisted I come in so I did. I asked my manager what I was supposed to do and his response was, ” I don’t know, go chill out somewhere.”

I was a little unsure but said ok and went to sit in the break room so if he thought of something I could do I would be close by and easy to find. A little more than halfway through my shift, two other managers came to find me and asked what I was doing. I told them what the other manager had said and they took me to his office. He called me a liar, said he told me to go fix the clothing displays, and fired me. He also blacklisted me so I can never work for the company again. Oh and that last paycheck for the two weeks of work I put in before getting hurt and what they promised to pay me if I let them take me to the doctor? I never got a dime.

Making Wal-Mart work for you

I started out when I was 18 as a cashier and quickly realized it was a terrible job because I never got to sit down and all I heard was complaints from customers. The cash register is the dumping ground for any and all complaints the Wal-Mart shopper has about their shopping experience or anything else. You are held hostage by the register, you can’t just wander off or tell the person you have to ‘do something else…over there’ and walk away. So I quickly requested to move to the Lawn and Garden Dept. It has an outdoor area where you can pretend to be busy or hide where customers and managers can’t find you or bother you. I would often ride around on the forklift moving stuff around and pretending to work and no one could bother me.

I quickly realized that the Wal-Mart I worked at was such a huge place with so many people working there it was easy to disappear and be anonymous. I would often show up to work 1-2 hours late, take hour or more long lunches when I was only allowed 30 minutes and no one ever said anything to me about any of it. I could pretend to do work outside and not be bothered, most of the time if I just looked busy and avoided eye contact customers didn’t bother me. I can’t count the number of times I saw people stealing things and did nothing. Once I was working as a cashier and a person came up with a trash can to purchase. The lid on the can accidentally fell off and I noticed there was a bunch of stuff in the can, jewelry, clothing, shoes etc. The guy quickly put the lid on the can and looked at me and I didn’t say anything. I rang up the trash can and on his merry way he went. I didn’t really care enough about Wal-Mart to try to stop theft and I figured Wal-Mart stole wages from people through denying to pay people over time and had taken out life insurance policies on employees and cashed them in so what does it matter if people steal from Wal-Mart, it evens out.

Pretty much everything you’ve heard about Wal-Mart is true, it was widely known that female employees were paid less than male employees, they showed anti-union videos and gave trainings, I was outraged by these things but there wasn’t much I could do but get what I could from Wal-Mart and move on. It was a crappy place to work and I would never go back to it but during that time in my life I made it work for me.

Happy Thanksgiving

I have a family member who has worked for Wal-Mart for 8 years. Yesterday she was let go after just having worked 4pm to midnight for them on Thanksgiving. She has built her pay to over $12/hr. The reason they let her go is because for the third time in a year she forgot to take a lunch during a 6 1/2 hour shift in which you have to. She thought it was a 6 hr shift in which you do not have to take one. In there great mercy and forgiveness, they will allow her to reapply in 6 months, but her pay will go back to minimum wage. SHAME ON YOU WALMART!!!!!!!!!!!!!! As of today I’m done shopping there.

My fault

I am one of the past Walmart employees .. I worked 30 to 40 hr weeks , payed only a part time wage. I was told many times that I would not be lifting anything over 20lbs because of back issues, but ended up lugging 100lb or more flats of water without the assistance of a machine on a regular flat roller. I was told to clock out at lunch so I didn’t get paid and that if I did overtime it would be off the clock. I was flirted with by managers and the straw that broke the camels back was when I passed out, hit my head on the floor and was told that I had to be at work the next day. They let me off work, but offered no health care for me as I was “part time” and no one rendered medical aid when I passed out. I was told not to talk about what happened at work and that it was my fault.

One can see how Wal-Mart employees—and Wal-Mart itself—could benefit from a little organized labor.

Sourced from Gawker.com

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

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 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