The Wal-Mart Files

10) You look wistfully at their weekly circulars and wonder when they'll call you to model that shapeless smock that they're selling for $29.99 and made by third world children for .03¢ an hour. You try out poses when no one's looking.

9) You hunt the Internet for anti-Wal*Mart websites and write hideously misspelled and personally defamatory rebuttals to the webowners.

8) There's a picture of Sam Walton in your family photo album and you reminisce with a tear in your eye of the good ole days when Mr. Sam was still alive.

7) You shut everyone up during Wal-Mart commercials.

6) You color-coordinate your makeup and entire wardrobe to match that spiffy little blue vest with half the buttons missing.

5) The phrase "Action Alley" gives you a thrill whenever you hear it.

4) You bake cookies for the general manager who clearly does not need the calories or the numbers added to his cholesterol count.

3) Your personal appearance suggests that you always stock the pharmacy and take generous samples home with you.

2) By the time they yell, "Gimme a "T"!", you forget what they were trying to spell.

1) When the manager forgets your first name and supplants it with, "Hey, you," even after five years of faithful service, you blame it your parents for giving you a difficult first name, like Al or Sue.

It doesn't matter how hard you work. It doesn't matter that you needed tourniquets and Ace bandages from having too many sharp-edged boxes fall on you. It doesn't matter that you've produced enough sweat to keep the fucking U.S.S. Eisenhower afloat. It doesn't matter if you arrive for work in C spine traction and think that physical pain is a natural state: Wal-Mart management, by and large, is constitutionally incapable of recognizing good hard work by its on-the-ball associates. "Fitting in" is vastly more important. Pettiness is the order of the day, week, year, and decade.

Only at Wal-Mart can a person be honored, after emptying out two trucks in the space of two and a half hours and staging the cheap crap, with the chore of single handedly lifting off the hand trucks entire entertainment centers, prefabricated dormers, car ports, whatever the fuck they have, and shelving the freight.

Of course, one of the biggest obstacles in avoiding criticism for poor job performance is being bounced around from department to department. One night, you're stuck in Furniture (Dept. 17, a number that will live in infamy) shelving boxes that weigh only slightly less than a Fiat Spyder. The next night, you're staging and stocking stuff in Hardware, or Sporting Goods, or Paper Goods and Chemicals. Just when you think you have the locations for all the freight memorized, you're jettisoned to another department and by the time you're assigned to that department again, everything's been switched around (playing Musical Freight largely justifies the managers' existence), you're back to square one.

When you arrive at any job where there are lots of people and many of them wear stupid little buttons on their vests with a pride usually reserved for war heroes who wear their fruit salad on their dress uniforms, you're bound to be in for trouble. Cliques have developed and ossified over the years they've been together and you can never do anything right. They often don't give you a chance to "fit in."

This is very much the case of the Hudson, Massachusetts Wal-Mart (Store #1970) and I have reason to believe that such smarmy, blue collar cliques exist in virtually every Wal-Mart store, as well as virtually any workplace. However, Wal-Mart mismanagement is notorious for singling these people out and squeezing them out onto the street, paying no attention whatsoever to their job performance and even accumulating lies about it from the very people who want you out (like Charlene Wilder, the repressed, red-vested lesbian who couldn't melt a stick of butter between her legs if she was in the Gobi Desert).

Okay, so you empty the trucks out (more often than you're on the conveyor belt, which is hardly more restful but at least you have ventilation or are out in the open air), you haul the freight out, stage it, then you stock it. You work like a nigger with a shotgun put to his head and what does it get you?

One night, I stopped what I was doing to look at a circular for a few seconds. Literally seconds. Who walks by me but good ole Charlene. Already having her number by this time, I immediately imagined myself months down the road being pulled into the manager's office and having to defend myself from being caught looking at a circular for five seconds. Sure enough…

Now, Wal-Mart asst. mismanagers get paid from $25,000 a year on up. This, supposedly, is because they have so many more responsibilities and work so much harder than we. They have the walkie talkies, they carry pieces of paper, and usually reserve for themselves the Herculean job of opening the break packs and shoving the full shopping carts at the night receivers to actually shelve.

What I'd like to know is, how can they justify persecuting a usually hard-working person for stopping long enough to look at an item in their own circular while often being caught by that same person time and again standing around and gabbing at the two overweight cousins who work Paper Goods and Chemicals for five, ten, fifteen minutes at a time?

Isn't Wal-Mart mismanagement supposed to making even more judicious use of their time than me, because they get paid more, because they get the primo bonuses, because they're on the inside track to running a store that takes up half an area code?

Who's talking about fair and equitable treatment here? We're talking about Wal-Mart, the PR agent for Lee Ann Rimes and the Christian Coalition.

The Open Door Policy is the biggest joke since Why did the chicken cross the road. Translated in layman's terms, the Open Door Policy is basically, "Don't let the open front door hit your sorry ass on the way out because you don't like the unfair way we treat scum like you. I have better things to do, like stoke my nicotine habit at the snack bar while I'm pretending to do meaningless paperwork."

Of course, Wal-Mart mismanagement gets bigger bonuses for lowering the payroll. This is why we'd have five, sometimes four, people Sunday nights in the receiving bay even though it takes a minimum of a dozen people to do the job effectively, especially when you have two or even three trucks worth of freight to empty, stage, and stock that night. Our GM, Chris Bodine (Bovine, I used to call him), had an ingenious solution for that. When our night receiving manager, Scott, was on vacation in Florida one summer, Chris got it into his head to become a night receiver himself.

Now, whenever I saw Chris, I couldn't help but think of that Jerry Seinfeld line, "Hello, Newman." He looked exactly like Wayne Knight, the actor who played the despicable mailman on that show. The problem was, Chris wasn't nearly as funny as the actor to whom he bore an eerie resemblance. Well, not deliberately funny, anyway.

One of the most dangerous people with whom to work, on a multiplicity of levels, is a Wal-Mart mismanager who fancies himself a "regular guy". One night, this obese oaf shows up wearing short red shorts and a tee shirt, and he brusquely walks by me, muttering in his Missouri drawl as he enters the truck trailer, "Let's get to work, Bob." I wound up inside every God damned trailer during those nightmarish two or three days when he was working with the night receiving crew and he insisted on being with me everytime, so he could keep an eye on me (I'd already acquired the reputation of being a person to watch closely and not because I was on the path to rapid and glorious advancement).

Well, about one and a half seconds after he enters his very first trailer, Chris winds up on his fat, cellulite-engorged ass. I considered pointing at him while loudly going, "Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk, nyuk, nyuk, nyuk, nyuk." But I thought of my fiancee and our three kids and thought better of it.

I patiently wait for him to get up so I can get into the bay opening (I told you he was obese) and we each take a side on the conveyor belt. Of course, being the micro-brained micromismanager that he is, he commences to tell me how to do my job, a job that a sponge could be trained to do if it had arms.

"Git th' boxes on th' middle of th' belt, Bob." "Jus' push 'em out, Bob." "In, out, in out, Bob. Don' stop fer nuthin'." Meanwhile, his own boxes are falling off the belt and are piling up on the floor.

Of course, as one could expect, his dramatic entrance into the bay proves to be the shape of disastrous things to come. He lasted about a half hour to 45 minutes. A box fell and gashed his shin open. He leaves to get a bandaid. The bandaid took 24 hours to find, since he never entered another trailer until the following night. He tells me to "Keep going, I'll get relief for you shortly."

After tunneling my way another few feet through one side of the trailer, I finally ask Charlene the lesbian, "Hey, when am I going to get someone in here to help me?" "Excuse me?!", she snaps, like I'd just asked if her five year old daughter was a virgin and if she liked older men. I repeat the question. The response was, essentially, "Just keep going and we'll get someone in there to help you when we're damned good and ready. Now shut the fuck up and even out the other side."

As another example of Chris Bovine's micromismanaging skills, allow me to relate the following and anyone who's ever worked for a Wal-Mart, I'm sure, has run into this kind of experience at one time or another:

I was working the Paper Goods and Chemicals aisles one night. By five in the morning, I had to take a dump so I went to the bathroom. I couldn't've been in there more than five to seven minutes. It certainly wasn't my intention to take an extra break, since the freight was unusually heavy that night and I already knew that I was being watched more closely than Kim Philby in No. 10 Downing Street.

I walk back to Dept. 13 and who do I see standing there, looking at his watch? The general transcript is as follows:

"Bob, where were you?"

"Uh, in the bathroom."

"Bob, how long were you in the bathroom?"

"I don't know, five minutes or so." I left my stopwatch at home, asshole. I often time myself. I was hoping to break the record tonight.

"What were you doing in the bathroom, Bob?"

"I was, uh, taking a dump." You want to go back there and take a whiff if you don't believe me? I ate at Taco Bell last night.

"Bob, do you like your job?"

Once again, I thought of the fiancee and three kids sleeping at home.

"Uh, yeeeeaaah…"

"Bob (I hate being called Bob and I think this weasel-ly-voiced redneck knew this), you've been here for, what, over eight hours and it's taken you all this time to stock this freight?"

Well, Forrest Gump, there was a little detail to attend to first, like ACTUALLY UNLOADING TWO TRAILERS WORTH OF SHIT THAT WE MOSTLY DON'T NEED BECAUSE YOUR BUYERS KEEP ORDERING IT TO BLOAT THEIR FUCKING COMMISSIONS. THEN I HAD TO HAUL THIS CRAP OUT MYSELF AND STAGE IT. "I've been working as fast as I can. I have to stock this, price the items, face off the shelves…"

"Bob, let me explain something to you: You're a night receiver. You stock freight. It's not your job to face off the shelves."

"…?!…"

Oh, and I suppose that we should just let the store look like it was caught in a thermonuclear strike, then? That'll look real good for the customers who come in at 7 o'clock. I aspire to be you. Charlene: "Uh, Chris, the morning openers need to be let in. You have to open the door." (Wal-Mart employees are quarantined during the evening.) "I'll be with you in a minute," he says, never taking his BB eyes off me. "Bob, you like your job?"

"I like it just fine, Chris." What, am I lapsing into Klingon, again? I'm so sorry. Perhaps I should slovenly toss in a few "ya'lls" and "Yee-haws" so you can understand me better and feel more at home, you inbred pachyderm.

Charlene looks by now as if she wants to crawl into a toilet and flush herself- Even she's embarrassed watching this public and needless spectacle, which in itself speaks volumes: "Chris, the openers have to get in."

By now, the FBI's Hostage Rescue Unit is outside readying their propane torches and M16's because they think the store's been taken over by terrorists.

Finally, the ogre from Missouri lumbers off, satisfied that he's done his good deed for the day. Meanwhile, my face is burning brighter than a cross on a southern black man's lawn and I'm wondering how many in the adjacent aisles just heard me get Rotor-Rootered a new asshole.

Now, by the time of this incident, I'd already been "counseled" by Scott as to my "poor job performance." You see, it isn't a viable excuse, getting bounced around from one department to the next several times a night. I'm also responsible for knowing which pallettes belong to which departments, although I'm not the one who'd put them there. So I have to take a generous ration of shit from the middle-aged grandmother and Charlene because I didn't know that this skid, which was placed in my area by accident, belonged to grandma's area, meaning she had to stage and stock it. God forbid I was busy doing my job and that I didn't notice it until past five in the morning. What was I thinking?

But this first incident with Chris, during which he harassed me publicly and actually told me to do my job wrongly, meant only one thing: Start typing up my resume.

Oh, one more thing: The next time I worked Paper Goods and Chemicals, I told the smarmy cousins with whom Scott loved to chat until the wee hours of the morning that I had to follow manager's orders and do my job incorrectly, meaning not face off the shelves so they looked like a redneck's smile. They insisted I do it the right way and I said, "Well, you weren't here that night, but Chris told me that I was a freight handler and that it wasn't my job to face the shelves off. You know better, I know better, and everyone here knows better except for Chris. If you don't believe me, ask Charlene. She was here."

Of course, they did ask her. As expected, the cunt denied the conversation even took place. But the smarmy twins told me to do my job correctly, anyway, despite knowing the uncomfortable position it put me in.

One of the few good things about working the graveyard shift, besides the extra $1.50 an hour, was not having to deal with customers. Still, during that 30 minute overlap between the time the store opened and my quitting time, waiting on a customer allowed me to escape the inevitable drudgery of collecting the cardboard boxes and crushing them in the impactor, or stocking freight until the last minute.

The funny thing is, if the mismanagement misses you (and they always will), and they don't see you actually waiting on that customer, they automatically assume that you've been fucking off and playing with yourself in the bathroom. You have to virtually tackle that customer in the parking lot, drag them back with a subpeona, and have videotaped evidence that you were in the vicinity of the customer while they were in the store. Even then, it's an uphill battle trying to vindicate yourself from charges of "poor job performance."

A word about "Poor Job Performance":

In a way, we still retain the Puritan work ethic. A man is what he does and he is the scum of society if he doesn't put himself into an early grave working his inexorable way into the poor house. Yet, this attitude stops short of actual performance where each worker is personally concerned. The Japanese once said years ago that American workers were the laziest on the planet and up to a point I have to agree with them. They must have been touring a Wal-Mart and watching the mismanagement.

Therefore, when a Wal-Mart or a Home Depot wants to fire someone for reasons other than the given one (I've been fired from both for identical excuses), the given reason is invariably "poor job performance." It's like a Studs Terkel version of THE SCARLET LETTER, where the disgraced employee leaves the Wal-Mart in tears, followed by three or four members of mismanagement every step of the way between their locker and the front door, a huge red PJP stamped across their forehead.

There is nothing more unforgivable, more distasteful, more scandalous, more unsavory, than being fired for "poor job performance", say the mismanagement team at the snack bar while the day openers are pounding on the door trying to get in and punch in on time so they don't get fired for "poor job performance."

A few things about Wal-Mart and Home Depot of which gentiles may be unaware:

For example: Wal-Mart's "ten foot tall" attitude, which always made me think of Robert Wadlow in a tiny blue vest, isn't predicated so much on providing customer service as it is a savvy attempt to prevent shoplifting. If several dozen associates get within ten feet of a customer and harass him every ten seconds with an artificial, "Hi, may I help you find something?", it's supposed to provide a deterrent to anyone interested in making off with something. So much for valuing the customer.

Try buying something of any real worth at Electronics. They have to call ahead on the PA system to anyone who may actually be concerned that some theft may be about to take place that you're on your way with this piece of electronic equipment that already has a damned sticker on it proving ownership. It's like trying to leave a nuclear silo.

Home Depot tells you to actually follow "suspicious-looking" customers and Wal-Mart isn't too far from encouraging its associates to do the same thing. Oddly enough, though, it never makes for a convincing excuse when you're trying to explain where you've been for the past 15 or 20 minutes. "I was following that old lady over there in Housewears. She looks suspicious. I'm telling you, there are thieves everywhere !"

Fun Things To Do At Wal-Mart:

11) Go to the photo lab and ask the cashier if your pictures of their kids are ready.

10) Dial 187 (the PA system code), and urgently call in a nonexisting code. (For example; "Attention all associates! Code Zulu. I repeat, Code Zulu. Please respond ASAP.")

9) Switch the SKU and bar code tags so people have to pay $79.95 for a block of Dial soap or get away with paying $4.99 for a four head VCR.

8) Collect all the items without price tags, bar codes, or SKU #'s and bring them all to the register two minutes before closing time, loudly complaining about how "Wal-Mart never prices just the things (you) want to buy."

7) Change the price signs so that prices really fall, like removing the 2 so that entertainment center that weighs slightly less than a Fiat Spyder now goes for $99. They'd have to honor it or be up on charges of false advertising.

6) If you're a guy, bring ladies lingerie in with you to the changing room and ask the old ladies working there if that teddy makes you look fat.

5) Look admiringly at the shotguns and ask the associate in Sporting Goods if there's any way you could take it to a political rally to try it out.

4) Bring adult videos in with you and leave them with the other videos in Electronics. Better yet, substitute the porno videos for the workout tapes by putting the porn in the boxes.

3) Bring in a syringe or a compass and puncture the bottom of every quart of motor oil and antifreeze that you see in Automotive. This is especially irritating when the target is tire sidewalls.

2) Go to the pharmacy and ask if they have any free samples. "Well, Sam's gives away free samples in the food section."

1) Go to Stationary and scribble obscene messages in the Bibles.

If you have any Wal-Mart horror stories of your own, write me. My email address is Crawman2@Yahoo.com

Tell me your experience and I'll put it on another page.

Check out this hilarious page just sent to me by a former Wal-Mart manager!

Ever wonder how those marvelously sneaky Wal-Mart Mystery shoppers do their jobs undetected?

Click here to see how well Wally World regards about your safety and dignity.

walmartsucks.com 'Nuff said.

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