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Here in Canada, our postal codes are letter-number-letter number-letter-number. V1F 4S9, that kind of thing. I got so fed up with people being angry and suspicious over me asking their postal code, I just started feeding the system a very specific code everytime. After the program was done, our store manager was furious and lambasted us in a morning meeting. He had no idea who did it, but all he knew is that apparently Santa did all his shopping at our Walmart. Santa's postal code, by the way, is H0H 0H0. 
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Dec 2, 2012 18:20
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I worked at Walmart this past year and people do not understand price-matching at all. No, sir, you can't bring in a flyer for someone else's angus steaks and expect us to price match, it doesn't work that way. Exact items only, I don't care. No, you can't just take two of the most expensive chickens we have and expect to get them for $14 together because Metro is doing that with their cheap-rear end chickens, thanks. Also, management did not understand the idea of having a fridge at courtesy to store the perishable goods in until someone came to pick it up. When I brought it up, I was told such loss was already accounted for in the margins, which is fair but still really loving dumb when you're the guy filling the throws bins everyday with trays of meat in part because the meat would be left up front until the meat/dairy/deli/frozen bucket was full, which could be hours of food being room temperature depending on the day. I was also told to hustle to pick up the perishable goods if I was so bothered by it, but that's obviously not always an option. Working the meat department was sickening. We would fill 4-8 240L bins weekly with meat throws. That's a lot of meat. On a particularly bad day, I filled two of those bins myself. I did nothing else for eight hours, just cut open packages and tossed the contents in. Bacon, roasts, sandwich meat, ground beef, ground chicken, ground turkey, steaks, pork chops, racks of rib, ham hocks, fish, shrimp, it was the absolute nadir of my days at that store. Managers would come in and be agog at how much crap there was, assuming a cooler had broken down, and all I could say was no, the coolers are all fine, but no one did any throws over the weekend because y'all forbid part-timers from having telxon access. The only nice part about throws was when a bag of whole fish thawed out and I could flop the fishes around and make myself laugh.
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Dec 11, 2012 16:50
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ijii posted:Wow, that's embarrassing. No, what's embarassing is my store had to throw out the entire contents of the big cooler in the back one day. $52,000 gone. 
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Dec 12, 2012 04:18
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ijii posted:Pretty sad if that was preventable. If that was because of a cooler breakdown, too bad no one moved the product to another department's cooler. That number would send some heads rolling. I had been told for my entire tenure there that raw meat was not allowed in the dairy or produce coolers because of the risk of cross-contamination. Okay, fair enough, but we didn't butcher anything, it came prepackaged and wrapped, safe as a box of hot dogs of sliced salami. All we should have had to do was throw all the racks on a skid, wrap it, and pull it through to dairy. But, instead, $52,000 of stock was allowed (by management) to go to waste so of course the hourly guys working that day were coached. And when the yearly bonus was cancelled, guess which department got blamed for it 
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Dec 12, 2012 06:13
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Sankis posted:I get this all the time at a grocery store. I haven't had anything awful like what you guys are describing. The amount of PLU numbers I have memorized is distressing. My memory is theoretically limited! I don't need to know all these dumb numbers for the rest of my life. I was dating a cashier from Walmart Canada a while back and we did her groceries at Loblaws one day. Turns out all the PLU codes from produce are exactly the same, so the self-serve checkout became a hurricane of us running through it. I mean, it makes sense that the same produce suppliers would just use the same PLU between stores, but I guess it had just never occured to either of us until she typed in the codes by habit to get some bananas and cabbage and everything worked out proper.
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Dec 14, 2012 06:44
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Retail is awful enough without stacking insane boredom on top of it. At least when you're busy you can pretend your job has meaning and isn't sucking the life out of you.
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Dec 15, 2012 15:07
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The Walmart I was working at this year has been open non-stop since last week. I have no idea if it's worth it, it sure isn't to the employees.
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Dec 22, 2012 00:34
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Darth Freddy posted:I don't have any direct experience with larger retail stores but I can imagine there is a lot of work to do "in the back". Hahaha At my superstore, the assistants never did a thing, it was all delegation to a ridiculous degree. Nope, can't pull a skid of toilet paper to the comp rail, better disrupt the undermanned unloading team to do it instead. Nope, can't log into the telxons to check if we have something, better get someone else from a different area to do that and ultimately spend tens of minutes having something done when it could have been done in two minutes. Nope, can't deal with customers on the floor, better hide out in the office and not answer the phone. The only thing the management at my store ever did in the back was yell.
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Dec 31, 2012 15:03
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Is that the thing where some of your uterine lining has escaped into your body elsewhere, like your joints and such? Because that sounds objectively horrific, yet I had never heard of it until one of my friends went in for surgery to excise some of the extra tissue.
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Jan 5, 2013 03:48
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Some people are just derpy about money and don't think about what the cashier may have in their drawer. I was working cash one day, years back, and at Walmart you don't have to ask the cashier to add on money for cashback like you do at some places, you can just do it on the machine yourself and drat the torpedoes. So this lady buys a pack of gum or something and my drawer pops open; the register says I owe her $200, the maximum you can cashback per transaction. It is 8:05 AM. The store had literally just opened five minutes previous. These tills only contain $200 at open. I tell her I don't have that much in the till and will have to call a CSM to bring the money to me because there's only $200 in the till at all. She says just to give her the money I have, that's fine. I pop the tray out the drawer so she can see the rolls of nickles, handful of quarters and dimes, assorted bills. She immediately gets huffy and bitchy about it. This, she tells me, is an outrage and when her money arrives she will tell the CSM what a horrible cashier I am to make her wait around like this, she will have my job, etc etc. I hop on the phone, back in the day when you could phone the CSM directly.  "I need a $200 loan on 5." "" "I got cashbacked on a pack of gum." "Fucks' sake, hang on..."While we wait, the woman glares at me and sighs loudly, looks at her watch, taps her foot, all the theatrical bullshit people do. After a few minutes of dicking around with the cash office, the CSM shows up with my money, hands it to me, I hand it to the customer who then promptly tries to chew me out to the CSM. The CSM immediately turns around and she's pissed. "We have an ATM in the store for a reason, ma'am. Just because the debit lets you cashback $200 doesn't mean you should do it." "But it's Walmart. You should have enough in the till, you make millions of dollars here." "It is eight in the morning. What did you expect? Take your money and have a nice day."At which point the CSM followed the woman out of the store, glaring at her the whole way.
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Jan 11, 2013 19:08
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Yeah, cashiering is awful. After my brief stint in 2004, I transferred onto the sales floor asap, got endlessly called to man a till anyway, and when I want back to Walmart in 2011 I went into unloading and kept telling them no when they repeatedly asked me to sign up for cash during the interview process. I feel horrible for cashiers, man, and I go out of my way to be as polite and friendly to them as I can. You can tell the long-term cashiers, too; they tend to be bitter chain-smokers who talk about how they have a bottle of whiskey in the freezer calling their name. That job, it destroys lives, I'm serious.
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Jan 12, 2013 04:35
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Ah, but it's theft, you see, and company policy regarding thieves is probably to call the cops so they can haul that no good thief away to press charges immediately. Thieves will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, after all. 
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Jan 16, 2013 04:55
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I generally refuse to shop with companies that employ me. They gave me money for my toil, I would prefer not to give it immediately back. Here and there is fine, but for the most part I will go out of my way to shop at other retailers. Plus, it's healthy for the economy! 
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Jan 17, 2013 16:12
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Well, presumably it's tied into a chequing account so you can perhaps write cheques from it, or some places may allow you to pay rent via debit. My rental company does, so I can walk right into their office every payday and drop a portion of my rent if I choose.
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Jan 17, 2013 18:22
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A manager one day called me on not being more cheerful when dealing with customers, so I pointed out how I am 6'4", yet every counter in the store is built for people who are ~5'2"-5'11" thus I have a lot of upper back pain from hunching constantly just to do my job. Being tall actually kind of sucks, I'm not going to lie.
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Jan 17, 2013 20:40
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I had a grocery manager at an IGA I worked for who was loving around with a pallet jack, trying to show how difficult it is to hurt yourself as the pilot because he thought safety was dumb. He stuck his foot beneath the raised pallet, which had a couple layers of bottled water on it, to show that you have to go out of your way to get injured, and then he randomly squeezed the handle and dropped it on his foot.  When he came back from having broken his toes, he was mighty big on safety then, let me tell you. If only he wasn't the owner's little brother, he might have gotten fired for something so stupid. 
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Jan 21, 2013 17:29
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That kind of thing is in every single industry and field. When I worked at a small broadcast company, our tech engineer's troubleshooting method was to just tape the manuals to the racking. I discovered one day I knew more about the audio compressor than he did just because I got bored and read the damned book. That was awkward for both of us.
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Feb 2, 2013 19:47
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Some people just want to watch the world burn.
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Feb 3, 2013 19:22
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I'm working currently at a large chain specializing in arts and crafts. And owls. So many owls. For whatever reason, corporate made policy forbidding non-frameshop part-timers from having shifts longer than five hours, no matter their availability. There's also so many people on payroll that no one gets many hours, since the budgetted shifts have to be spread out across all thirty of us. We are not a big store. We are not a particularly busy store. Somedays, we're expected to make $9000 and we can't even do that. There's no good reason to have so many people on payroll, especially as it ensures no one gets hours worth discussing. But we're always hiring. Meanwhile the counterpoint to that is the abysmal scheduling. Despite having tons of people to schedule, we regularly have days where no one is there. I've shown up for a 2-6 shift and was the only floor person in at all that day. No one called in, they just whoops forgot to put anyone in that slot. On those days, the schedule is usually a cashier from 9-1, their replacement from 1-5, then the closing cashier from 5-9:30, with a floor person floating nebulously around in the midday to cover breaks. There are often gaps between shifts and a manager winds up on cash for an hour until someone else, anyone else, shows up. Sometimes, the opening manager has to close the store as well because they forgot to schedule someone else. It's infuriating. (I hate being on cash, not because of the work or whatever, but because I'm 6'5" and the counter is below my crotch. I hate having to stoop just to do the job, it hurts so bad after a while and none of the managers believe me since they're all at least six inches shorter than I am.) The most common complaints from customers are always "there's no one on the floor, I need help" and "it takes forever to check out!" Well, there's no one on the floor because that's me, and I'm up here on cash so the cashier can eat a sandwich, sit down for a few minutes, whatever. None of our aisles are numbered, so giving directions turns into "keep going past Hello Kitty until you hit the modelling clay, that's where the glue is" and people wander off confused. I asked a long-timer about this, and apparently it's within the past few years that the aisle numbers went away. New policy; having the place be difficult to navigate encourages customers to seek out employees, giving us the chance to interact with (and upsell) them. And it takes so long to check out because our POS is a POS; it's incredibly limited and slow already, with common functions like "quantity" locked out unless a manager overrides, and policy actually tells us to be slow. It's faster to pick the scanner up and pull the trigger to scan; this is against the rules, the scanner must remain in the dock at all times. I don't give a gently caress, so I undock it regularly to keep a brisk pace, and I have had the local rules-knob nag me for doing this. It is maddening to work there. Store-level tasks have been centralized off to district; if a light goes out, we have to call district who will send out a technician within two weeks to fix it. The urinal was non-functional for over six months, because district didn't feel it was enough of a priority to deal with. We use stickers for shelf labels, so to reset a section requires we clean all the shelf fronts, and the only cleaner quick enough for us to use effectively was turpentine. For most of January, I was cleaning shelves with a rag and a bottle of cleaner volatile enough that customers were complaining about the gas leak in the building. Our internal propaganda says we're number one in the arts/crafts sector, and all I can think is "if this is number one, how loving lovely are the other guys?" 
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May 8, 2014 04:52
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Holy poo poo, Michaels went $4B into debt?
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May 8, 2014 18:09
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We're not allowed to have the cleaning supplies in a basket anymore. It's not "5-Star" to easily carry around four spray bottles, a roll of towels, a box of latex gloves, and a bunch of garbage bags. This company deserves to be eaten alive by its creditors
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May 10, 2014 04:29
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KoB posted:Im 6'4". Normies wont ever understand the tall person plight. Don't hold back. This is a safe place, you can use our word for those who are not tall. Mundanes.
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May 14, 2014 13:07
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Not a single sink in my store drains properly any longer. This means the common drain they all connect to is impaired, not any single sink. This is a job for a plumber, most likely. So of course, management is utterly unwilling to do anything beyond buy a bottle of Dran-O and call it a job well done
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May 26, 2014 02:33
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A customer called in today to complain about me! Apparently, I didn't respond when she asked me how I was doing. Clearly, this is an unforgivable breach of conduct which must be brought immediately to the attention of management... an hour later, in the safety of your own home via telephone. Was your cashier perhaps speaking softly and you didn't catch his response? Perhaps you spoke too softly for him to hear? Perhaps absolutely any possible reason at all why you didn't get the warm, personal connection you for some reason expect while obsessing over coupons? No, no, best to file a complaint. A completely baseless, unneccesary complaint which only serves to illustrate the shallow, empty lives of busy-body customers. That'll show 'em, for sure. What's the bbcode for the enormous rolleyes vomitting smaller rolleyes?
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Jun 7, 2014 21:23
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Some moron somewhere in Michaels' corporate hierarchy decided the most rational thing ever would be to have the system automatically flip all the modular addresses to the new modulars whenever said mods are published. Combine this with the horrible idea that modulars can only be reset on certain scheduled days, which everyone goes along with for some nebulous reason, and you get weeks of the scanners telling you utterly wrong information. And, for no reason I can fathom, the planograms and documentation for modulars are not a digital document, they are printed and shipped to the stores. What is wrong with this loving company
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Jun 20, 2014 22:36
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Marchegiana posted:The Michaels POS is a POS. Yeah. I'm not sure who designed it, but they did a horrible, horrible job of it. From the main screen, I have eight or buttons I could push depending on what I want to do, but the only two I'm allowed to push are "regular sale" and "regular return". There's an employee sale button, but we're not supposed to push it; instead, we scan a coupon in regular sale to give employees their discount. There's a gift receipt button which is similarly out of bounds. My managers have told me we don't issue gift receipts anymore, despite the option being there. Speaking of coupons and Michaels, please never shop in a Michaels unless you have come armed to the teeth with coupons. Our markups are so ridiculous that we still make mad bank off you even if you walk up with a "50% off one item" deal. I've seen the cost data in the system, and we'll sell things for $79.99 that we bought for $2.10. My particular store sells a $12 mirror for $124.99. I don't think Michaels has a single loss-leader, like how Walmart would sell Xboxes at a 40% loss because they made all their money on the games. We just charge out the rear end on every single item possible.
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Jun 21, 2014 16:49
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I worked for a guy who actually tried to convince some of us to not ask for raises because it would put us just over the limit of the next tax bracket and thus our takehome would be substantially reduced. People are pretty ignorant about tax brackets, and having those above us deliberately lying to us about it doesn't help much.
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Jul 2, 2014 16:50
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Zerstorung posted:I think I have you beat. My coworkers just scored a majority vote for cutting our entire department's pay by 5% because they think their taxes would be lower enough to make more money from it. You might be able to get acquitted of the forthcoming multiple homicides by claiming it was self-defense.
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Jul 6, 2014 16:47
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Don't overstuff the pegs, Buggiezor. If not I, then someone at your store will loving end you if you do.
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Jul 9, 2014 18:08
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Oh gently caress, the glitter.  For most of December, I swear that poo poo just hung in the air. I could not touch glittery floral junk at all and still go home with my face sparkling like I was at a gay rave. I would brush my hair in the morning and glitter would drift out. It was horrendous.
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Jul 9, 2014 18:42
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Oh, loss prevention. Yes, let's talk about the LP guys. I've known several, and none of them have been what I'd consider well-adjusted. It takes a special breed of bird to pull that job, man. At the Walmart I was at a couple years back, one of our LP guys moonlighted as a bouncer and was really obvious when he'd follow people in the store. He had serial killer eyes and probably would have been more subtle were he wearing a blue vest and nametag. The other guy was a bodybuilder who spent hours watching the cameras and calling phones around the store to tell employees to get to work, and when he did decide to actually work the floor he wore mysteriously tactilol gear, like black cargos bloused into mid-calf boots. In a related story, one day some kids from dairy and produce got together in my meat prep zone and decided it would be a great idea to kick the poo poo out of each other. So they did. And when one kid had to beg out of his shift because he hit his goddamn head on a skid and couldn't stand up without getting dizzy, management installed a camera in the meat prep zone. This camera was subsequently watched constantly, and for months afterwards the phone would ring immediately if anyone from dairy or produce came into the bay for any reason, even legit ones like "fill the mop bucket." One time, bodybuilder eschewed the phone entirely and just burst into the bay to scream at us in person. The dude literally ran across the length of the store to do it, and it was for nothing; the kid from dairy came in to ask me for my help moving stuff. That dude was so blatantly there to watch out for internal loss, he probably should have just worn a peaked cap and a black wool greatcoat. And then someone wrote "friend of the family human being" on the whiteboard, which the camera was not able to see, and boy did bodybuilder launch a loving witchhunt over that
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Jul 16, 2014 04:39
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Someone once gave my name over the phone to a customer; since he wouldn't be around when they called back, he figured it would be easier, I guess? Anyway, said customer calls back, asks for me personally, I pick up, have absolutely no idea what the conversation is about, get yelled at by the customer for being an rear end in a top hat, then wind up with a manager talking to me about my customer service skills
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Jul 20, 2014 12:48
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ijii posted:Good god, whose responsibility would it be to suggest getting a cart? Just a clerk stocking general stuff on the sales floor? I bet anything that the idea behind suggesting a cart is: cart = more stuff = more $$$! You got it. I'm supposed to ask customers who do not have a hand basket if they would like one. This was pitched to me as a way to encourage customers to buy more, because if they have a basket they will want to fill it with goods. That's idiotic. Instead, I offer people baskets if I see them struggling to carry a dozen loving things in the crook of their arm because they didn't think to grab one on their way in. Because that's what a considerate person does.
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Jul 21, 2014 13:19
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Cast_No_Shadow posted:Someone looked at the data and decided that customers that spend the most money usually have carts. Yes, the Supply-Side Retail theorum. If you give everyone the biggest cart you can, they will be compelled to fill it with as much random poo poo as possible. As well, if your store isn't selling as many t-shirts as it used to? Jam the shelves full of t-shirts until they're falling off, this will encourage customers to buy them, obviously. 
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Jul 21, 2014 17:29
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It's fun to blindside someone, however, by telling them how many cents they owe. "Okay, that'll be twenty-three thousand, seven hundred, and sixty-seven cents." ""
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Jul 26, 2014 19:34
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The planogram system at Michael's is dumb as poo poo. Yeah, if you know where a mod actually is, it's not so bad. And perhaps the mod on the shelf is even the same version listed in the inventory system, that's helpful, too. But there's no obvious sense to how the mods are arrayed, so if you don't know where a specific modular is, you're totally hosed unless someone else knows where the product you have goes. I spent nearly twenty minutes yesterday combing scrapbooking for the Journaling 5', because I had never heard of it before. But it was department 15, so it had to be there, somewhere. Going into another Michael's in town is frustrating. No two stores have remotely the same layout, as far as I can tell. Walmarts are all more or less the same, in my experience, but Michael's seems to have this idea of making the shopping experience as frustratingly hard as possible, and extolling that as a virtue.
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Aug 4, 2014 14:41
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Zeth posted:Rumors are flying at big blue and evil about dress code changes. I have heard that t-shirts will soon be verboten, even plain blue ones. This is gonna suck. Walmart Canada's switched a while ago to "black or white only, your shirt must have a collar if you're a man". I had spent years moving out of my goth phase and Walmart dragged my rear end right back into a mono-black wardrobe
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Aug 5, 2014 13:51
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I bought, I think it was a half-dozen donuts or something, and the price came out to $6.49. The provincial lottery is Lotto 6/49. I saw a dark cloud fall over the cashier's face when she rang me up. Dread squeezed her heart as she waited for me to bray like an rear end and comment. I saw my life flash before my eyes as I considered what to say, knowing that one misstep would plunge my soul into the abyss, as surely as the cashier would plunge the Iced Capp machine's blender into my chest 
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Aug 7, 2014 12:35
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EugeneJ posted:"12 PM. LUNCH TIME. NEED TO DROP EVERYTHING AND CONSUME 5000 CALORIES. GO!" It's like society is OCD about meal times. I would see the hordes of Walmart department managers, almost to a man, put off their lunch break until well over halfway through their shifts purely because they didn't want to be eating at 10 in the morning. Sorry, assholes, don't give me loving stink-eye for going on my hour meal break four hours into my eight hour shift; the day started at six, which means I had breakfast at five. No way in hell am I waiting seven hours til noon to have another meal, y'all can get hosed. And then, of course, all these people who haven't eaten in nearly a third of the day are now ravenous, so what do they do? March on into the McDonald's inside the Walmart, get a Double Mac with fries, a large drink, and a McFlurry. They're hungry! 
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Aug 8, 2014 04:48
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 15:58 |
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The Lord Bude posted:You have a McDonald's INSIDE the supermarket? 'murica.txt 'murican_corporations.txt, actually, since I'm Canadian The only good thing about having a McDonald's inside Walmart was being able to grab an apple pie if you wanted. Sometimes, you just need an apple pie with filling so hot it could weaken the structural integrity of steel, and by God, McDonald's is there for you! (there is an actual McDonald's restaurant in the same plaza)
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Aug 8, 2014 14:17
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