Wal-Mart

[Tony]

I read this article yesterday, it describes the atrocious and humiliating conditions subjected to wal-mart employees. I think its a disgrace.


http://www.motherjones.com/news/feat...ma_276_01.html

Quote:

Jennifer McLaughlin is 22, has a baby, drives a truck, wears wide-leg jeans and spiky plastic chokers, dyes her hair dark red, and works at Wal-Mart. The store in Paris, Texas -- Wal-Mart Supercenter #148 -- is just down the road from the modest apartment complex where McLaughlin lives with her boyfriend and her one-year-old son; five days a week she drives to the store, puts on a blue vest with "How May I Help You?" emblazoned across the back, and clocks in. Some days she works in the Garden Center and some days in the toy department. The pace is frenetic, even by the normally fast-paced standards of retailing; often, it seems, there simply aren't enough people around to get the job done. On a given shift McLaughlin might man a register, hop on a mechanical lift to retrieve something from a high shelf, catch fish from a tank, run over to another department to help locate an item, restock the shelves, dust off the bike racks, or field questions about potting soil and lawn mowers. "It's stressful," she says. "They push you to the limit. They just want to see how much they can get away with without having to hire someone else."

[pgwenthold]

Those bastards probably don't even give her time to read the internet!

[Crossbow]

It sounds like she is getting the typical treatment that one would get at just any retail service job.


It is not news to me because I did this sort of work for a few years myself and I did not like it!

[Samus]

A co-worker's wife worked at Wal-Mart for a while, she pretty much got treated like dirt, too. Hey, when you hire incompetent management, you end up with employees being treated bad.

Regardless, I bet that 22-year-old could find another job if she really wanted to. I can only sympathize to a certain point. If she does nothing to improve her circumstances (in other words, she's just whining and waiting for someone else to help her), well, I can't feel sorry for her.

That said, I would not want to work at Wal-Mart. I did McDonalds for 2 1/2 years, and that was quite enough for me. I much prefer the life of an office pouge, thank you very much!

[Wile E. Coyote]

The article also mentions Wal-Mart's action against the formation of unions as being unethical or just .. evil, I guess.

I was in a union for a grocery store that I worked for as a teenager and in college, and I came to the conclusion that unions are bad for just about everyone involved (for retail industries).

Without benefits, I paid about $300 a year for union dues, and for this I was guaranteed a $.05/hr raise every year. For what I was able to work, this was a net loss.

Unions tend to be leeches that occassionally help employees by providing legal support.

Sorry for the rant. I get a little touchy about unions, obviously.

It seems the girl in the story should not expect so much from an unskilled labor position.

[Agammamon]

If she studied a little harder in school she would realize that she's experiencing a little thing called capatalism. It's all about supply and demand. As long as Walmart can find large numbers of unskilled labor to man its stores, it can afford to treat them poorly.

[kourama]

I worked as a stock boy in a pharmacy for a coupla years before university. I got a degree & got a nice little engineering job. 10 years later I visit the pharmacy and to me complete shock almost all the same people I used to work with were still there.

I mean, damn! Don't you want to do anything better with your life?

As a side note I was a horrible stock boy. There were a few complaints from customers and fellow employees, but apparently I was one of the few guys who wasn't stealing anything...