I'd to point out the irony of the title comes from one of the ads on the right hand side of the page of Facebook which was displayed as I went to post this very long entry. Life is amusing to say the least.
Before I even begin this very long rant, I’d like to take this time to say that I do appreciate everything my current place of employment has done for me. It is thanks to them for these last three years that I have been able to afford to put food on the table, have a place of my own to live, I can pay off all my bills, and have enough money left over to satisfy all my needs and most of my wants. As far as college students go, financially I’m ahead of most of them and that is without any supplemental income from my parents or legal guardian. I am now making a little over ten dollars an hour thanks to a mixture of being in the right place at the right time (like starting at the company when they were still doing 90 day raises), previous work experience (being hired immediately after being a frozen department manager), and a lot of sheer luck (a substantial cost of living raise when I transferred from a very poor district in Kentucky to Murfreesboro). Even during this recession, I have not gone a single day without having a job, something many people regretfully cannot say. My employer has provided for me and has in fact taken care of me very well.
And it is for that exact reason that I am compelled to write about the problems and inexcusable actions I am seeing them commit.
And those of you who are my coworkers who read this, even though I will inevitably refer indirectly to people that I dislike in this entry, I have enough respect for them as a person not to name them and I will be the first to admit that it is usually not one person who is at fault. Anyone who I mention by name in this entry will be named because of the admiration I have for them both as a person and as a genuine worker. So if you do read your name in this, feel honored, because for what it’s worth I think highly of you.
When I started at Wally World, I was constantly seeing posters of Sam Walton pasted all over the break room filled with some of his most famous quotes. The one that most stuck out in my mind, paraphrased to the best of my ability, was “Listen to your workers; they are the true idea generators.” This was merely three years ago. This was when I first started with the company and from what I had noticed immediately was the best run departments were those who allowed motivated employees manage the department. The less manager involvement the better the departments were ran, even the managers at this relatively small store in Kentucky which due to location was constantly busy thanks to its location on the state line which drew people from Tennessee across it so they could take advantage of Kentucky’s drastically lower sales tax (when I was working there it was 6%, compared to the 9.25% sales tax on food items and the 9.75% on nonfood items we have to pay in Tennessee).
I was working in the best department in the store, dairy. I am not saying that as a matter of opinion, but rather fact. Every single manager: assistant, co-manager, and even the store manager told us in dairy that we were the best run department. We were the department that they knew they wouldn’t have to worry about, in large part thanks to the efforts of myself, Andy, and our department manager Steven who all worked tirelessly to ensure that whatever needed to be done, was done, and on time. We were a self managed unit, almost completely separate from the rest of the store. The only times we were even called to do something out of our normal routines was to help unload our trucks or to answer calls for returns (and since it was a dry county we didn’t have to worry about keg orders like we do in Murfreesboro).
When I transferred to the Murfreesboro store I’m currently stationed at in the late summer of 2007 when I transferred colleges to continue my education at MTSU, I transferred into a store in complete disarray. Once again, that is a statement of fact, not an opinion. This was a store that at the time of my transfer had no set store manager (the assigned one at the time seemed to be on a permanent hiatus); just to keep the store running a manager from one of the nearby stores was having to do double duty by floating to and fro their store and our store. The frozen department for months within my being there had no department manager even. No one in charge knew what to do. I fell back on my days with Food Swine back when I was a department manager and tried to offer my guidance. But being a part time associate who at that time didn’t have the chance to prove myself to everyone else, there was only so much I could do for my own department. It was chaos at its purest form, disorder. Eventually, the dust began to settle. We eventually had a store manager take over the vacant slot and John Hill ended up getting the frozen department manager position. When the dust began to settle, the employees for the most part seemed to become complacent with their jobs once again, the confusion was over.
It was during this time that I transferred back to the dairy department, which was my wish ever since I was forced to go into frozen due to there being no open positions in dairy at the time of my store to store transfer. The dairy department at that time was horribly understaffed. This period marked the first time since my days at Food Lion that I would voluntarily start working ten hour days just to make sure the job was completed. Please note that these ten hour days were not at a manager’s request, but my own personal drive to ensure that the job was done so the next person would not have as much work to do on their own.
At this time, though my department at the time was not so much as affected as other areas of the store, there was a significant problem that takes place in many large corporations where there are simply too many managers. This is not a statement of their skills as a manager, but when you enter into the “too many chiefs, not enough Indians” scenario there comes a point that orders of each leader begin to contradict one another. Miscommunication runs rampant. Jobs are left unfinished or worst finished only to have another manager tell the associates to redo it a certain way. Discontent was running high store wide.
To be continued tomorrow...
Cheers,
Eric Summers
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