Yeah, I worked for WalMart for almost 4 years. They were the longest 4 years of my life. We would start our nights about 10 o'clock at night, in the Subway area, doing stretches and what not...doing a "cheer" for Walmart. The real motivation though was purely of the negative sort. The managers frequently made threats of "accountability", and reminders that we were in an "at will" state; meaning the company could fire us at will, for any reason, and that there were plenty of potential replacements applying for the jobs. Basically, we were expected to work at 110% every single night. Needless to say, morale was rock-bottom.

About the profitability; one of the managers there told us that while Walmart was making a profit things were not well in the company. Most of the profit and expansion was due to overseas stores, and that in the US profits were not very good. He also said that they had recently closed some warehouses and distribution centers in our state, and thinned out some of the management ranks. It became obvious Walmart was not a happy family.

Some of the people in management were ok, but even if they liked you, there wasn't anything they could do for you. From what they old timers said, years ago, if you worked hard, you could get a raise and a promotion to a better job. By the time I started, those things were long past. The corporate heirarchy dictated that the rules be mindlessly and rigidly enforced, whether they made sense or not. They had computer generated printouts outlining how much freight we had to work in each department, and God help you if you didn't reach their holy targets. Naturally, these targets did not take into account the facts on the ground. One night manager, was famous in our store, for being a world-class SOB. Sometimes, he could be reasonable, but when things didn't go well, he would threaten, harass, and demand. He made our lives a living hell. I used to pray he would be transfered to another store (or be hit by a truck), and I'm sure I wasn't the only one. One of our night-shift associates called him Dr. Jeckell.

We had two assistant managers on nights. Sometimes, one of the day managers would come in to help out, or set things up. Nobody really wanted the job, the night managers were the ones that lost the coin toss. Some of the better ones probably would have been reasonable, if it was their store, and they had the latitude, but they didn't. Turnover among the associates was very high.


From my perspective, Walmart made it's own problems. We had between 12 and 18 associates on the night shift, to stock the store. This number was marginal, at best. We might have been able to do ok with this number, but management seemed wholly unable to manage the freight and make rational decisions. We were chronically short of space in recieving, and therefore, extra pallets had to be worked just to consolidate them and free up space. This was a very inefficient way to do things, and we were in a constant state of exhaustion. It only got worse during the holidays. In my opinion, we had just enough people to stock the store, not enough to stock the store, work all the overstock, clean up the store, and pander to corporate whims. They kept saying there was going to be a new system implemented that would eliminate the overstock problem, but whatever changes they were making seemed to aggravate the situation. Having the shelves completely full was a corporate fetish.

We were told, that in the future, we would scan in and out of our departments with our badges, so management would be able to track us every minute to make sure we were "productive". It was as if the suits sat around trying to think of ways to make our jobs harder and more unpleasent.