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Since 2008 – Progress Through Politics

Confessions of a Retail Worker: Voices from the Street ..Redux

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Hi everyone! Great place you have here. Love the coffee. Let me tell you a bit about my life and work. The best way to do that might be to utilize the intro piece I had at a different place. 🙂 So here it is.

Let me tell you a bit about my workplace.

I do manual labor in retail. (Note: Some details here are deliberately changed to obfuscate my workplace. Because the last thing I want to do is be unemployed right now, but all of these things about the workplace have actually happened  either to my coworkers or myself.)

Our work day is challenging. One of my coworkers cries and hides in a stockroom for the entire break period. Another had a nervous breakdown and is in therapy because the stress of the work got to him. A third co-worker who is now switched to On-Call, has lost their home and moved in with the newly married adult child. Another was out on official leave, because OSHA compliance is a joke and he was injured very severely. Our stock rooms and our dock areas have never been painted, much less heated or air conditioned and all environmental controls, including lights are controlled by computers out of state. You don’t know fun until you’re trying to unload stock and the lights go out mid-lift. The fire department actually came out once and made Retail Store hire an electrician so that our emergency lights would work. Yay for fire departments!

There’s no middle class workers here at my Retail Store. Well, there might be, but I’ve never met them. There’s us, some salespeople who are fired if they don’t make quota (lots of turnover there), and Senior Management of Retail Store. If we have a work problem we can’t resolve, we go to someone with the title of Vice President. We’ve never met anyone from Human Resources, because Human Resources is run out of another state. Our performance review is based on a computer generated set of statistics that have absolutely no relation to how effective we are. For example, one of my coworkers (I’ll call him “Dude”) had a performance review a couple years back that commended him for his highly productive work in spring of 2008, but criticized him for his lack of efficiency during the holiday season of 2008.

Difficulty: Dude wasn’t hired until 2009.

It’s a fireable offense to share our performance reviews and raises, if any, with each other but Dude thought this particular one was so hysterically funny that he did share it. Even the VP had a laugh and said “I don’t control how the performance reviews are done.”

Every morning Vice President stands by the employee entrance to let us peons in the store. We usually share fun stories about how many rodents we saw the previous day and or how many dead rodents we stepped on by accident when the Fire Drill was called.

Ah, yes. The Fire Drill. This is Senior Management’s way of telling us They Care About Us and Do Not Want Us to Die in A Fire.

Our fire drill requires us to meet at Popular Coffee Shop in the neighborhood when we evacuate. Senior Management take attendance, and also take turns popping in for Fancy Coffee Drinks that cost more than we earn in an hour. Usually a few of us Peons will go in to buy a large coffee with two espresso shots. Any of us Peons buying  “One Large Coffee” when we’re there as a part of Fire Drill is served exceptionally well by the owner. The Peon purchaser ordering a simple iced coffee will receive: A very large iced coffee usually used for sodas, four empty cups, a cup of milk “for creamer”, enough sugar to excite a class of children, and a zillion napkins. The coffee shop owner will ultimately charge Peon only for “One Large Coffee”. That way, it can be shared among us at a price we can manage. Senior Management  gets a glare from this owner, and a Fancy Coffee. Senior Management doesn’t notice because they don’t pay attention to service people. But I tell you, we notice it.

…..

So that was my introductory post about retail. Hasn’t changed much, unfortunately.


Categories: Uncategorized.

/ 69 Comments

69 comments

  2. marrakesh

    most notable with its resemblance to John Boehner’s tan.

    Good to see you in action again, hope all is well with you.

    btw, is “Fierce” good? The opposite of ‘Fail’, I hope.

  3. canadian gal

    Quite a powerful diary. I know retail sucks here in Canada as well, but not this much. Employee reviews out of a can? I guess this explains why so many American companies hadn’t come here though. Until recently that is.

    Minimum wage In Ontario is $10.25 which really who can live on, and I was just shocked when I googled levels in the US. HUGE ranges from None (Alabama) to $9.19 (Washington)… Crazy.  

  7. HappyinVT

    Although the boss goes the long way around to his car just so he doesn’t have to meet the employees on the way out.  We didn’t get the Thanksgiving turkeys we usually get but management was taken to lunch, given holiday cards and framed group photos of employees.  Apparently I’m good enough to be in the picture (won employee of the month at the function at which the photo was taken) but I’m not good enough to get a copy.

    But I’m so happy to have a job.  ::eyeroll::

  8. pittiepat

    and went to work for a well-known bookstore chain, alas now defunct.  I was the early person, arriving about 6 am to prepare register drawers and do the bank deposit.  If I was duty manager I also had to receive deliveries of book pallets.  For some reason the team responsible for getting product sorted and onto the sales floor had not done their job and when that mornings delivery arrived, I was the only person in the store so I refused it because there wasn’t an empty square inch in the warehouse.  WELL, the roof damned near fell on my head.  My refusal landed on the CEO’s desk!  Not my fault there was no room but was expected to accept the delivery anyway.  No one could ever tell me what I was supposed to do with it.  Put it in the parking lot, I guess.  I love it when rules are made by management who hasn’t a clue about what is actually required.  Made me nuts.

  9. Actbriniel

    I was a huge fan of your work at dk and was so sad when all of your great work was deleted.  I am so happy to know you kept copies and hope you share them here.  

  10. Moozmuse

    I’m looking forward to reading your posts again, too – even though I tried to read them all.

    xoxoxox

    aka translatorpro

  11. Born in NOLA

    I read your diaries at GOS and was very sad when you were pushed out. I’ve often wondered how you’re doing and if things have improved. It’s good to hear you found a farmer’s market.

  12. mideedah

    We are “moosacks”, I am looking forward to your diaries. I am blue collar also, and I agree that generally, management doesn’t have a clue as to how long a task takes, or how to do it.

  13. Moozmuse

    Lightbulb, please tell us more about the farmer’s market you have come across, or will you be writing a separate diary about it?

  14. 1864 House

    So happy to see you here and am looking forward to repeats of old and some new diaries.

    I haven’t worked retail since I was a teen, but my kids and “adopted” kids have more recently.

    One of my adopted kids had an incident last year with the most-well-know chain store. She worked night shift so she could attend college. She worked in produce and there was a guy who worked in dairy (connecting back rooms) who sexually harassed her. It moved from verbal to physical and one night she called me in the middle of the night on the verge of hysteria and I went down to talk to her manager. She was sobbing and her manager refused to talk to me. She asked to please be allowed to go home and was told she could but it would be marked as an unexcused absence. I drove her home.

    She was told to toughen up. She asked if she could be please not be scheduled the same nights her harasser worked and was told they would try but couldn’t promise. A couple of weeks later she was fired for being a scheduling problem.

    My youngest worked retail during college on the sales floor and was continually scheduled on her “permanent unavailable” times for classes/labs. She worked at the jewelry counter at a major retailer and was the top salesperson by far, even as a PT’er. Being conscientious, she skipped classes and labs for a couple of weeks then had to quit. Their total disregard for her legitimate needs killed their golden goose.

    And people think your diaries are fiction?  

  15. sricki

    It was deleted for blatant disregard of our Posting Guidelines. Unfortunately, all replies to the comment were removed as well. We do not tolerate flagrant abuse of our hospitality.

    In reply to the deleted comment was the following from Brit that we feel is important to remain seen:

    Why bother following Lightbulb, registering, and making this comment: why not leave and make others (who seem to know him better) make their own judgement

    Your claim is extraordinary, and needs extraordinary evidence to be sustained. In the absence of that it, it’s just a fly by night hit-job.

    We don’t tolerate content free invective on the Moose. If you’ve got a case (as Rasheverak had with Linfar many moons ago here) you’ve got to make it much better than this.

    In the absence of that, it’s just a nasty hit job

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