How Dare They?
“I’d been working at this store as a cashier since October. Christmas Eve rolled around, and thank God I wasn’t scheduled to work. Cue phone call from the manager asking why I hadn’t come in yet that day.
Me: ‘I’m not on the schedule?’
Manager: ‘Yes you are.’
Me: ‘I’m not coming in. I wasn’t on the schedule.’
The next day I worked was the day after Boxing Day. I went and looked at the schedule, and lo-and-behold, someone wrote that I was supposed to work… in pencil.
I quit shortly after.”
Code Brown
“Last summer, I frequently visited my best friend who worked at the technology counter thing at Walmart.
One day when I was there someone took the biggest, steamiest crap I’ve ever seen in my life in the middle of the toy aisle. Someone pushed a cart through it, and it smeared everywhere. My buddy called in a code brown on his walkie-talkie, trying to be a smart aleck. Code brown means hostage situation.
Hilarity ensued.”
Sort Of A Sad Story
“There was this older lady that came in every day and she would kind of attach herself to an employee (usually the same one), and follow them around just talking to them about their day, her day, all kinds of stuff. As soon as I started at Walmart, she attached herself to me. I actually got to know her pretty well. She didn’t drive and walked about 20 miles to get to Walmart each day, just because she had nothing else to do and was lonely (her words). She had seven cats and three pugs. She lived in a house with no floors and no electricity (a co-worker who lived near her verified this). I’m pretty sure she didn’t have running water, either, just because of obvious hygiene issues. She also very obviously had some kind of mental issues.
What was even sadder is that a lot of my co-workers would make fun of her to her face, but she didn’t understand what they were doing. I thought it was really messed up. I felt bad for her, so whenever I had time I would stop and talk to her. It got to the point where she would call the store looking for me on the days she didn’t come in.
I probably could have contacted some kind of community service, but honestly…she seemed so happy, and I know she ate because I saw her grocery shopping all the time. I moved about a year ago and haven’t heard anything about her since.
I didn’t know Adult Protective Services existed at the time, but I wish I had. Funnily enough, because I’m in school to be a social worker and she’s actually part of the reason why.”
Workman’s Compensation, Alright
“I sprained my back moving product in the back. At first, I thought it was a pulled muscle, and walked towards the pharmacy to try and buy a heating pad and some Tylenol.
I made it to jewelry, barely keeping conscious from the pain. I asked my coworker to call management and let them know I had hurt myself pretty badly and needed to go to the hospital. Management told her to have me go to the back office to fill out paperwork. I blacked out twice going back and was yelled at for taking so long. I ended up being out for a month and a half for the injury and got a whopping $24 in workman’s compensation because the second I got hurt, my hours were reduced to one hour a week.
I hate Walmart.”
What Does This Even Mean?
“A friend of mine was working part-time at Walmart – he’d been there for over a year, was working any and all positions/shifts they threw at him so he could try to provide for his wife and (unexpected) new baby.
He started to apply for any and all full-time positions as they needed the benefits. One day management took him aside and told him this was ‘not the Walmart way,’ and he needed to make a plan with steps on how to get to a particular position.
Apparently, ‘anything full time’ is not okay, Walmart wants to help you achieve your (specific) goals.”
Loads Of Cat Litter
“I worked for Walmart 11 years ago for a whopping total of 8 months. I worked the overnight shift as an overnight stocker for Department 8 (Pets). The store I worked at had just gotten brand new high rise shelves installed. They were said to be able to hold over a ton. Well, one night after getting all my regular freight stocked and the overstock put into the bins, my bosses had me pull eight pallets of Arm & Hammer cat litter. The boxes had an extra 10 pounds inside, making them nearly 35 or so pounds apiece. They wanted all of those on the high risers. I asked if they were sure the shelves would be able to handle all that weight. I threw a fit about it because I knew I was in the right for being worried. Other department managers who were there also sided with me. They watched over the next couple of hours as I carefully did my job. As I was putting the final 12 boxes on the bottom shelf, I heard a cracking and tearing sound, and next thing I know, I’m buried underneath all of the cat litter that had caused the shelve to collapse.
Everybody in the store heard it happen, and everybody was explicitly told NOT to dial 911 or anything. Forget that! After getting all my blood cleaned from my face and cuts patched up, I called my uncle’s then time girlfriend who was a lawyer, told her what had just occurred, and what the upper management is attempting to do.
As of today, I still haven’t spent all the money I received as a result of going to court over it.”
“Take Them Back”
“A woman came in with some panties and said they didn’t fit and she wanted to return them for cash because she had already bought the correct size elsewhere. She had a receipt and plopped a Walmart bag down on the counter. Inside this bag were six crusty crotched, crap stained panties that were a biohazard from six feet away.
I did not touch them. I paged the manager on duty, and he told me to just TAKE THEM BACK despite being very nasty. I processed the return, and she happily left the store with her $8.”
Down Goes The Cereal Display
“I worked in grocery as a stocker. We had just finished a cereal display near the front of the store compiled of about 100 boxes.
In came an older lady, probably in her 60s, driving one of the electric carts. She was looking dead-on at the display and promptly rams into the thing. Boxes went everywhere, and she started apologizing over and over and explained that she was legally blind. A customer that was nearby and saw everything asked her how she drove here if she was blind.
She responded by quickly turning around and leaving the store.”
Never Look Back
“I was working at Walmart at the beginning of this year and aside from weird older men hitting on me, it wasn’t that bad. A few weeks before the minimum pay was raised, they decided I needed a new position in the store. I was told that I was great with people and needed to be out helping customers as opposed to checking. Sales associates get paid less than cashiers. They told me that since it was a promotion for me that they would let me keep the cashier pay instead of lowering me to sales pay. I agreed to the job for that reason (plus the new job was full time).
A week later they took me to sign the papers for the job switch, and the manager got to the pay part. He said, ‘I know we told you that you could keep the same pay, but it’s just easier to make it the same as everyone else’s. Besides, everyone’s pay is going up in a few weeks anyway.’ So I just agreed, and though whatever because, I was still going to be making more. Then my hours started to get cut. I agreed to 40 hours. I was cut down to 25. My manager said he messed up the schedule on accident and would fix it. It continued happening every week.
I finally got so frustrated I just left one day and never came back.”
Cooler Chronicles
“There was black mold in the dairy cooler.
And I don’t mean just a little patch. I mean all the way along the yogurt wall. The manager who was asked to clean it claimed he did.
So naturally, management went to check his work. He hadn’t even touched it.
They ended up having to stand in there watching him disinfect the cooler from top to bottom. This was a well-known substance abuser, and it was too gross for HIM.
A co-worker witnessed one of the meat department workers from the day shift take a piece of meat that was almost green out of claims and put it back on the shelf.
On top of that, for a good three months, you could smell the expired meat from outside the meat cooler.”
‘He Was Convulsing On The Floor’
“I was still working the customer service counter, and we had this guy roll in with a large stereo system box on top of a shopping cart. This guy pushing the cart was thin, sweating, and quite obviously on something. I knew it was going to go badly.
There’s a policy at Walmart, or the one that I worked at anyway, that electronics must be cleared by someone from that department before we accept any returns. I paged electronics to the front of the store, and as we were waiting, the guy with the return began to sway and lost the little bit of color he had. With this, I had a gut feeling that this was about to go badly, so I paged security too. Security and electronics arrived around the same time, and as they began to open the box, this guy went down and started convulsing on the floor.
Security called 911, and I used another phone to page the manager. Well, the manager arrived and decided that it simply would not do to have a customer convulsing on the floor for everyone to see, so he told security to help him move the guy to the back office. They couldn’t move him until he stopped seizing, and once he did, they sat his unconscious body in the office chair and wheeled him back. Emergency medical technicians arrived a few minutes later, and they were not amused that he was moved. They scooped and ran with the guy.
When we opened the boxes finally, they were full of rocks. There was nothing in the boxes to return.”
A Particular Soul-Sucking Feeling
“My biggest pet peeve was people coming through the express lane with 800,000 items in their cart. Middle-aged women were the primary culprits. I don’t know why. I guess, they had some weird sense of entitlement.
There was this one lady who could tell I was annoyed. I didn’t say anything, but she kept trying to have a conversation with me, and I kept giving her short, one word answers. At one point she was like ‘DO YOU HAVE A PROBLEM WITH ME OR SOMETHING?!?!’ And I was like ‘Well, it does say 20 items or less…we have very little counter space here.’ She said, ‘You’re the most hateful person I’ve ever met.’ Which must be an exaggeration, because I never said anything really rude to her, other than to answer the question she asked. I’m surprised she didn’t call a manager.
Some dude pounded his fist on the counter as hard as he could and screamed ‘COME ON MAN, HURRY UP!’ I was trying to unroll a roll of dimes to give him his change. He was buying corn dogs from the deli place.
I also had a guy throw his smokes at me because they were the wrong ones. I laid the box on the counter, he picked them up, and threw them at me, hitting me in the chest and said: ‘I SAID GOLD, MORON.’
Those were just isolated jerks though. It was just the monotony and soul-sucking feeling of dealing with slack-jawed idiots all day long.”
“Walmart Is Disgusting”
“I had recently inherited the toy department. This was about 10 years ago. It had gone without a manager for like six months, and the one they had before that was utterly incompetent and lazy. So the department was a mess.
But I am a toy department professional. I can take any toy department and make it look like somewhere you would want to shop. I’d clean it up, stock it right and work my behind off and fix it and the backroom too. So, it was daunting, but I had a lot of confidence in myself, and I knew I’d be pretty much doing it alone because Walmart doesn’t give a crap about toys. But I figured if everyone just left me alone, and let me work my department, it would be fine.
So here’s what happened:
I decided the first thing I wanted to do was physically clean the place up. There was overstock everywhere, and the bike rack and power wheels rack were just a dumping ground for any crap you can imagine. Power wheels are the big electric ride on toys.
It takes me DAYS, but I finally got the power wheels display cleaned up, and I could start moving the power wheels boxes themselves around back to where they were supposed to be. So, I grabbed one, and it sounds all…rattly. I thought maybe some other toy had fallen in or a bag of bolts inside the box had busted. But then as I moved the box I saw there was this wet streak where I was moving the box, and there was a hole in the corner. These things run from $75 to $300, and this is not what I wanted to see an expensive item.
Oh no, I think. Mice.
Well, no sooner did I have that thought did two mice come bursting out of the hole and go sliding across the tile floor. I screamed and jumped back and recompose myself.
I pushed the box some more, and it sounded like a darn rain stick. It’s was all ‘psssssshhhhh.’ And I was like, ‘what the heck is going on in this box?’
Then I think, well forget it; I have to get it off the sales floor because we can’t sell it in this condition and I don’t want to break open this box on the sales floor because I don’t want customers seeing whatever is in here.
I got a cart and tried to load the box. The bottom of the box gave way, and mouse poop just cascaded out. Bits of paper, liquid, It was the most wretched crap I had ever seen. Every time I moved the box, it was just…feces everywhere.
I was about to hurl at this point, and I get the stupid box onto my cart, grab my PPE (personal protective equipment) and clean out of the shelf – the floor – the air – my hands – everything.
Anyway, I take the stupid box to the back. And go to the area we took damaged goods and told the woman there that I was throwing this thing out and explained to her what was going on with it. I told her to please mark it down but don’t touch it.
The woman began to threw a fit and said that needed to talk to the manager. So we waited, and the manager eventually came and decided that what we needed to do was open the box and ‘wash’ the merchandise. I said no way. These items were for children and were completely filthy and that I wasn’t touching anything. It wasn’t safe or sanitary, and no one should have had to clean that thing.
The manager said ‘fine, leave it’ and we’ll get rid of it as soon as possible. I was thankful and went back to work.
The next day that filthy box was back on the sales floor. I raged. Threw it back on the cart and took it back again. Mouse crap was still falling out of it too.
The woman working in the back said that the manager said we couldn’t mark it down and we definitely couldn’t throw it away and that we can just try to sell it as is. Uh, no. That woman and I got into an actual screaming match. Why couldn’t she see that a toy filled with rat discharge was NOT SAFE? She started crying, and I was fuming. The store manager came by and said that he told a maintenance guy to clean the box up and that he was sorry it looked like he didn’t do an excellent job.
I didn’t care how good of a job he did. I wanted that thing GONE. Like, if it were my department, I was leaving, and I would never come back because I thought it was sick, Walmart was disgusting, and I couldn’t even believe I had to have that argument. He said leaving was my choice, but he’d have the item cleaned up ‘properly’ by this afternoon.
So I sliced open the end of the box (they had retaped with actual mouse crap in the tape!) and stuck my hand in and yanked the whole thing out.
It nearly fell over. Not only was it filled with crap but it was a HUGE nest, and there were corpses all over the thing, and all over the floor and dead mouse babies stuck to the inside flap of the cardboard.
GAG.
The store manager looked disgusted, and got on his walkie-talkie and called the bike assembler. The guy arrives and says clean it and sell it as a display. The bike builder looked like he was about to faint.
I said ‘I’m done, bye bye,’ and I left. I didn’t know what to do. I thought about calling corporate, the news, the Health Department.
But what I did was go home and cry The next day, I ended up going to work at whatever time I felt like it. I clocked in and went to toys, and there’s that POWER WHEEL. I don’t know how long the poor assembler worked on that. But it did look a million percent better. But I didn’t care. I dragged that thing straight to the compactor, but it wouldn’t fit, so I had to rip the wheels and mirrors off to cram it in. I was back there raging at the compacter for like 40 minutes. I took the battery out and took it to automotive to recycle and decided if they fire me, then so be it.
Everyone in the store practically saw me the past three days fighting about this stupid toy with management. Everyone saw me throw a piece o ‘merchandise’ in the garbage (which was an instant termination by the way).
No one ever repeated a word about it, except the store manager who came by and said, ‘where did you end up putting that display?’ I said, ‘in the garbage.’ Boy, he fumed. He just turned around and walked away.
I did turn that toy department around, got our pest control guys in (thanks to an assistant manager who made the call, since department managers couldn’t do that) and rocked the heck out of that department for several years. I won some awards for sales and improvement, and no one questioned me again, and luckily I never had another problem remotely like that again. The store manager was demoted and moved to another store soon after.”