I graduated high school in 2000, technically I didn’t actually graduate from my high school.. I had missed so much school my senior year, that my principal decided I had to go to the local community college to get my High school equivalency degree, seeing as how I skipped a lot of school.. I just hated the atmosphere of the high school.. I never fit in..
My girlfriend at the time was in the same boat, we skipped together 90% of the time, but for some reason, she was allowed to go to the high school of a neighboring town to make up her credits, and she graduated with the rest of the class..
So I went for my HSED.. I first started attending the community college in the middle of January, I was out by the middle of February, there were plenty of classmates of mine that had gone there for years, and still never graduated. It was a piece of cake for me, I was more than smart enough to graduate, I just didn’t like the teachers at my school, most of the classmates, and especially the administration of the school.. so I graduated 4 months before the rest of my class..
I had been working at Sam’s club my senior year.. so I decided at that point since I was so sick of school, to just work. It may have been a bad idea not to get a college degree, but I had had enough at that point. I continued to work at Sam’s until 2004..
So in 2003, I was in the lowest level management within Sam’s.. I worked in the bakery department in many different capacities. I was the closer/cleaner, production, and ultimately what they called a “team leader.” The hierarchy went like this.. There was the store manager who was in charge of everyone, underneath him was the various managers of the different departments.. meat department, bakery, front end, receiving.. and every department manager had a team leader who was to alleviate some of the managerial duties, and especially, delegating the workload to the rest of the workers. That was me.. a 23-year-old in charge of a bunch of middle-aged women.
The shit I put up with from those women, holy shit. I got slapped on the ass by 2 of them, one tried to set me up with her daughter. I just laugh whenever I see stuff about the #metoo movement. Not because sexual assault or harassment is funny, but because it really is a 2-way street. Guys just tend to ignore it, or just not report it for various reasons.. Anyhow, one of these women approached me first thing in the morning and the conversation went a little bit like this:
She said,
“You’re in trouble”
I didn’t say anything and she continued..
“you don’t even know what you did, do you?”
I of course had no idea so I said “no.”
She said “I had a dream last night and we fucked”
Which I laughed off, and tried to change the subject. So needless to say, it was a bit of a struggle for me being in charge of these women.
After a while, I had managers coming to me.. suggesting I get into management.. I guess they saw something in me, I felt like I didn’t know what the hell I was doing most the time, so I didn’t put much stock into what they said. One time in particular though, the store manager set me up with a meeting. It was a meeting with the district manager, the regional manager.. and a representative from the home office in Arkansas.. I wasn’t sure why they were all there.. The rep from Arkansas was a young woman, probably just a few years older than me.. she did most of the talking.
I found out pretty quick it was more of an interview than a meeting. They asked me the typical “what do you wanna do with your life” and “what are you hobbies” I soon found out that they were looking to put me into the Walmart “rising star” program. A program to mold the lower level management employees who show promise into full-on managers.. and place them in any of the 100s of manager openings they have around the country..
I had told them I was into playing guitar, and somewhat musically inclined, to which the they told me they have a Walmart band, who travels the country and sings songs about Walmart. I thought it was the most ridiculous idea I had ever heard.. anyone who writes a song about Walmart, is a disgrace to all music. She went on to tell me how Walmart has the second largest computer system after the US government, and also touted the Walmart logistics team as the best in the world. At the end of the meeting, I still was not convinced I ever wanted to be a Walmart manager.
I always just kinda went with the flow, I was asked to do the team leader position after a friend of mine working in the bakery had assumed the manager role, we went through 2 managers before her.. they were horrid. One of them had no bakery experience, and could not make the important calls, and the other was the former meat department manager, he had been caught changing the dates on the fresh breads and muffins, in order to give them a longer shelf life.. after he was caught doing that.. it was found out he was doing the same thing in the meat department.. so yeah, people had unknowingly been buying outdated meat for years. He did it because of Walmart’s strict policy on keeping the throw away to a minimum.
We had also gone through several store managers, and at this point we had a manager named Todd. He was a horribly fake person. He was in his 40s, starting to bald, but was too proud to cut his shaggy hair, so you could see his hair receding underneath the mess on his head. He tried way to hard to sound “cool” even going so far as to try to talk music with me, I found out his music taste was just a shallow as his management abilities.
He had me sit in on a managers meeting one time, they were discussing ways to increase productivity across the entire store.. his first suggestion was the cut out the two 15 minute breaks the employees got during the day, and leave them with just a half hour lunch. He said “we aren’t required by law to give those breaks, so why should we?” Me being the polite person I am, didn’t say anything. It has been proven though, that by giving people breaks throughout the day gives them something to look forward to, and actually increases productivity, they work harder when there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.. to me it was the worst idea I had ever heard to get better production. Luckily, that change never became reality..
Near the end of the summer of 2003, Walmart had their yearly shareholders meeting. Every Walmart store and affiliate around the world chooses one employee to make the pilgrimage to Bentonville Arkansas to represent their store.. it was always a new manager or low level management. Walmart paid for the travel and lodging for these chosen ones. When Todd approached me about attending, I was very skeptical at first.. it just didn’t seem like something I’d wanna do, it was a 14-hour bus ride.. and a 3 night stay. Ultimately he wore me down and I agreed to go. Which turned to be one of the worst decisions of my life.. I shoulda trusted my gut on this one.
The night that I left, I was to meet the bus in a Walmart parking lot across town from the Sam’s club, they told me to meet up with a Walmart manager there, who was basically my companion for the better part of the trip. We rode the bus together and bunked together in the dorms at the University of Arkansas. The meeting would be held at the Bud Walton stadium in Bentonville..
To this day, I cant remember the managers name that I rode with, but he was about annoying as anyone could have been.. we didn’t talk much on the way down there.. but once we got there, every second we spent alone, he couldn’t shut the fuck up.
We arrived in at the Walmart home office sometime the next afternoon. We kept our belongings on the bus while we got a tour of the Walmart home office building. It was so weird. The entire town seemed to be employed by Walmart. Everyone I talked to worked there obviously.. but they all had family who worked for Walmart in some way too.. The tour guides were children of Walmart employees. The building was just swarming with people.. it was like a carnival.
We took the tour of the home office, I got to see where all the high ranking executives worked, and I even got to have my picture taken behind the desk of the CEO of Walmart at the time. So somewhere out there is a picture floating around of me behind the figure head of Walmart’s desk, trying to smile along with the rest of the group, who seemed to be enjoying this.. I wasn’t too thrilled.
We finally got to our dorm rooms sometime later that night, the douchebag manager companion I had and I brought our stuff to the room, and were finally allowed to relax. We met up with our group that evening for dinner in one of the many college buildings on campus. We returned to our room to get some sleep before the next day. We had a lot of shit to do, they actually gave each of us an itinerary for the time we would be spending there. We had to be up at 6am for breakfast, and then it was non stop running to meetings after that.
That fucking asshole kept me up all night, he would not sleep. He kept going on and on about his life, and how difficult it is to be a fairly new manager at Walmart. He actually told me how his biggest dilemma at the time was whether to date a girl that was interested in him or not. He said he was holding back because he didn’t want a relationship to get in the way of his career. The whole time I’m thinking “are you fucking serious? Walmart is so important to you, that you’d turn down a woman you’re interested in, so as to not fuck up your shitty career?” this dude was a douchebag to boot. No wonder he became a manager. I mean I do understand that women can make things more difficult for a man, but he just seemed so pathetic when he talked about it..
That night I got maybe 2 hours of sleep after listening to that nonsense.. at one point I finally told him I had to get some sleep and after 15 more minutes of garbage.. he finally shut up
We got up for breakfast at 6am, ate and then started our day.. after breakfast I had to meet up with a group of people who share the same department as me and share ideas.. There were only about 25 people in my group. There were executives in charge of the bakery department at the home office who were running the group. It was basically nothing but a bitchfest, punctuated by a few new product demonstrations.. bakery products we could sample that were soon to be available in our stores. We talked about productivity and ways to increase it.. people were literally crying about their workload, and how they couldn’t get people to do their work.. it was as sad as it was obnoxious.. to see a grown woman cry about her workload at Walmart.
I skipped a lot of the day's activities and spent it in my dorm room, I was already regretting making this trip. I did make it to the presentations that afternoon from the executives to the many Walmart shareholders in attendance.
Having one person from every Walmart store in the world, they filled up an entire stadium of people. China didn’t make it that year because of SARS. Even without them, the place was packed.. they started the presentation out by doing the Walmart cheer. Now if you don’t know what that is, you’re in for a treat if you ever get to see it.. you have one person up in front of the group. That person screams “GIMME A W” and everyone screams “DOUBLE YOU” then “GIMME AN A” and everyone screams “AYYY” etc..
Now imagine an entire stadium of people screaming this, never in my life had I ever had the desire to be in a cult, and at that moment I couldn't shake the feeling that I was part of one.
The presentation continued with various executives taking their turn to talk about business, profits margins, advertisement and all the other bullshit that goes into making this cult work.. I sat there in a daze, not really absorbing anything that was being said, I had basically resigned to a self induced coma state, where I could hear things going on around me, but in know way paid attention to any of it. I was very irritated..
So that night was the first of 2 nights of entertainment courtesy of Walmart. They had paid off some mainstream bands to sell their souls on the stage of the Bud Walton stadium, to a massive clan of Walmart enthusiasts. The first night it was Brooks n Dunn followed by Jewel. I hate country music, but I did like some of Jewel’s early stuff, and was almost looking forward to it.
I found my assigned seat within the stadium, right next to this little southern girl.. she had a thick southern accent she was kind mousy. She was very polite, and just seemed to be a very happy person. I on the other hand was pissed off, and really didn’t wanna be there.. So Brooks n Dunn played, I obviously wasn’t very impressed. The last song they did was their very own Walmart tribute song. Satan had literally climbed up from the bowels of hell and inspired these douchebags to write a song about how amazing Walmart is. I don’t remember the words, I obviously had disassociated from myself the way a child who is traumatized does to deal with a horrific event.. I was scarred. I do remember though, that little southern girl, standing up and cheering.. screaming how awesome Walmart was during this assault on good music. She hit me on the arm, trying to get me to stand up, saying “come on, get into it” and I just sat there.. in disbelief.
Later Jewel came on, she was pushing some song, and I think the album she had just come out with called “Intuition” which was also the name of a Gillet razor she had been pushing along with the album. This night was the 2 biggest sell out moments I had ever seen in my life. It was so bad that Jewel couldn’t make up for it by playing some of her older stuff, which she did.. I was just left with a horrible feeling of injustice. She stopped midway through the show to talk about how wonderful Walmart was, and of course to encourage all the young ladies out there to buy her Intuition razors.. What a corporate whore..
I went back to my dorm that night slightly stupider, as well as losing all my hope for mankind.. and it was only the first night of the musical performances Walmart had bribed musicians into doing.. The next night was Rascal Flatts and some other band I had never heard of..
The next day after breakfast, we continued with the executive presentations, but of course we had to do the Walmart cheer first.. The woman who was crying and sobbing about her workload in our individual meetings, was screaming extra loud this day. As well as screaming “GO WALMART” and “WALMART IS AWESOME” it was a sharp contrast to her crying like a little bitch about how horrible her work life is.. She had been complaining about controllable things.. workload can be alleviated, people who don’t listen can be fired, all of these things, the upper management of Walmart will not do. They have it in their power to help her, and they refuse. I don’t see how she could not recognize this.. that the parameters they put on us aren’t set in stone, they’re set to make copious amounts of money at the workers expense.. yet she sat there screaming with every ounce of energy she had.. screaming the infallible godlike wonder of Walmart.
After the presentations for that day, I was done.. I was sickened by the bullshit I had been experiencing over the last couple days. I retired to my dorm room and literally spent the rest of the time there.. pondering the meaning of life, and the existence of Satan. I made some phone calls to friends back home, as it was a little bit comforting hearing some familiar voices while living in this hellish nightmare. I called my mom too and explained to her the sickening worship of this crap, worthy of comparison to a golden bull calf.. I hadn’t been religious since I was 15, and this was making me question the existence of pure evil.
After skipping everything else over the remainder of this trip. It was finally time to go home. We made the long bus ride back to the Walmart I was picked up in, I got in my car and drove home.. never being so happy as I was in that moment.. it was finally over.
When I returned to work everyone attacked me with questions about what goes on at a Walmart shareholders meeting.. I held back a lot. I gave just the basic breakdown of what goes on, without delving into my opinion, and personal experience.. with the exception of one or two of the people I was closest with at work.
Todd approached me to ask me how it went, and I did the same thing with him.. I told him a watered down version of my experience, with only the very basic events. He immediately told me I was to give a presentation to my fellow employees about my experience, and apparently, there was some information I was supposed to bring back to everyone else. They must have given that out on the day I decided to retreat, realizing I may never recover if I subjected myself to even a minute more.
I flat out refused to do it.. I finally told him it was a horrible experience, and I would never do it again in a million years.. he didn’t really have anything to say once I admitted this.. he walked away, and I went back to work..
The next day in the morning meeting, at the end just before they were about to do the Sam’s Club version of the Walmart cheer, which they do every day before store opening.. Todd told the group that at the end of the week, I would be giving a presentation to the rest of them about my experience at the shareholders meeting. I laughed out loud at his suggestion, the meeting ended, and I immediately decided to have a talk with MY manager.
I told her that after what I experienced in Arkansas, I no longer wanted the Team leader position.. I told her they can keep the extra 50 cents an hour I was getting paid for it (not kidding at all.) She obviously tried to change my mind, but for the first time, I stopped going with the flow.
Sometime later that day she broke the news to Todd.. Todd never spoke to me again. After she told him, he left to go home that night and came back around 9 pm.. turned his keys in to a subordinate manager, and never came back..
Over the next couple weeks, the department managers approached me, one by one trying to get me to give that presentation about some top secret information I was supposed to have gotten from the shareholders meeting. I explained to each of them that I had no idea what they were talking about, and therefor couldn’t give said information to anyone. One manager, in particular, said: “the company paid a lot of money to send you to Arkansas, and they expect that you will give this presentation.” I fought them to the bitter end.. I almost decided to give a real a presentation of what my experience was, which would have been a shortened version of this blog post.. but I wasn’t that vindictive..
I never did give that presentation.
Almost a year later, after stepping down from the team leader job, I was helping out in the Sam’s Café, making pizza and waiting on customers. I was very sick. LIke throwing up sick, I shouldn't have been handling food people were gonna be eating. I asked my manager, before she left for the day if I could leave early, because I wasn’t sure if I could make it through the rest of the day. She said that was fine, but to let the Café Team leader know when I was leaving..
They were training a new employee in the Café that day, and she got pawned off on me. The Café team leader told me she was going to leave because she wanted to go home to play with her new cat.. I told her our manager had given me permission to go, and if I left the new person would be here by herself.. which was basically not an option.. Little miss team leader had only worked about 2 hours that day, I had been there for 5 at this point.. She told me that it was too bad, I had to stay.
She left, and about 20 minutes later I was teaching the new girl how to make a pizza, and something in my head snapped. I took off my apron, set it on the table.. and walked out the door. A little old lady who did product demonstration for the store was out smoking a cigarette as I walked through the parking lot.. she said “Hey! Where are you going?!” and I replied “No where fast” and never went back. I had worked there for 5 years.
They called me a few times over the next few days, leaving messages practically begging me to come back.. I never replied.
There is nothing in this world I dislike more than insincerity, and fake people.. my time in Arkansas was just that.. 100% fake.. I couldn’t understand these people who will literally scream at the top of their lungs to show their undying love for this cold, empty uncaring entity called Walmart, it was an assault on everything I am, every belief I hold.
Those same people when asked in a more private setting, will break down from the unnecessary stress put on them for such a meager wage.. while the executives stand there, with absolutely nothing to say, no words of encouragement or even a little understanding.. this love those people feel for the company only goes one way, they don’t give a fuck about their employees, as has been shown time and time again by the poverty wages they offer their workers.
I made the right decision.. Looking back, I know that my feelings about it were, and still are real. Had I just kept going with the flow, odds are I woulda found myself years later stressing out over the fact that I had no room in my life for meaningful connections with other people, and living a life as part of the cold, careless, corporate machine that pumps out garbage into the hands of its customers, at the expense of the people making it happen..
Walmart has become a necessary evil for the dwindling middle class. They come into small-town America, destroying small business along the way, offering the people who now have almost no choice but to work there, for wages so low they can’t survive without government assistance, a meaningless existence.. Undercutting every other business with their ability to transport product, so that no small business can compete with their prices. To have been able to see the level of brainwashing the employees who take so much pride in their jobs live with at Walmart .. leaves me feeling ill, and still leaves me less hope for our species..