As most people are aware, Target Corporation suffered a security breach last year. Since botching their response to this security breach and suffering declining sales, Target has dismissed its CEO as some sort of panacea. The bleeding continues, however and it is Target's Team (cough) Members that are taking the hit. The truth is, as much as Daily Kos likes to beat the drums against Walmart, what Walmart does Target does with better window dressing. But first my story...
When the economy collapsed, my family was hit especially hard. Husband is in construction sales. We lost everything, our retirement savings included. I was a college graduate, three degrees with Honors. Just as I was about to embark on my first job in my career field, my second child was born with a birth defect that required many surgeries and years of therapy. During this time I picked the wrong surgeon to remove my gallbladder and spent years in and out of the hospital, donating a few organs along the way. Career had to take a back seat to family and health.
When everyone's health was stable, I was eager to resume my career but that coincided with the economy collapsing. As luck would have it, my back up career was in a field where people were getting laid off left and right too. My husband stayed in our home state to keep his job and fight foreclosure. The kids and I moved in with a relative in another State for a few years. After sending out thousands of resumes, I was getting no where. I removed my college education, experience, and with the dumbing down of my simple resume, I finally landed a job at a Target. That was two and a half years ago.
I also swallowed my pride and for the first time in my life signed up for and received Food Stamps. I also collapsed on the floor at home one morning with one side of my body numb after working three shifts in a row. I hit the medical lottery with a wonderful neurological disorder. Five months later, I could walk without my cane and limp unaided during my job at Target. And I was grateful a wonderful woman in Human Resources held my job for me until I could return.
Last year my husband landed a nice contract with a large home builder and I was able to get off of Food Stamps. We also were able to rent a nice little home on five acres. For four years, my husband has traveled every two weeks to be with us. It has been tough on all of us. But we survive.
But I have got to say, that although I was grateful to get the job at Target, it is the most soul sucking job I have ever held and I have held quite a few before, during and immediately after graduating from College.
Just like at Walmart, when you go to training at Target, you get to watch an anti-union video where the narrator makes it clear that Target Team Members are just so happy and are given so much by the Corporation that Team Members should not even utter the word union and if it is heard, it should be reported because that would not be good for moral and the "TEAM" atmosphere.
In my State, Target starts you off at $8.75 a hour. You are lulled by the promise of Team Work, and pay raises and a "Fun, Fast and Friendly" workplace. As a long time Target shopper I thought that would be the case any way. The reality is, just like Walmart and basically all retail jobs, you are LUCKY if you can get 14 hours in a work week. You usually get three, four or five hour shifts. If people post shifts they don't want to work, those are up for grabs upon approval. But in a really great week, you may get 18 hours. Pretty exciting huh?
Every April, you get your ONE and ONLY review for the WHOLE YEAR. You will be told that although you work hard and are the best in the store at (fill in the blank here,) you are inconsistently effective because one time eight months ago you were in the far back of the stock room way on the other side of the store, pulling merchandise to take to your department and could not sprint at the speed of light to hop on a register at the front of the store when called over the radio. And then you get a .13 cent pay raise. And you discover that after almost three years, you are now making $9.01 an hour. That's right. On the penny... in the year 2014. You find out someone working at your store for years longer than you, who is a great worker, makes LESS than you. You scratch your head trying to understand HOW IN THE HELL is that possible? Because that person started when the starting wage used to be $7.25 an hour but her hourly pay did not rise when the starting pay rose to $8.75 three years ago. So I make .30 cents more an hour then she does. I am angered for her.
You also find out that 99% of all Team Members will get the same review and the same pay raise once a year. If you are best buddies with a Team Lead(Manager over a department like electronics,)and hang out with said Team Lead after hours you may get a .20 cent pay raise.
What makes this pay scheme more galling is that, Target like Walmart and every retail business, runs its stores on a skeleton crew. So, there may be five of us on the sales floor. One person covers, electronics, toys, sporting goods, home improvement, seasonal,and books and movies. One person covers boys, girls, infants which includes clothing, food, diapers and furniture, men's, ladies, shoes, luggage, jewelry,glasses, purses, hats, scarves, belts and other accessories. One person covers bedding, bath, home furnishing, small appliances, kitchen, office and party supplies, home decor, personal hygiene, medicine, makeup, and pet food. One person covers the entire supermarket side of the store. That is four of us plus the Operator that runs the switchboard and dressing room. We also have one person that works in Guest Service and mans the photo counter. We usually have two, sometimes three cashiers. SO in addition to taking care of the entire store, sales associates MUST drop everything to rush up to the registers every ten minutes. Some days we may have three extra people on the floor.
We must also clear merchandise from Guest Services and take those items to our departments. We must also pull the new merchandise that is coming off the trucks out into our areas on the sales floor and restock. We are also the maintenance crew, responsible for cleaning spills. Guest Service must clean the bathrooms. Although we usually have one cart puller, we are also responsible for pulling carts when needed. We are also supposed to help guests and attempt to pick up and keep our areas clean. We are also supposed to enlighten people to sign up for Red Cards. We are often pulled out of our departments to work in the supermarket section when there is too much food piling up in the back stock room that needs to be put on the floor. And every day we are also asked to do tasks that the Leads(Managers) are supposed to do like replace missing sales signs, re-do displays, take inventory and flag shelves for merchandise that needs to be ordered. It is back breaking work. It IS NOT a no skill job. Most young people quit within weeks. The majority of us are over 35 and a good percentage of us have college degrees.
In sum, one Team Member is expected to do the equivalent of seven jobs in one four or five hour shift for poverty wages. But we get rewarded with rotting bananas and expiring pastry products in the break room and there is always generic peanut butter and jelly with stale bread available as well. The vending machines are always broken. Don't worry, there is a bulletin board where we can post how great we think each other is for moral. And we may win a 50 dollar gift card in a monthly raffle for signing up a bunch of people for the Red Card or going injury free for a month. We may be able to throw a pie at the Store Team Lead too. It is like Kindergarten. The Store Team Lead(Store Manager) and the other Leads get thousands of dollars in bonuses for Red Card sign ups that lowly Team Members do. And by capping the amount of people working in the store and limiting their hours, the Store Team Lead and the other Leads get hefty bonuses quarterly. Store Team Leads usually get a 40k bonus.
Which brings me to the data breach. We use REALLY OLD computers and equipment. I mean cathode ray NEC monitors from 1990(NEC has not been in business for quite a while) and software running DOS from the late 1990's. I think we have Windows NT in front of DOS. Our wireless Internet is as slow the old dial up days, so our equipment fails when ever we are on the floor helping guests with pricing issues. Our registers and credit card machines are all 1990's technology. Contrary to what you heard from Target, our systems crash almost every other day. We are continuously hacked. It came to a head last year. And you will love this part. We knew about the problem long before Black Friday. I did because working on computers is my fun hobby on the side. I was not surprised when I came in after the Black Friday weekend and was handed a Script by the Team Lead and was told Team Members were not allowed to talk to the media and to read the script when answering the phone. The script lied of course and said we just found out we were hacked after Black Friday. Corporate knew for months and kept its mouth shut to make money during Black Friday and into December.
Our security "FIX" consists of such things like adding extra screens on the register asking to input the security number on the back of credit cards and occasionally blocking your purchase if your purchase is too large signaling a fraud alert and requiring you to call your bank even if you know your card is good. It has happened to three guests in the last week already.
My bank was quicker to send me a new debit card two days after the news broke of the breach, than Target was to respond. Target did not even bother to send new Red Cards out. I had to demand a new card from someone in... India. Just yesterday, our system went down again. It does not help that we and our vendors use really ancient PDA computer scanners that any 12 year old hacker with a cell phone app can hack into. They break down every day. And we walk around with ancient walkies, some with the antenna missing and just the coiled wire sticking out. If you are lucky, you get stuck with one of those and get electrocuted throughout the day.
Our stores are dirty. We have found poop and peep in the dressing rooms. The carpets have never been replaced. A cleaning crew(undocumented workers) comes in ONCE A WEEK to do a quick vaccuum, otherwise some subcontractors come by after the store opens in the morning to do a quick sweep with brooms. We are responsible for being the cleaning crew the rest of the day. We have dust pans and brooms the size of a pancake spatula in little cleaning stations. We don't get mops, or regular sized brooms and dust pans. If the spill is large enough we can beg to borrow a regular broom and dust pan from Food Avenue(the place you get pizza and drinks from.) Pretty sad. A Multi-billion dollar corporation and we get cleaning equipment sized for a toddler's playhouse. If you think our store is old, it was built in 2007.
We are not allowed to carry a bottle of water with us on the sales floor when we get overheated, but Guests are free to eat food and drink Starbucks all over the store. Shelves and fixtures are broken and not replaced. The switchboard goes on the fritz every day and the dressing room desk is failing apart and held together with packing tape. And we are in a wealthy area of town.
In sum, the morale is so low that people are broken shells at this point. Especially when those of us with experience and college degrees ask and get passed over for promotion. Target's policy is to hire young girls, about 21, right out of college to be Leads. It does not matter what their degree is in and they must have no experience in retail to be hired cheaply. I have been training my new boss over the last week. She is a sweet girl but she has that deer in the headlights thing going on. Like others that came before her, she will hold on for four to six months and bail for the next job. She makes $10.00 an hour. My other Lead is also a woman but she is in her thirties. Even though she works hard and is good at her job and has been at Target for a while, because she came from different country and does not have a college degree, she can never be promoted beyond Team Lead in my area of the Store. She makes $10.50 an hour. Mostly men get promoted to be Store Managers. And when Store Managers hit age 50, they are done. They get laid off.
The best part of this is this wonderful Grandmother I work with who still works full time as an Office Manager at another business but works at Target part time. She has worked for Target for 25 YEARS. She works harder than anyone. Gives her all. And she makes $11.00 an hour. That woman should be making twice that for her length of service. Instead she has not received a pay raise in five years because she is at the salary cap for Target Sales Associates. But for reaching 25 years this year, her whopping 10% employee discount will become permanent even if she leaves, which she is thinking of doing because she is disgusted with what she calls the Plantation Mentality of Target. We are all indentured servants. Wage Slaves.
Finally, Target is an 8 billion dollar company. Our store made 58 million dollars. The average is 48 million to 78 million a store a year. I already know the skimpy payroll for the store for THE WHOLE YEAR is covered by the first week of sales in the New Year.
Target has the money and resources to be the Anti-Walmart. But quite simply, they are content to be Walmart in a pretentious designer dress. They do not care about their employees or the customers that walk through the doors. They care about their bottom line, raking in money to increase pay at the top and dividends to the 1% shareholders.
Even California's Pension Fund that divested itself of a million shares of Target stock did not bother Target in the least, because Corporate Leaders hold multi-million dollars of stock options as part of their pay package.
So we at the bottom are numbers on a spread sheet, mere ant drones toggled on a computer screen and scheduled to work based on a computer logarithm that schedules people based on weather and traffic patterns in stores to maximize profit.
IF you are old enough to remember when working in retail meant monthly reviews and pay raises and a chance to work your way into management, no salary caps, health insurance, making commission on high value items in the store, well those days are gone.
And Target will continue to bleed us at the bottom. We know there is no hope or future, except the inevitable closing of stores next. I can tell you that everyone I work with is someone's daughter, son, wife, husband, grandmother, grandfather and every single one of them deserves a living wage and a 40 hour work week. They deserve be treated with respect and not like children in Kindergarten by Target Corporation. And Target Corporation can damn well afford to pay well. And they damn well can replace and update their systems so your data is safe now. But profit margin is the religion of Corporations.
Why is it not enough to make millions in profits instead of billions and keep data safe and pay a living wage? But that is okay because every day I go in and work hard and then I leave and take my frustration out by going grocery shopping at the grocery store down the road, shopping on Amazon or going to a different clothing and shoe store when I need items, just like my fellow Target Team Members do. Places like Target and Walmart do not understand that when you treat your employees like indentured servants, they will tell their family and friends and those friends will tell friends and that is why they are both losing sales. I saw some cute things at Target during the holidays for gifts and then I shopped at Amazon. At least I knew my data was safe.
