If you are a human with a conscience, and you work around a lot of food, and you notice that there's some mold growing on food in the back room, what do you do? Generally, if you're afraid of losing your job, you might make an anonymous call to the local health department, right?
What if they never respond? Well, people might like to know that 1) there's mold and also ants on what they're eating, and 2) the Health Department did nothing. So maybe you decide to send an email to the anonymous tipline of your local news station.
So what do you do if THEY don't respond, either?
Well, I'm joining Daily Kos and staring a public online journal about my experiences in my workplace. Because surely, somewhere out there, statistically speaking there must be SOMEONE who gives a shit, right?
By the way, this place I work for? Wal-Mart. And I will explain to you why your favorite thing is NEVER on the shelf anymore.
As far as the specifics go, it's kind of a long story, but the short of it is that at least at my store, we have a backstock problem. It's out of control. It started going to hell somewhere around April or May, right before the yearly Inventory, and we never really got a grip on it since. You may not be able to see it from the sales floor--well, actually at this point you probably could--but we have carts and pallets EVERYWHERE. We're working with only about 1/3 of our receiving areas, if even that much, because we just have so much backstock. We have no idea WHAT we have, really. If I scan something on the sales floor for a customer and it says we have a few on-hand but they're not in a bin, then chances are it IS in the backroom, but it would take a full-fledged expedition plus an entire shift to find it.
There are multiple reasons for this. Part of it is staffing: we simply don't have enough people to run everything and then bin the overstock. We'll get a pallet of something that won't get touched for days, weeks, even MONTHS at a time because the one night it was new, it didn't get ran because the stocker for that department was only allotted two hours for four pallets, and then it gets lost in the backstock shuffle. I've got a good visual memory, and one time I was rearranging the pallets to try to make more of them fit in a smaller space and I recognized a pallet I'd built myself A MONTH PRIOR. Well, I recognized the bottom half of it, which hadn't been touched. There was another half-pallet's worth of backstock on top of it. And some of the stuff on that pallet was stuff we'd been getting more in for about a week.
Which is another reason for the backstock problem: the counts are off. We can't properly count how much of anything is in the store because we simply don't have enough time/room/people to do so. We have about thirty pallets of unprocessed apparel that was either backstock one night or was never even run at all, because no matter how much apparel we get any night, I haven't seen more than one person tasked to stock softlines in months. Whether it's one pallet or five, the usual softlines stocker is this nice, older lady who had a stroke a few months ago, and she's on her own; she knows where everything is, or at least most of it, but she isn't what I would call spry, so it's not surprising that she might not get all of her freight done.
We have whole pallets that are nothing but boxes of random clothes from what could be as long ago as spring. My point is, if it's not binned in then the system thinks it's on the floor, even if it isn't. So if someone ever checks the shelf count and notices that it's not there, the shelf count is changed to zero and usually signals an order, which means we have an extra thing floating around. A few days later, more of that thing shows up, but maybe not all of it get stocked or binned, because there are only about five people on overnights who bin now because everybody else either quit or got fired, which means you suddenly have at least TWO of that thing in the back room. Now multiply that by what could easily be over a million different barcodes, and I'm sure you're beginning to see a problem.
Factor number three is the warehouse and the ordering system. Some of the stuff we get is on automated order because it's seasonal and has generally consistent sales: charcoal grills, pool noodles, chili beans, bottled water, snow toys, and the like. Some of it is stuff we order manually. And sometimes the warehouse just randomly sends us stuff. If we had our inventory under control, this wouldn't be an issue. But when it's freaking NOVEMBER and we're STILL GETTING CANNING JARS, I would really like to travel to the distribution center and smack somebody upside the head with a brick. Sometimes the warehouse needs to clean itself out, and I understand that, but when one of your delivery sites has to order EXTRA trailers for Christmas layaway because the regular layaway trailers are full of summer toys, blenders, and Back-To-School, then you should at least have the courtesy to pick up the phone and ask if we have room for this crap.
All of this brings me to the reason you clicked this link in the first place: the backstock problem doesn't just extend to shampoo and laundry detergent. Food isn't immune to this idiocy. And the thing about food is that it tends to EXPIRE--so please, everyone, I beg you to check your expiration dates. I also advise you to wash the CANS before you open them. You never know if it had been sitting in a bin in the backroom being used as a stepping stone for ants before being pulled to the sales floor.
One of the worst areas was, until very recently, the soda/water/juice backstock. The thing about backstock pallets is that not everybody can stack, or some of them don't want to. If they run their freight and have only a few cases left over, they might simply take those few cases to the back and fling them onto a backstock pallet--and I mean FLING. These pallets may have started off as being well-stacked and sorted but they slowly turned into this massive, dank, sticky cluster that few dared touch for their own safety. It was an avalanche in slow motion: busted cases spilling bent bottles of sports drink, a tipped-over case of gallon-sized fruit juice crushing a carton of soy milk or a stray juice pouch, loose soda cans everywhere because their cardboard case had been ripped and soaked and rendered fubar weeks ago, six-foot stacks of 24-packs of bottled waters held upright only by each other and just BEGGING for one absentminded bump to send it all crashing down.
Some of those pallets were there for what could be whole MONTHS, unworked and unmoved. The sugar-soaked wood and the dark, undisturbed environment made it an ideal breeding ground for mold; some employees started complaining about the smell, but not too much, because they didn't want to get drafted to fix it.
Well, one day, time ran out. I and another associate were "volunteered" to turn that chaos into order. My coworker's solution was to line half of the back hallway with temp bins and then sort out the pallets. Sounded easy enough in theory. Unfortunately, he's one of those people whose immune system doesn't play nice with certain families of mold. This mold may or may not have been out of the penicillin family but it was close enough that he had to take frequent breaks to step back and wheeze to himself with a red face and watering eyes. When we started carefully moving those pallets, I would describe the smell as a combination of rotted sugar, mothballs, and the time that mouse decided to hide in the cardboard baler.
A sane person would probably have called a Haz-Mat team at this point, or at least started sending whole pallet-loads to Claims. But I do not work for sane people, and my orders stood: create more perilous stacks but at least put the product in the system this time. The stuff that was un-sellable was sent to Claims: the busted cases of soda, the bent bottles, the stuff with un-scannable barcodes, a couple of cases covered in some weird, damp black shit that I still keep telling myself was just "mud." But the rest of those cans and bottles and cartons and packages didn't even receive so much as a wipe-down; I thought about it, but they would've just yelled at me to get back to work, and I mean that literally because some of our managers yell at us for wasting precious time if we stop to sweep up broken glass. Those liquids were binned in. And every day, people are drafted to take apart those tall, precariously-stacked temp bins for a few items at a time.
This disturbed me so much--still does, or else I wouldn't be here--that I anonymously called the local City Health Department to report the mold.
No response. No sign that any of them had ever visited my store.
So I emailed the local news station. I figured, THEY would be interested to know that the Health Department never responded, and they'd at least like to beware of their own food. Hell, I see the anchors shopping in my store sometimes.
No response from the news station. None. Nobody cares. It's dirty, it's filthy, it's sick, it could MAKE someone sick, and nobody cares.
Do you?
As this is my first Kos entry and as it's basically the reason I joined the site, there's not much more to say on the matter. But it would be nice to have a wide, interested audience who cares to listen to my ongoing horror stories should interest be expressed in such. Like today's. And note: a 'meal exception' is the term for a coaching automatically generated by the computer if you go to lunch too late. Because Walmart punishes workers for making that paperwork get filed to get the company in trouble even when company policies are the direct cause of why they might violate the labor laws in the first place. They tell us in the back, "you don't go to lunch until the truck's done." And they'll hold us back there until the very last second, until we have to RUN to get to the time clock, because the Task Times come first and thus the managers are ordered to run us into the ground instead of allowing us to rest and eat. But of course it's our fault if we go into our fifth hour without going to meal, because that's the Walmart Way.
A conversation:
Me: "Hey, they fired [Failed Goatee] today for that meal exception he got LAST MONTH."
Former supervisor [Sir Spaz-A-Lot]: "That's funny, because [The Compliance Queen] said she fixed that."
Manager [The Dude]: "Uh, she CAN'T fix that, because it's a violation of federal labor laws. You HAVE to go to lunch before your fifth hour."
Me: "Then what about the time when we were about to be late for lunch because we were unloading the truck, and The Queen finally let us go and said, 'Fix your time before you clock out,' huh? Sounded to me like she was telling us to adjust our times so we wouldn't get exceptions."
The Dude: "She WHAT?"
Spaz: "Is this the same Queen who said it wasn't Walmart policy to have a fan in the backroom even when [The Hipster Ninja] kept overheating and throwing up?"
Me: "Yup."
All together: "::sigh:: Welcome to Walmart."
Tue Nov 05, 2013 at 12:30 PM PT: Update 11/5/13: OSHA has been notified. Now, let's see if they actually do anything, or if the stories were true and Walmart DOES own them.
Mon Mar 17, 2014 at 1:45 AM PT: Update 3/17/14: For anybody who cares, OSHA never showed up. We did have a notice posted by the timeclock for about a week, notifying all employees that somebody had indeed bitched about safety, but nothing has changed. It's still an unsanitary, extremely hazardous place to work and I'm getting really, REALLY tired of fearing for my damn life every time I have to take apart one of those bins to pick something. What scares me even more is that one day recently the bread guy told me we were doing pretty good, because all of the other stores in his delivery area have a backstock problem, too, but at least we have a path.
This genuinely FRIGHTENS me.