Working is HARD! Bouncy...

[asdf2231]

Long winded but worth it for the following comments by other DUmpsters...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x6687745

TwixVoy  (1000+ posts)        Sat Oct-03-09 04:33 AM
Original message
Why working retail is hell
 Edited on Sat Oct-03-09 04:33 AM by TwixVoy
When I first started writing on the internet about my retail experiences I kept the name of my employer secret. I wrote about happenings for fear of retaliation. My retail “career” was with Target which I voluntarily left earlier this year.

This is not going to be about the negative environment when it comes to some customers. Everyone has heard those stories. This is a look inside from a former retail mangers view.

I started with Target several years ago as a part time “team member”. (Target’s term for an employee. You’ll find Target loves to create special terminology for just about everything) Basically the lowest entry level spot one can get at Target. When I started the job I considered it to be a part time temp job that I would be free from within months at most. I made $6.50/hour part time and had no benefits. Full time is NOT an option for regular team members in any situation at any store.

When I started with the company it was actually somewhat common to find some older working age adults working in these positions for longer than a year. (roughly anyone age 25-50) During the past few years that is no longer the case. The vast majority of regular “team members” are teenagers, college kids, older retired people, and immigrants. Many of these people were living with family or had a spouse with a higher income job. This is simply because anyone age 25-50 that has a family (or even themselves to support) simply can not do so on retail wages.

“Expect More Pay Less”

To begin with pay is incredibly low. At Target your starting pay is your starting pay. There is no negotiation. The highest level regular team member position (for example flow/stocking, presentation team) is only typically 50 cents higher in pay than the lowest regular team member position. (for example cashiers, sales floor)

On top of that no one in these positions is considered full time. The vast majority will average 20 hours a week with few exceptions. Weekly hours are also subject to change drastically. It is not uncommon for a person to be scheduled 20 hours one week and 6 hours the next. You never know how much pay you will take home in your bi-weekly pay check.

Typically a team member must maintain 32+ hours a week to get benefits. (very few hit this average number) OR they must wait 2 years before they become eligible with out the minimum hours, but only for a reduced benefits plan.

With the exception of a full promotion to a higher level in the company (extremely rare) team members are only eligible for a promotion ONCE a year. There are no exceptions to this policy. The raise is based on an annual performance review score. The annual performance review score is based on a meeting of leadership (Target’s word for management) and is typically derived at in only a few seconds of discussion. The stores are limited in giving out too many above average scores (regardless of rather or not performance justifies a higher score) so most team members (typically 80-90% of them) get an “average” score or below. Typically most team members get anywhere from a 5 cent to 25 cent raise annually after this process. We had a few team members who had been with the company over 10 years and had still not reached $10/hour in pay.

After 2007 even promotions were not possible for most team members. New positions were created that had almost ALL the responsibility of first line management positions that would be assigned to team members. However they would get NO pay increase and none of the benefits or hours of a management position. This was done to phase out first line management and basically get cheap management with out having to pay for the work done.

“Target is like a family”

Well before I knew it months became a year. A funny thing happens to many retail workers. Even though it is a dead end job (and you know it is a dead end job) certain things attract you to coming back every day. Many people I worked with largely came to work because of co-workers. Target team members (especially back in those days) were fond of saying “Target is like a family”. It was almost as if you came to work because you had a subconscious message put in your head that the people you worked with were your friends or even family. You really felt that way over time.

We had what was called a “Fast, fun, and friendly” environment at all the stores. It was a slogan you could find on the walls in employee areas. The idea was that when you came to work at Target it would be partly because it was fun. Well it was a fast environment, but was it really fun? Not really.

I liked my co-workers though. Overall the actual working environment at Target wasn’t so bad either in those days. Still I had put in a year and wanted out. I was considered a top performer in the store during the entire year. I did my job well, but it had gotten me no where. I informed leadership of my decision and the reason. Before I knew it I was being told what a great team member I was. How much they appreciated me, and they loaded me up with all this talk about going places in the company. They told me they would promote me to a “Specialist” position.

What is a specialist position? It is a hybrid management/non-management position. Basically you are not responsible for supervising people directly, but you are responsible for supervising the daily operations of a department. Most Target stores only have a handful of these positions, and because they are a higher level than a regular employee it is considered a full time position.

So I thought “Wow maybe there is a future in retail after all”. Next thing I know I have my promotion and my whopping $1/hour raise for a significant amount of additional work. I also have my 40 hours a week. (Well, not really... you see typically you’ll really get 38, and if payroll gets behind that week it may go down to 32) Still it was a lot better than getting 20 our less hours a week.

“Leadership Dimensions”

So before I know it another year has gone by. I start to wonder “So where was this career path again?” Around this time I start to look at some of my peers. They are all high school kids by and large. What am I doing here? I am struggling to pay my bills every day. Sure there are some adults with me. But you know what? They had been beaten down over the years. They believed that retail was all they could do. They believed that they deserved to not make a living wage. Exactly what mega retailers want.

A lot of people don’t realize this, but the adults working in retail generally have very low self esteem. They honestly believe that retail is all they can do. In some rare cases this may be true, but I worked with a lot of talented discouraged people who had skills that could have gotten them significantly better jobs. But this is an effect of retail.... after a while you start to think this way. The job beats you down over time, and it is very hard to build your self back up.

Fortunately I had not been there long enough to be so beaten down. So once again I go to leadership and tell them I am giving notice to leave and the reasons why. Once again “Oh no don’t leave! You are a great specialist. You are right we will move you up another level to address your concerns”. I really was a dedicated employee, and delivered good results every day. I thought to my self “Ok, maybe the next level is where I get a living wage”

So a few months later I get promoted again. This time to an entry level leadership (management) position. It is a whole new ball game now. A large part of my daily work now revolves around supervising employees directly and running store operations. My raise? A whopping $2, and the same hours situation as a specialist.

I got to go to special training where I learned “Leadership Dimensions” and other Target expectations for its managers. This is where I got to see the dark side of Target and retail in general. I also got to see Target’s anti-union videos for management which I considered pure propaganda.

“Managing Talent”

So a little bit of time has come in my new position. I am all excited. Target sales are going through the roof. The company is filling me up with all these positive slogans. I’ve got a great future ahead and so does everyone else at the company I am told. This is right around 2005.

Upper I was one level away from upper store leadership. They were making at least $50,000 a year. I was at around $25,000. They had been with the company on average 10-20 years.

So one day something strange started to happen.... Upper leadership suddenly started getting silently terminated over the course of several weeks. One day they were just gone. People who were dedicated and had gotten promoted through hard work and dedication just like I did. They were typically in their 40’s and 50‘s. I asked around. “What happened to....?” No one knew. But it was pretty obvious.

At first I thought it was just our store. Then I started talking to some managers I knew from some other stores. Same thing was going on there.
Next thing you know my boss is a 22 year old college kid. Not just my boss, EVERYONES boss becomes a 22 year old college kid. Yup, that’s right. They all ended up getting replaced by a fresh out of college bunch which thought their new $32,000 a year pay rate was just incredible.

Things went down hill company wide pretty fast after this move.

“Hey better to push carts than get a college degree!”

I still remember that phrase. It was shouted at one of our cart attendants (who happened to be mentally disabled) by one of our 22 year old upper managers. Disparaging remarks became a matter of every day business.

It seems that not only did our upper managers get replaced by young people who had ZERO leadership experience, ZERO people skills, and ZERO competence they also happened to be the bottom of the barrel in college grads. People with BS “degrees” along the lines of basket weaving. Or the straight “D” average crowd. Basically the ones who couldn’t make it in the field their degree was in. It showed.

As a manager I didn’t have to deal with it too much. The team members though? That was a whole different story. It was like a group of high school bullies being set lose on the timid kids. It was not uncommon for someone in upper management to come over to a team member and stare them down. Why? Because they got off on it. It was sick. They dedicated their time to literally to doing nothing but bully those at the bottom.

This was not unique to my store. On company message boards there were complaints about it from all over the company. Nothing was ever done by headquarters. I once spoke to a district manager about the work environment concerns I had and was told directly “Well they (team members) better learn to live with it”

We lost a LOT of good team members to this. This had a side effect of pushing out a lot of the adult team members we had. From 2005 on the only ones who tolerated it (mostly the teenagers, immigrants, and retired folks that were left) were the ones most vulnerable and trapped. Others in my level of management were stuck and terrified of retaliation (which was rampant) even though we would all constantly talk about how much we hated what went on and wanted it to stop. They could not risk losing their job. (they would lose their home in many cases) Fortunately I was in a better position so I refused to do anything unethical for these people which quickly put me on their enemies list.

Essentially outright harassment was allowed. I had team members come to me and tell me “You are the only one I trust and I want to tell you about this....”. The problem is I was one level under upper management. So while I could do a little to help I was quickly shot down on most occasions.

In one situation we had video footage of a team member that was grabbed, pulled in to an aisle, felt up, and kissed by a specialist in the store. She pushed him away and reported it to HR the next day. HR ignored her, so she came to me about it. I went to HR on her behalf and was later told by our store manager to cover it up, and that I should not have done anything when it was reported to me. Why? Because the specialist was someone that was liked more than she was. I refused to follow this instruction, and a week later was told (off the record of course) that any future career advancement for me in the company was over. I had no regrets though.

“So, what’s for lunch?”

A new trend with upper management was lunch time. You see with our prior group of managers lunch time was 30 minutes at most. With this group of 20 somethings it could literally be six hours. In fact, it regularly was. Every. Single. Day.

They essentially delegated running everything to us the next level down in management. A big reason for this was that they simply did NOT know how to learn their job, and even after 4 years still could not figure it out. (a side effect of all these “D” college grads) So what did they do instead? EAT of course. They literally had what we below them called “the menu binder”. They had gone to every fast food joint within 15 miles, got a printed menu, laminated it, and put it in a binder. That way every day they could refer to it to order food. They would bring in BAGS of greasy fried saturated fat filled food. Every day.

When they came in they were ALL skinny as a rail. When I left the company early in 2009 most of them were at weight levels that would be classified as obese. In fact, one of them had gained so much weight that in the month before I left the company had broken a bone in his leg.

How you ask? He had put on so much weight that the bones in his legs literally could not support his weight. He was hospitalized for over a month, and had not left the hospital by the time I left the company. Did I feel bad for him? Considering he was one of the primary guys that outright harassed team members, and was one of the ones who told me I should had covered up the case of sexual harassment mentioned above..... I considered it karma catching up to him.

“Call the integrity hotline!”

Headquarters (supposedly to deal with these things in the stores they were not present to see) setup a special reporting hotline and web site. Team members were told that they could safely report anything unethical using those resources. (after all, we had an “open door policy” which was a big reason we supposedly didn’t need a union) They were told the report would go to someone at headquarters. Guess where it really went? You guessed it. Right back to upper management at the store to “deal with”.

“Congratulations, you are promoted to guest”

We have a saying at Target.... when you leave the company you are promoted to a “guest”. (customer)

Leaving the company was one of the best moves of my life. How I spent so much time there scares me. For the longest time I let my self be manipulated. I left the company suddenly. It was not planned. Basically I had too much of the corruption to stand it any longer. I refused to behave that way or treat people that way.

I decided NEVER to go back in to retail... or even management for that matter.

You may say “well that was just your experience at one store and at one company”, but the sad truth is that most of this crap goes on every day at other Target stores, Wal-Mart, and other mega retailers. Sure there are exceptions, but more often than not this is half the reason so many working retail are miserable.

I could write pages more. I have enough years and experience to fill a book up. Maybe one day I will.

These retailers are deathly afraid of unions. Essentially upper management at these places are a pack of bullies, and if one thing scares a bully it is a group of people standing up to them.

More importantly though I view it as just one more symptom of our sick country. Sick in the way other people treat each other. Sick in the way our corporations allow behavior like this. Sick in the way it is covered up. It weakens our economy and it weakens our soul as Americans.

And the fun starts!  You KNOW it's bullshit when the first comment is "Are you serious?!" 

Mythsaje  (1000+ posts)        Sat Oct-03-09 05:09 AM
Response to Original message
1. Seriously?
 Some of this is real, some is bullshit, and some of it is VERY specific to your location. Sexual harassment would never fly at my store, and, in fact, has gotten a few people fired on the spot. Sounds like your problem is not only your store management, but also your district and regional management.

There's some of this that's universal, but some of it sounds pretty weird. I've got my own complaints, but some of this is entirely over the top.

1 (1000+ posts)      Sat Oct-03-09 05:18 AM
Response to Reply #1
3. or perhaps, drama queen posters are drama queen posters. that is universal...

Oldtimeralso  (863 posts)      Sat Oct-03-09 05:10 AM
Response to Original message
2. Isn't Target owned by the French? n/t

OUCH.

BuelahWitch  (1000+ posts)      Sat Oct-03-09 08:03 AM
Response to Original message
16. I worked at Target during the Xmas season a few years back
 The first night I was there one of those college grad managers got in my face trying to get me to apply for a Target credit card. I just looked at her and said I wasn't going to take on new credit when I was only going to have a job for two months at the most. Then they paired me with a trainer who had an anger problem. Once I was away from Attina the Hun it wasn't so bad, but it was very hard on my feet and I had to quit.
I still think it was ludicrous how adamant the one girl was about having seasonal temps apply for credit...

 








 

[Chris]

What a whiny little crybaby *****.  "Waaah, I have a job!  Waaah, I'm expected to work!"  How old is this person?  You'd think it was the first job they've ever held.

[Chris_]

Ya know what DUmmie, even if everything you wrote is true it's how
Target decided to run their company and if you didn't like the way they
ran things you should have left a long time before you did and gone and
gotten a better job at a greyt retailer!


Like Wal-Mart. 

[JohnnyReb]

You’ll find Target loves to create special terminology for just about everything

Target must be the democrat training ground.

[MrsSmith]

It seems that not only did our upper managers get replaced by young people who had ZERO leadership experience, ZERO people skills, and ZERO competence they also happened to be the bottom of the barrel in college grads. People with BS “degrees” along the lines of basket weaving. Or the straight “D” average crowd. Basically the ones who couldn’t make it in the field their degree was in. It showed.

Hmmmm...I wonder what their DUmp names are?   

[blitzkrieg_17]

Attina the Hun

Is that Attila's older sister?

[Chris_]

Unless it has changed, Target is/was owned by Dayton-Hudson Corp. out of Minneapolis........formerly headed by the ex-DEMOCRAT Senator by the same name.....in DUmmie-speak a very "Blue Company"......

Ergo, how can this be true?    Where is their "living wage"?

doc

[The Village Idiot]

To begin with pay is incredibly low. At Target your starting pay is your starting pay. There is no negotiation. The highest level regular team member position (for example flow/stocking, presentation team) is only typically 50 cents higher in pay than the lowest regular team member position. (for example cashiers, sales floor)

On top of that no one in these positions is considered full time. The vast majority will average 20 hours a week with few exceptions

Sounds like a DU egalitarian dream

[BlueStateSaint]

My cantoring mentor, a pretty 26-year-old music teacher in a local school district, also works at Target--she worked there during the summer.  My wife, who goes to Target a fair amount, never crossed paths with her there.  She's managed to get herself labelled as one of the "reliable" employees there, or at least she tells me, and I have no reason to doubt her.  Now that school is back in session, she works weekends--this is her last for the year.  If she applies half the work ethic she does to her singing, well . . . they will move Heaven and Earth to keep her there for the next summer.

[LC EFA]

I decided NEVER to go back in to retail... or even management for that matter.

LOL.

"Hey , buddy , I hope you've got some spare change "

[NHSparky]

Oh, this assclown would be in the fetal position the first time they humped a ruck/got underway/loaded up on the C-141 ramp.

Fug 'em.