Serious Question to anyone who works in retail

[SolidSnake84]

I think you're missing my point. They can still be the #1 leader in retail and can afford to pay their employees more than minimum wage. They dont have to be shady with their employee health care, or lack therof.

Target is just as busy and they at least give people 8.25 an hour. I think Target could overtake WM if they had the # of locations.

I've read Sam Walton's book before. He pulls no punches. He was all about coming in, driving the "mom and pop" places out of business, and beginning his monopoly. With that said, he also beleived in treating his workers better..

[firstdown]

Originally Posted by SolidSnake84

I think you're missing my point. They can still be the #1 leader in retail and can afford to pay their employees more than minimum wage. They dont have to be shady with their employee health care, or lack therof.

Target is just as busy and they at least give people 8.25 an hour. I think Target could overtake WM if they had the # of locations.

I've read Sam Walton's book before. He pulls no punches. He was all about coming in, driving the "mom and pop" places out of business, and beginning his monopoly. With that said, he also beleived in treating his workers better..

Well maybe they are not shady with wanting to provide health care.
Wal-Mart Backs Drive to Make Companies Pay for Health Coverage - WSJ.com

[tryfuhl]

Originally Posted by SolidSnake84

I think you're missing my point. They can still be the #1 leader in retail and can afford to pay their employees more than minimum wage. They dont have to be shady with their employee health care, or lack therof.

Target is just as busy and they at least give people 8.25 an hour. I think Target could overtake WM if they had the # of locations.

I've read Sam Walton's book before. He pulls no punches. He was all about coming in, driving the "mom and pop" places out of business, and beginning his monopoly. With that said, he also beleived in treating his workers better..

most retail operations keep their workers under the state's overtime hours in order to not have to offer benefits, etc.. this is far from being exclusive to walmart

another company that I worked for, I was a manager working 40-50 hours a week, sometimes more.. and I was still listed as part time, which is actually criminal.. when I left I printed out a copy of my timesheets, etc.. I had only gone under 40 hours in the first 3 weeks that I was there.. I told them to either give me backpay in sick days and vacation time or it was going to the labor board, I got it.. ironically enough I ended up back there after 5 months with a promotion, 45pct pay raise, full benefits options from day 1, etc

[mooby]

Originally Posted by SolidSnake84

I think you're missing my point. They can still be the #1 leader in retail and can afford to pay their employees more than minimum wage. They dont have to be shady with their employee health care, or lack therof.

Target is just as busy and they at least give people 8.25 an hour. I think Target could overtake WM if they had the # of locations.

I've read Sam Walton's book before. He pulls no punches. He was all about coming in, driving the "mom and pop" places out of business, and beginning his monopoly. With that said, he also beleived in treating his workers better..

Woah no. Definitely not true. I worked at Target for 10 months up until last June, started on sales floor and finished on the planogram team, and they most definitely do not start people at 8.25 an hour. Sales floor started at 7.50 an hour (They do not give two shits what salary you ask, everybody starts at 7.50 unless you're hired as a team leader), presentation team started at 8/hr, and cashiers started at 7/hr.

As for why you only see 5 people operating lanes at any given time (usually not true on weekends, which is when more people hit the stores), well I found at Target it's because total hours given to workers are generated by sales determined at the same month of the last year (ex: hours right now are determined by sales in Jan. 09) as well as a mixture of other factors(All this determines cashier hours fyi), including how many credit applications you got people to apply for (if you didn't get people to apply for a Target based credit card your hours would be cut), what your cashier speed was, etc. All of the above determined how many hours a cashier would get a week, but the total pool of hours was determined by sales. And you could bet that on Black Friday every register would be open, mainly because more sales means you have more customers in the store and thus a need for more registers open.

Also at Target we practice backup, in which all sales floor personnel are cashier trained so that if lines get too long we will go up to help ease the congestion until it dies down. But if we didn't have a lot of people on the sales floor and the cashiers called for backup you'd see more managerial types get on register because we gotta have some people on the sales floor to assist customers and get work done.

The reason most big box retail stores have 14 or so registers is for situations like the holiday season and Black Friday, which is also when retailers make the most money. Thus you're more likely to see more lanes open between September and the end of December and if you go to a Target on a Tuesday in Mid January around 2 pm you'll probably only see 2 lanes open.