Thursday, June 29, 2006

Wal-mart's exploding tires lead to old, disabled gentleman's dehydration

I am 50 years old, disabled gentleman who lives in Roswell, NM. I am unable to write or type on a computer (don't even own one) and I have had a very big problem with some tires that were purchased at my local Walmart.

Two of the tires failed (exploded) on a trip from Roswell to the Carlsbad Caverns. This resulted in my son and I being stranded in the desert for over five hours while we waited for Walmat road service to handle the problem. I suffered severe heat exhaustion and dehydration which resulted in medical treatments over $11,000. I am still having problems and medical expenses because of it.

I have been told that posting this type story on your web site gets the attention of Walmat and they may do something about taking responsibility for my medical expenses. To date they have not.

Since I can not write, (my sister in Tennessee is sending this e-mail for me) is it possible for me to dictate my story over the phone so it can be put on your web site. I could also send a video tape explaining the entire situation, if I had an address. If you give me a phone number I would happy to call. You can send this information to me via phone, mail or by e-mailing it to my sister.

Bernie DeGruchy
technographics@tgphoto.com

Saturday, June 24, 2006

Norway dumps Wal-Mart stock for "systematic violations of human rights and labour rights"

"Norwegian Finance Minister Kristin Halvorsen's finance ministry officials cited "serious" and "systematic violations of human rights and labour rights" as its reason for pulling out of its Wal-Mart investments."

click link (below) for full story:

  • Norway Dumps Wal-Mart Stock (click here)
  • Scraping Employees Off the Floor

    At the walmart two towns over in Auburn, the floor crew that the store hired mixed bleach and ammonia to strip the wax on the floors. They don't speak English very much and I guess this wasn't coverered in their don't do lists.

    We all had to be evacuated from the building in the middle of winter, and they scraped some employee off the floor who had been knocked out for god knows how long from the fumes.

    Thejimms@wmconnect.com

    Wednesday, June 21, 2006

    Hello GSD&M

    Hello to GSD&M, Wal-Mart's advertising/marketing agency, who visited our site today.

    We'd be extremely pleased to be a part of any future advertising plans that might involve Wal-Mart.

    Please count us in.

    Friday, June 16, 2006

    Walmart Pledge

    Recently we at store 5466 had a meeting where a pledge to the customer was revealed. My coworkers and I had to stifle our laughing the entire time because it was so ridiculous and FAKE. I've included my version of the rank-and-file's pledge to the customer. Read and enjoy.

    Wal-Mart employee’s pledge to the customer:

    1. I will keep the shelves stocked with a never-ending array of erroneous product.

    2. I will have knowledge of only my area and will lie to you when given half the chance.

    3. I will ignore you and avoid you until you force me to help your lazy ass.

    4. I will pass you off on another department at every opportunity so that I may get my menial and repetitivework done.

    5. I will send you to the opposite end of the store if you are too stupid to read the signs or to first try andlocate the product yourself.

    6. I will keep you on perma-hold when you call, and when I return to the phone will give you a responsecontaining the word "no".

    7. I will, with you standing at the counter in front of me, pretend to talk to a manager on the phone when infact I've called my own department's extension and am speaking to the busy signal. My response will alwaysinclude some form of "I'm sorry, but..."

    8. I will, when faced with a situation I can neither avoid nor control, tell you "I don't know", smile sweetly andemploy any combination of the above in getting away from your stupid ass.

    Wednesday, June 14, 2006

    Walmartsucks.COM in Walmart's Hands

    Unfortunately, as of last week, walmartsucks.COM has changed ownership.

    It is now in the hands of the Wal-mart empire. Prior to being owned by Wal-mart, it was a freeedom-of-expression gripe site.

    If anyone knows how this came about (if the domain name expired or was sold) please email us with the information.

    Thank you:

    TheManager@WalmartSucks.org

    Monday, June 12, 2006

    Rats and what comes out of them

    You wouldn't beleve how many rats we got at walmart. Ever since we started stocking food. I've been there almost twenty years. I never saw rats like since we got food. Rat crap everywhere. Take a sniff of the boxes of cereal some time. Whats it smell like.

    I guess rats like food and some of them walk on two legs. Crazy like it is there's our manager who squeeks like a rat too. I know because i drove a cart over his foot this one time.

    "life sucks...then you die... then you work at walmart

    I do work at walmart... and it SUCKS , I like your site a lot, but I think you could use a better slogan, at my store (the hell hole where I work) the employees (myself included) often toss around the fraise "Every Day Low Standards"..."Always walmart".

    A lady I work with once said "life sucks...then you die...then you work at walmart" my response to this was "life sucks...then you work at walmart...then life sucks more...then you kill your self" my appendage to this is "then you go to hell and work for Satan ( aka Sam Walton)...but your still glad your not working for walmart".

    Thanks for a kick ass site anonymous

    P.S. I'll have a boat load of sh-t to say about walmart, once I'm out'a there, and working at my new job. Sure my new job isn't as close by, but it pays WAY better and has benefits so good, it's like I died and went to Canada.

    Monday, June 05, 2006

    How am I supposed to sell ammo while mixing paint?

    I work at a reasonably new (one and a half year old) store, and it's already crumbled and become disgusting. Even the people who liked working when the store opened hate it passionately now. Let me start with management. We have 3 assistants and the store manager right now, down from 5 assistants at the beginning. One quit to go to back to school (good choice!) and one got transferred because he broke the "No socializing with lowly hourly associates" rule by abandoning his wife and children on Christmas when he ran away with a department manager to have an affair.

    Gotta love the WalMart drama. Two of the remaining managers are ok and I actually like one because she's rude right back to rude customers, but the other one is the hugest jackass I've ever met. He was my SWAS leader for almost a year after I transferred to the floor from cash, and I can't stand him. He has a terrible combover and greasy hair, and he's just plain creepy. He likes sneaking up behind workers and shouting things like "Boo!" Plus, he's just an ass. Once I handed him a time-off sheet for ONE DAY and he just stared at me. Didn't say a word, just stood there and stared at me for a full minute before I said "...it's only one day." Then he frowned and walked away, still without a word.

    When people do manage to finally get days off, he goes into the computer and overrides the day off to give you a shift anyways, or writes it in on the schedule! I'm graduating this year, and so are many others in the store, so we all booked graduation weekend off around February. But what do we see when we check out the schedule? Shifts written in under "N/A: OT"!! Then management has the nerve to tell us that we need to show up for the shifts since we've already been scheduled!!! How about NO?!?

    One of my managers actually told me that overriding days off is common, if they think they the reason we booked it off for is "not important". One said that she'll book people on random off days and will only take the shift away if she deems their reason to be acceptable. Obviously it is if the day was given off in the first place! Oh, and once I asked for my availibility to be changed (I was taking one evening out) so that I could have more time for my schoolwork, and my manager said "Isn't Walmart more important than school?" And once when I asked for a weekend off, he said "Don't you want to work for Walmart?" like he was threatening to fire me because I wanted time off.
    Another bit of sleazy management: when I switched from cashier to floor, my manager didn't tell me about the 30 cent pay cut until AFTER I had been hired and had accepted the job. Then he refused to talk to me about my wage for about a week. I asked him if he was allowed to just cut my pay without informing me it would happen, and the next day I get called to the manager's office and get a "merit raise" to bring me back to what I was making before. Sounds like I caught him doing something wrong and he was trying to stop me from asking questions.

    My store is yet another Walmart that is horribly understaffed. I'm sick of covering 6 departments all at once. Managers get mad at you if you don't answer a call for sports desk, but how exactly am I supposed to sell ammo if 1) I'm mixing paint, 2) There's a lineup at the fish tanks I have to attend to already, 3) 9 customers are asking me questions and wanting carryouts, and 4) I'm too young to sell ammo! Here's a thought, why not schedule more than 2 associates for the floor during the week's busiest day! The one day there was lots of coverage, they pulled out 3 floor associates to cook burgers at the safety bbq, so that I was all by myself again, swamped by customers. They need to hire new people really badly, but refuse to hire new people so associates just shift positions and cause a new shortage in a different department.

    In addition, my department manager is a fool. He doesn't do ANYTHING, so I'm supposed to do his crap for him during the weekend. The flags in my department were 6 MONTHS OLD before I finally got sick of looking at them and took them down, and then my SWAS manager got mad at me for it, because apparently having ancient flags with wrong prices because the rollback ended 4 months ago is better than having no flags at all. Then the new flags I made sat there for 3 months before I ripped them down again, and now my department has no flags.

    I work in Pets, and the tanks are so filthy and diseased that I'm afraid to touch the water. I clean them as well as I can on the weekend, but there's always at least 2 days of dead fish buildup when I come back. He doesn't scoop the deads, and if he does he lets them sit in the sink and rot and stink. We have an incredibly high fish death rate, because all he does to "help" the diseased fish is sprinkle in aquarium salt until you can smell salt 10 feet away from the tanks, and he'll put the new healthy fish in the same tank as diseased fish without medicating them and then be confused when the new ones all die. I do tests like leave a particular dead fish in a tank it doesn't belong in to see if he'll scoop it, and it will still be there when I come back 5 days later. I've made many complaints about this to the store manager, but nothing has come of it because in my store, department managers are perfect and favoured no matter how crappy they are.

    To add to this, associates are encouraged to not take their breaks so that they can keep working, one manager threatened to fire an employee if she made a complaint to the district manager about her UNFAIR d-day (they claim she did something she didn't), and management doesn't give a crap about associates because they won't let you go home even if you're throwing up. I'm counting down the days until I can quit this hellhole.

    I need this job for the next two months because Walmart has already squashed most other employment in my town, so I'll pass on giving my name and store number.

    ziggystardust013@hotmail.com

    Friday, June 02, 2006

    Hit in the head by falling gerbil houses

    I have sadly been employed in a Wal-Mart store locally in Kansas for nearly eight years now. I know its my own fault taking the punishment managerial charlatans and frauds can heap while maintaining their innocence.

    But still for every time they manage to destroy your morale there are those very few times everything comes together to be a simple paying minimum wage crap job. Those are very few and far between though now.

    Where can I begin to criticize. Maybe start with the fact that We recieve way too much freight than a twenty-four hour store should. Every store recieves large amounts of freight, but this one loves to get large amounts of merchandise that has no where to go.

    The shelves are overfilled by earlier shift to the point they can't be stocked and probably cause problems for the shoppers who in managers own words "always gotta bitch about something" like freight stacked so high its toppling onto the floors. I've been told there is no space in back for my freight so supposedly I have to put it above the soda aisles.

    I have a limited amount of time sadly and no help since again in managers words I have to ask for help to do what is most obviously a two man job so this turns into a feverish escapade every day. Now we even get so much unusable freight its become impossible to put stuff above the aisle and they've started cramming it up there. This makes pulling freight from the shelf a chore of constantly shifting the merchandise, but supposedly this Okay since there is none of my merchandise in the back.

    Speaking of the top shelves or Risers, there are rules that are mainly tossed out when they need to get rid of merchandise. Unfortunately the shelves are rickety. Sure they look solid but one good shove to put some merchandise on the shelf and these things shake like grass in the wind.

    One day these things shook so much I was hit in the head by falling Gerbil Houses to which I stupidly didn't report to management but the first time I was hurt on the job the situation was turned around in their favor to the fact that I shouldn't have been pulling a thousand pounds of water softner salt down an incline and straight into a pallet of magazines.

    Speaking of the recieving crew with the overages in freight this causes them to work too fast and there is no real safety in the six foot tall pallets. When you pull these onto a floor filled with browsing slow customers this could cause a problem with freight falling on customers. Management again "They shouldn't have been so close to the pallet" like a customer knows how to shop properly.

    This is from a company that prides itself on safety as well.

    I heard recently as well that the company is trying to crack down on unwanted clutter. Hope it happens soon because in order to get rid of my freight earlier shifts are piling boxes on top of other merchandise. Theres so much of it they're piling it in small corners of the floor of the aisles that are so small two customers can't fit down the aisle without causing cramping in the aisles.

    One last thing favortism which is rampant. There isn't supposed to be such a thing in Wal-Marts little society but it happens. Every night there are a few select associates (employees to people who don't want to feel special) who stand around talking and slowly working because they know they'll always get help. This is painful when I'm a few aisles down trying to dodge customers on my aisles (two aisles for one man) to stock the shelves and at the end of the night when I'm beaten and battered I have to help them clean up their work whether I want to or not.

    This is also painful because I've seen managers just standing around with them talking all chatty at the begining of the night. When I stop for a short chat with my department manager this one manager is on me like its the most heinous act I could possibly do.

    Theres just so much nonsense in this store I can't believe they sit around just building more in order to make more money. The company says they want to corner the market, but look at it my way.

    Six stores in a twenty mile area, this cuts down on a stores earning. A store not earning cuts its employees cutting wages for the company. So they're really getting more money for the company while keeping stores overstocked with needless freight and under valued employees that are kept in order by two managers whose job seems to be to defend the managers and keep employees working. If there was a god Wal-Mart would be wiped off the face of the earth by some major event. Just get rid of Bentonville to beautify Arkansas a little bit too.