People of Walmart

After two weeks of day labor, we were despairing of ever having steady work over the summer. Strategic Staffing, the temp agency we had been relying on, had thus far proven uninformed, unreliable, and incompetent. When we finally were informed of jobs remodeling a Walmart, we were told to report for work at 5am on Sunday, as our jobs were supposed to run from 5am to 2pm Sunday through Thursday. Grant, Dave, Matt, and I shuffled to the back of the largely deserted Walmart and began our search for a manager. After ten minutes, we were finally informed by the manager that our jobs were actually scheduled for 5am to 2pm Monday through Friday. Although excited by the slightly more amenable schedule, we were all exasperated at being misinformed and at our unnecessary 4am wakeup call.

Chris, who was also supposed to be working with us at Walmart, was somehow overlooked by Strategic Staffing and so continued day labor for another week. Before his eventual integration into the Walmart crew, he expressed his concern that he was sinking into the comfort of rhythm and complacency. I often feel the same way and fear that I’ll fall into a comfortable but ultimately unchallenging and unrewarding life. In The Departed, Matt Damon’s character says to his girlfriend, “If we're not gonna make it, it's gotta be you that gets out, cause I'm not capable. I'm fucking Irish, I'll deal with something being wrong for the rest of my life.” I know I have this tendency so I have to be constantly vigilant.

Our first few days were mostly silent drudgery, tearing down, building, and stocking shelves. We would communicate only to receive commands. Breakthrough came in the form of conversation. Working alongside our manager, Bunny, I got the opportunity to strike up conversation and begin asking questions about her life. I began to realize that, far from my low expectations of a Walmart employee, Bunny was an exceptional woman. Beyond being a single mother of three and a full-time Assistant Manager at Walmart, she played three club sports, coached youth basketball, and was a voracious reader. Over the next few weeks we developed a rapport that led to mutual respect. She quickly realized that, far from her low expectations of temporary workers, we were intelligent and could handle increased responsibility. Surprisingly, we began to take pride in our work and take ownership of projects. Did I just spend three hours laughing while working at the “Evil Empire”? Weird.

Perhaps it’s the social equivalent of Newton’s third law of motion, but life seems to work in dichotomies. After a few weeks of work, we completed the remodel and were assigned to the Platte Walmart to work on a much larger project. Rather than a manageable group, 50 temp workers were corralled, cajoled, and coerced in an attempt to completely overhaul a store that had not been remodeled since Clinton’s first presidency. Our task masters fostered disempowerment through what seemed to be a carefully concocted mixture of a lack of communication, trust, or respect. Our motivation was daily drained by the incompetence of our superiors. It became almost a daily occurrence that we would receive an order, protest that the assignment should either be done another way or not done at all for any number of valid reasons, be rebuffed, and then 30 minutes later be proven prescient as we would inevitably be tasked with redoing or undoing our previous action. One of the most difficult moments for me was when one of our bosses, a 23-year-old with a GED and three children, reprimanded me as “an idiot” for not putting in a shelf correctly. It was much more difficult than I had imagined not to snap a reply about how I must have missed shelf-building 101 while I was getting my MBA.

Morale slowly dripped from our bodies leaving little puddles of broken spirit whenever we congregated for too long. We all struggled in vein to remain awake and alive, but Dave alone seemed to excel at remaining in high spirits. Although he didn’t always succeed, he always asked himself, “How can I have a positive attitude today?” He had set the goal for himself that, by the end of our time at Walmart, he would be offered full-time employment. Dave understood the importance of motivation and taught me that you can give your best no matter the circumstances.

Working at Walmart was awful. Doing awful things can be great. Climbing the educational ladder often puts distance between me and large swaths of people and experiences. I’m very certain that the average MBA graduate doesn’t challenge themselves in the ways that I was challenged working at Walmart. Spending so much time working with others every day gave me a lot of time to be myself. Spending a lot of time also working by myself, I was also able to analyze what being myself was. Where do I find fulfillment? How do I motivate myself? What are my goals? What is my attitude towards work? What is my attitude towards my bosses? I struggled with so many questions, but as with most of the summer I think that the struggle is just the first victory.