Walmart is the largest private employer in The United States and recently, for a short time, I was a member of that large swath of the working class.

Late in 2024, I was looking for some temporary work to make extra money. I looked up some temp holiday jobs and found one, making about fifteen bucks an hour for about twenty hours a week when Walmart chimed in. I had applied for a job as an overnight stocker just as a lark. But the job paid more than the temp job and it was full time as well, so I took them up on their offer since I could use the extra money.

What kind of job did I get? Walmart stores are usually so big and serve so many people that it’s necessary to stock up the place overnight while the store is closed, ergo the overnight stocker position.

I have worked retail before, and I’ve done plenty of warehouse work in the past. I’ve also done a lot of manual labor, so I was not worried that I wouldn’t be able to handle the tasks. I’ve also worked for corporate companies before, places run by big, giant mega corporations, so I knew how impersonal they could be, especially when it came to the way they treated their ground-level employees

That being said, after having worked at Walmart there were a lot of things about the job that didn’t surprise me, but some other things that did.

It was pretty easy to get the job. I stopped by and chatted with one of the supervisors who showed me around the store and quickly described the stocking procedure. He then introduced me to the big boss in charge of the graveyard shift. Between the two of them they did not ask me even one interview question. I volunteered my experience working in a large warehouse, and how I told them I knew how hectic the work could get. They simply signed me up and that was that. The whole “interview”” process only took a few minutes.

It was really telling, that they didn’t bother asking me any questions or vetting me even in the slightest, before hiring me.

I attended one daytime orientation with a few other new hirees. The man who talked to us was one of the upper echelon managers, and the orientation went pretty much as I suspected it would: employee policy, store policy, company policy… They emphasized that the ongoing onboarding and orientation involved watching a lot of videos about company policy, procedures, and store policy, which I did sporadically during the first few weeks of working there.

Despite the wide variety of merchandise in the store, from hardware to toys to clothes to auto and electronics, the main job of graveyard stockers was groceries. The work shift started at 10 PM with a team meeting in the supervisor’s office. They would talk about how much stock there was to put away and they would usually assign people to various sections of the store. Sometimes they were specific, and other times we were instructed to simply “pick an aisle” and work that section.

I learned that groceries is Walmart’s Biggest money maker of all their departments. At least that’s what the bosses told us. I didn’t find that hard to believe. We were constantly restocking the very same shelves we had filled up the night before.

There were three main departments: groceries, dairy, and frozen. Early on they let us know that frozen was the most critical department, as was emphasized on one of the training videos which pointed out that quickly stocking frozen foods was critical. In fact, shortly after I was hired, quite a few of us were sent to the frozen section, which consisted of three aisles of freezers. We were instructed to put away the ice cream products first, as they were the most perishable items. We were then to stock the rest of the frozen products, the frozen bags of fruit, the TV dinners, the frozen pizza, and so forth, and that evening we were not allowed to take our lunch break until all the frozen products had been put away.
More on that frozen foods policy later in this essay.

Sink or Swim

It’s an all-too common policy with all kinds of businesses large and small: toss the new employee right into the job, even if they don’t know some of the finer and not-so-finer details of the position.

Picking up a box and finding where it went involved, at first, looking around the shelves for its spot. This could be fairly daunting. If you’re putting away spaghetti sauce, there’s a dizzying array of brands and flavors and styles of sauces, so much so that you could spend a few minutes trying to find the right spot.

Eventually a new hire showed me how to use the Walmart employee app to scan a product’s barcode and find out exactly where it went. It worked fairly well, but would sometimes get it wrong. Another employee told me I was using the wrong search feature, and showed me how to open the correct scanner for a product search.

The point is no one explicitly showed me how to use the app to find product positions. It would be a few days later before a supervisor instructed me to double check to see if a product was being used in a feature, a mid-aisle display or what they called an end cap, the displays at the end of an aisle, meaning the item in question had more than one location.

What Walmart should do, and just about every other business out there should also do, is give employees comprehensive one-on-one training before being launched into the wilderness. They should get carefully and thoroughly schooled by a veteran or a supervisor of the place so that they aren’t lost, confused, or simply having a difficult time figuring things out. But many employers are not interested in going that extra mile for their employees. They would rather chuck them into the game to try and get as much work out of them as possible.

Gathering information about that particular store was always piecemeal and haphazard. One employee warned me that the managers were watching us while we worked on the security cameras, and that we had to be careful. I was informed by another Walmart veteran, who had been working there for years, that most of the cameras didn’t work, and as for the ones that did, “You can’t see shit on ’em anyways!”

I also got schooled on other details that were never mentioned to me before being put out on the floor, such as to never stand on a wooden pallet or you would get blasted by a supervisor. A minor detail that was not as critical as another piece of advice I got; Never stand in front of a working cardboard baler. The supervisor who gave me a quick two-minute training lesson on how to use the baler never mentioned that critical piece of information. Another employee told me that was the one place you did not want to be if the machine malfunctioned.

What’s the Policy?

I mentioned the frozen food policy on my first week there, how we had to stock it quickly. That policy did not last long. Occasionally several of us were ordered to stock frozen foods and to make it a priority, but on other days they treated frozen foods as if they were any other grocery items.

On some days frozen food items would sit out for hours, sometimes for nearly the entire shift, before anyone got around to putting them away. One night I spent nearly my entire shift putting away ice cream products which, if you remember, was supposed to be a priority stock, since it was the most perishable of the frozen foodstuffs. There was a lot of ice cream that night, and most of it spent hours on the floor, being as I was the lone employee putting the stock away. During this ice cream incident, I informed several team leads that I was the only one stocking ice cream, basically telling them I needed help to get it put away in a timely manner. They never assigned any other personnel for the task.

Other policies changed as well. The very tops of the shelves were reserved for overstock, and we were warned that mere employees were not authorized to shelve any products on the top overstock. A few weeks later, we were told to put overstock on the top shelves, being as the warehouse overstock was piling up.

For each shift we had two paid fifteen minute breaks and one unpaid hour of lunch. At first, the timing of lunch and break was more-or-less variable. Later on, they demanded that everyone take their breaks and lunch at the same time in order to coordinate the shift work.

There were other examples, and they may seem like small details, (Except for the whole frozen food thing,) but it emphasized the shifting changes in procedure. The haphazard policy changes made things rather confusing for myself and all of the other employees.

Ghetto Store

Walmart is a place where a lot of poor people shop. Say what you will about the place, they do have low prices, low enough that people struggling to make ends meet shop there quite often. The cost of their Great Value brands is especially attractive for people living check-to-check who have to scrape by to put food on the table.

(One also thinks about the ‘People of Walmart’ pics, basically a class minstrel show where people can delight in making fun of the poor and destitute.)

The people there are very working class, and the place got pretty “ghetto”, as the saying goes. Young people would be having loud and very inappropriate conversations in the break room, talking loudly about sexual subjects and violence, the kind of workplace banter that would never be tolerated in most other workplace settings. The break room was also a place of some chaos. Trash and litter were always all over the place, all of the time: crumpled paper, bits of uneaten food, empty soda cans… It was oftentimes as bad as a middle school cafeteria after lunchtime.

The store itself was not much better. The emphasis for our work duties was to get the stock on the shelves, as quickly as possible, of course, and to “zone” our aisles. That is, to make things look as neat and orderly as possible.

But it was only the aisles that were supposed to look near and nice. The floor and the general store itself were another matter. It was not unusual to see pallets piled with product blocking aisles, or sitting in the middle of walkways. Torn boxes, piles of dust and dirt, and half-finished boxes of stock would be lying around the sales floor. There was also a lot of neglect when it came to the cleanliness of the freezers and shelves. Random junk was always found on the shelves, behind the products, and just hanging out. It was usually products that were left there by customers who had the habit of carrying things around the store and leaving them in random places: bits of food, toys, clothing, and all kinds of other items that were way out of place. I once found a bright red bra nestled in between packages of toilet paper, for example.

Random junk left around the store by customers was just a fact of life. I’ve seen that at all of the retail stores I’ve worked at. The condition of other parts of the place were another matter. I was once packing an open refrigeration shelf with packets of cheese. The floor of the freezer was a plastic grate, in which you could see the underlying shelf. Underneath the grate was all kinds of trash and crud: bits of plastic, bits of goo from old food, dust, dirt, faded stains from God-knows-what, and occasionally things such as screws, bolts, and one time a lost box cutter. It was quite obvious that it had not been cleaned or maintained for a very long time. As I stocked the cheese, I tried my best to cover up the decidedly unpalatable debris underneath.

There was also the attitude of the employees. I said we worked when the store was closed which was only partially true. We started work one hour before the store closed, and we were still working for at least another hour after the store opened in the morning. It was not unusual for team leads or supervisors to be dressing us down and growling at us right in front of customers. The presence of paying customers did not change their tone or attitude one iota. I also heard plenty of employees engaging in inappropriate conversations on the floor with customers around. I even heard one employee shout “Who stole my fucking cart?” nearly at the top of his lungs, close to seven AM, when there were more than a few early morning customers in the store.

(I also got blasted by a very loud and aggressive colleague during open hours. More on that later in this story!)

Pressure – Toxic Leadership

One morning when I was coming into work, I was walking into the store at the same time as one of my supervisors. I said “Hello. How’s it going?”

He did not say anything, he did not look in my direction, he did not respond to me at all, even though he was right next to me. He just kept staring straight ahead with a stern look on his face.

The point was made. I was just an employee, and underling, and associating with me was not in the playbook.

And that was not an anomalous incident. That was the prevailing attitude among most of the higher ups. Some were a bit more personable than others, but overall the line was made very clear.

The times when team leads or supervisors said anything even remotely positive were so far and few between that I can clearly remember them, and can also count their collected positive comments on one hand after working there for two months. The boss’s main form of communication was nonstop blasting. With only one or two exceptions, the team meetings were the bosses complaining that the collected workers for not being fast enough with stocking, and not making the aisles clean and orderly enough, which created a familiar workers’ conundrum: being ordered to work faster while taking the time to pay attention to detail. The idea that one meant sacrificing the other was completely immaterial to the higher ups, something I’ve had to deal with too many times before in other such work environments.

They really dogged us one night, complaining, as usual, that we weren’t working fast enough. In fact, the terse manager decided to time my putting away a carton. It was one of the situations where I first had to locate the right spot for the product, and then move a lot of other product out of the way, as it was crowded with overflow from its shelf neighbor.

He waved his timer in my face, telling me I should’ve done the carton in a minute. I came in at one minute and fifty eight seconds.

I didn’t say anything or respond to him. I was not his only victim, however. He did the same thing to several other people.

I could’ve pleaded my case, letting him know that no two cartons were the same. Earlier I had stocked three cartons in a minute, because they were all in the same section and I knew exactly where they were supposed to go. But others were more problematic, requiring more organizing, or searching for the right spot. Oftentimes shelf locations were crowded with overflow from the next section, and frequently other employees would stick the wrong product in the wrong location, meaning you had to take the time to move it. It happened often enough to significantly slow down the work, for myself and everyone else. Myself and a colleague tried explaining this to our higher-ups, but we only got blasted for our reports. They just repeated their usual refrain: we needed to be faster.

The pressure to keep moving was really ramped up on that particular night. But by this time, after having worked there for a few weeks, I was convinced there was no way we could ever meet their expectations, that no matter how hard we worked they would still come down on us, complaining that we simply weren’t good or fast enough. Blasting their employees for not being good enough was the default.

It was pretty much summed up by a young man who had been hired shortly before I came onto the night shift, one of my other colleagues who also had a cell phone timer waved in his face. “I used to like this job,” he said, “but now I hate it.”

Some of my colleagues were harder working than others, and some were more conscientious about their work, but every single one of my fellow night stockers worked. Even if some were not quite as good or as fast as other workers, no one on that floor ever stopped moving. Yet they were constantly getting blasted by the higher ups, constantly getting verbally beaten up and scolded by the stern faced team leads and supervisors, the kind who completely ignore their lessers when you try to tell them good morning.

Which leads one to wonder, what was the point of trying to do a good job? The way a few of my colleagues went about their jobs, I basically assumed that they had given up trying to please the bosses. There was simply no point.

Among this toxic work environment I did get one very pointed surprise at one point. A few weeks into the job, a young colleague who was hired around the same time as myself told me something rather bizarre while we were stocking the shelves. He said all of the bosses had been talking about what an awful worker I was and that they would have to fire me soon. He emphasized this by adding “All of the bosses are saying that.” (Meaning not just the supervisors but the team leads as well.)

I was quite taken aback by his report. While I wasn’t as good as the veterans who had been working there for years, I knew I was far from being the worst worker. If they were grading on a curve at all there were plenty of others who were far slower than myself. (The speed of our work being their primary concern.) I also paid more attention to what I was doing than others. I didn’t open cartons of stock unless I checked the location first, making sure that there was enough room for the items. If a product location was already full the new stock would be branded overstock, and you had to place that product aside. I was also careful not to misplace items, which was obviously not a habit practiced by many of my overnight colleagues. I never witnessed the crimes but I always found evidence, routinely finding products stocked in the wrong location.

I could only assume that my young coworker was telling me that by design, rather than it being a happenstance occurrence. I hypothesized that either the bosses made sure he was within earshot when they made such remarks, knowing that it would most likely get back to me, or they had explicitly instructed him to tell me that as a way to motivate me.

Or maybe they had actually said and meant such a thing and he did happen to overhear it. Though that’s the one scenario that’s the least plausible. I was harangued on the job by supervisors and team leads all the time, but not more so than all of the others. I was never formally called to task for my work performance, or given a write up, or threatened with termination, which is what should have happened if they were really that displeased with my performance.

Regardless of what the case may be in regards to all of the bosses thinking I was a crappy worker report, it only highlights the completely toxic atmosphere of that workplace. Even though I knew it was a job I was not going to keep, I still worried about getting in trouble, and possibly being let go, thus losing out on the extra income I was hoping to make. As much as I knew I would not stick with that job for very long, I still needed and wanted the temporary income.

The anxiety over getting dismissed was, by all the evidence, irrational. The main boss kept talking about how they were short-handed, and even told us that If we had any friends looking for work to encourage them to apply. Even though I was only there for a few months, not one person was ever dismissed, transferred to another department, (as they often threatened to do,) or even disciplined for their work.

The toxic atmosphere, the constant verbal beat downs and threats by the managers, and the over-the-shoulder rankles created the kind of poisonous atmosphere that kept their workers on the edge of anxiety. At least in most cases. A few veterans seemed to have gotten used to the strenuous Workplace, having realized that they would have to do something extra heinous to actually get fired from the overnight staff. At least that’s what I assume.

The conundrum of their employee practices is that they beat on their employees to try and get them to work as much and as fast as possible in order to maximize the cost of those employees.The non-stop pressure to work faster was relentless.

At the same time it was emphasized to us that they needed more people to work the night shift, yet because of the toxic workplace they have a pretty decent turnover, and the very nature of the job kept people from applying. When the main boss said I should tell any friends of mine who were looking for work about the job, I knew that was the last thing I would do. I did have local friends who were indeed looking for work, but I would never recommend that job to them.

Quitting

I worked my last shift as a night stocker without informing anyone that I was no longer going to be working there. I had already secured another job and I basically worked a gratuitous last day to get the extra day’s pay. I also felt that, even though it was a pretty awful experience, I needed to have one farewell day at my “temporary” job.

Knowing that it would be the last time I would have to suffer under the glare and spite of my higher ups really took the edge off. I didn’t feel the pressure nearly as much. I still worked, but without the must-get-it-done-by-tomorrow stress. I was scolded by one team lead who asked me why one aisle was taking so long and I just shrugged.

To top it all off, right as I was working my very last hour, a colleague came up to me to blast me about something. He started off with “What is your problem?” He then proceeded to shout at me in a loud and angry voice that he had told me to do something regarding the frozen food aisle. I was completely lost, not having any recollection of him having informed me of anything, and I really didn’t know what exactly he was talking about as he growled about some esoteric stocking details that were lost on me.

In true Walmart fashion he did this when the store had already opened and there were customers walking back and forth, putting the grand and ever-present emphasis on the stark lack of professionalism in that work environment. Not exactly a good look to have employees yelling at each other in front of customers.

Not that I yelled back. I simply looked at him as he ranted away. I said nothing in response, letting him wear himself out before he finally stomped off in a huff.

When I got home, I texted the head of personnel to let him know I was giving notice, that I would not be working any more shifts at Walmart. I decided not to tell any of my supervisors beforehand that I was not coming back. Given the toxic nature of the environment, I wanted to avoid any harsh confrontations with the higher ups. If I told them I was no longer going to be working there, I’m almost certain they would have heaped quite a bit of abuse upon me, or might have kicked me off of the job on the spot. I simply wished to avoid that kind of confrontation. It just wasn’t worth it.

I never heard back from anyone regarding my termination notice or of my absence from the work shifts. Not a text, not a phone call, not even an email. Not a word.

Which Walmart am I talking about? Where exactly did I experience this working class tale of angst and frustration? I’m not going to say. I know I had this job at a specific Walmart, but knowing what I know about how these kinds of corporate businesses operate I have no doubt that the same kind of atmosphere exists at all of them. It’s the corporate structure. It’s the nature of the faceless company that cannot even contemplate the lessers of their company as people. All they see is what they can get out of them, how far they can push them, and how they can maximize their profits, regardless of what it does to their minions. As I said earlier, a factor in my bosses toxic attitudes came from their bosses, the store and regional managers who would give them hell, and lean on them to pressure their workers even more.

It’s a toxic company, and it fosters toxic workplaces, across all of their stores.

As I was working for Walmart during this time, I came across the Busta Rhymes Walmart commercial, the one emphasizing Walmart’s holiday season services. The commercial shows happy Walmart employees, dancing and singing while wearing those blue vests and those flimsy name tags. It just looks ridiculous to me, the idea of jubilant Walmart workers. It’s so far removed from reality as to make the commercial a sinister and crass piece of propaganda.

It was not difficult for me to separate myself from Walmart. I have college degrees and the kind of expertise that makes my job search far easier than many people in the USA. Sadly, many of my colleagues most likely did not have such options. Too many people in this country put up with the abuse, poor pay, and toxic working conditions because they have little to no choice. They must work to keep up their paycheck-to-paycheck existence.

The hard working people of this country deserve better, much better, than what Walmart and so many other corporations like it have to offer its employees.