I'm really bored so I'm gonna talk about that last job I stayed a long time with. If you haven't guessed by now, it was with Walmart. --and if you really want to get technical about it, I was really with them for more like 8 years overall if you don't count the time I spent on and off. I had to break away from them a few times moving from Florida to Texas and back again and wasn't able to transfer, but always managed to get re-hired by them almost immediately after.
"Walmart!?" you might say. "Why, that's a terrible company! No wonder it was such ****! Why didn't you just get a better job?" you might ask. Well, here's the kicker: When you have no money at all and you're desperate for work, you have to apply everywhere. I must have sent out hundreds of applications, praying to a God I don't believe in (yup there's the problem right there God ******* hates me for not loving him ayup) for anything better than Walmart. (My favorite part about all of this is spending hours filling out psych evaluation questions where I must pretend to be a mindless subservient robot in all of my answers.)
I managed to get into a few interviews with some other places, like an Amscot in Orlando. It was a two hour drive from home, but I shaved off all my hair and put on deodorant and a tie and my best impression of a fine, upstanding gentleman. Well, like all other non-Walmart interviews, it ended with a lot of fake smiles and politeness and a "we'll call you" as I walked back to my car, humiliated, wondering why I had just done that to myself and wasted so much precious fuel to get there and back.
You see, here in reality, finding a job is a heck of a lot like finding a girlfriend. First you need to look for someone who's actually looking for someone. Then you need to meet all of their standards and needs. Then you need compete and be better than all the hundreds of other people who are after the same job. You need consent from the employer to take up a job with them. You can't just take from them and hope you don't leave a mark. What does that leave you with? It leaves you with Walmart. That's what it leaves you with. When nobody else will call you, Walmart will.
It doesn't matter who you are. If you get a call from Walmart for an interview you can bet your *** they are going to hire you on the spot, as soon as you arrive. You get an interview, but it doesn't even matter what you say or how you answer the questions. They need someone RIGHT NOW and it might as well be you. The interview itself is always the hardest part, because they'll ask you all the same kinds of questions as anyone else, but you know that they aren't taking you seriously-- that they just need another warm body to fill a hole with-- but you do your best to play along and act like it's all serious business before they ask you how much you think your pay should be like you have some kind of say in that and you almost lose your composure to all the white-hot rage you are feeling underneath.
From this point on the experience kind of varies by location. Here's some advice for anyone who finds themselves forced to work for Walmart: Don't learn how to do anything. Don't offer to cut keys, or mix paint, or issue fishing licenses. When they hand you a Telxon portable computer/scanner device, tell them you don't have a login set up with it yet (because you probably actually won't anyway.) Just don't. You will take on so much more responsibility and nothing else will change. If you do this, on top of all your regular work, you will be paged constantly to hurry all over the store to take care of impatient and ungrateful customers who all feel they're entitled to being treated like ******* royalty by you, the lowly Walmart peasant. You will get payed exactly the same as you would as the guy who has been there for ten years who never touched any of that ****.
You won't get treated any better, and most of all, you WILL NOT MOVE UP. If all of the management in your store suddenly died together in a fiery crash aboard the same airplane, YOU are not the person to replace them. They will bring in people from outside the store, even outside the company. You are a peasant. They are nobles. You should be happy and feel honored to be making as much as you do because you are all apart of one big happy Walmart family-- family in the kind of sense that you are their dog or cat, and you are serving people who are better than you.
I could write about this all day, but I have better things to do. Not really