Nickel and Dimed: Undercover in Low-Wage USA (17 page)

Now I don't need Wal-Mart anymore, I think, although it turns out they need me. Roberta calls to tell me, in fulsome tones, that my “drug screen is fine” and that I'm due in tomorrow at three for orientation. The test result does not have the desired effect of making me feel absolved or even clean. In fact I feel irritated and can't help wondering whether I could have gotten the same result without spending $30 and three days on detox and bloat. I ask her what the pay is—it should be noted that she does not offer this information herself—and when she says $7 an hour, I think: OK, case closed. But I decide, in the spirit of caution and inquiry, to attend the Wal-Mart orientation anyway. This turns out, for unforeseen physiological reasons, to be another major mistake.

For sheer grandeur, scale, and intimidation value, I doubt if any corporate orientation exceeds that of Wal-Mart. I have been told that the process will take eight hours, which will include two fifteen-minute breaks and one half-hour break for a meal, and will be paid for like a regular shift. When I arrive, dressed neatly in khakis and clean T-shirt, as befits a potential Wal-Mart “associate,” I find there are ten new hires besides myself, mostly young and Caucasian, and a team of three, headed by Roberta, to do the “orientating.” We sit around a long table in the same windowless room where I was interviewed, each with a thick folder of paperwork in front of us, and hear Roberta tell once again about raising six children, being a “people person,” discovering that the three principles of Wal-Mart philosophy were the same as her own, and so on. We begin with a video, about fifteen minutes long, on the history and philosophy of Wal-Mart, or, as an anthropological observer might call it, the Cult of Sam. First young Sam Walton, in uniform, comes back from the war. He starts a store, a sort of five-and-dime; he marries and fathers four attractive children; he receives a Medal of Freedom from President Bush, after which he promptly dies, making way for the eulogies. But the company goes on, yes indeed. Here the arc of the story soars upward unstoppably, pausing only to mark some fresh milestone of corporate expansion. 1992: Wal-Mart becomes the largest retailer in the world. 1997: Sales top $100 billion. 1998: The number of Wal-Mart associates hits 825,000, making Wal-Mart the largest private employer in the nation. Each landmark date is accompanied by a clip showing throngs of shoppers, swarms of associates, or scenes of handsome new stores and their adjoining parking lots. Over and over we hear in voiceover or see in graphic display the “three principles,” which are maddeningly, even defiantly, nonparallel: “respect for the individual, exceeding customers' expectations, strive for excellence.”

“Respect for the individual” is where we, the associates, come in, because vast as Wal-Mart is, and tiny as we may be as individuals, everything depends on us. Sam always said, and is shown saying, that “the best ideas come from the associates for example, the idea of having a ”people greeter,“ an elderly employee (excuse me, associate) who welcomes each customer as he or she enters the store. Three times during the orientation, which began at three and stretches to nearly eleven, we are reminded that this brainstorm originated in a mere associate, and who knows what revolutions in retailing each one of us may propose? Because our ideas are welcome, more than welcome, and we are to think of our managers not as bosses but as ”servant leaders,“ serving us as well as the customers. Of course, all is not total harmony, in every instance, between associates and their servant-leaders. A video on ”associate honesty“ shows a cashier being caught on videotape as he pockets some bills from the cash register. Drums beat ominously as he is led away in handcuffs and sentenced to four years.

The theme of covert tensions, overcome by right thinking and positive attitude, continues in the twelve-minute video entitled You've Picked a Great Place to Work. Here various associates testify to the “essential feeling of family for which Wal-Mart is so well-known,” leading up to the conclusion that we don't need a union. Once, long ago, unions had a place in American society, but they “no longer have much to offer workers,” which is why people are leaving them “by the droves.” Wal-Mart is booming; unions are declining: judge for yourself. But we are warned that “unions have been targeting Wal-Mart for years.” Why? For the dues money of course. Think of what you would lose with a union: first; your dues money, which could be $20 a month “and sometimes much more.” Second, you would lose “your voice” because the union would insist on doing your talking for you. Finally, you might lose even your wages and benefits because they would all be “at risk on the bargaining table.” You have to wonder—and I imagine some of my teenage fellow orientees may be doing so—why such fiends as these union organizers, such outright extortionists, are allowed to roam free in the land.

There is more, much more than I could ever absorb, even if it were spread out over a semester-long course. On the reasonable assumption that none of us is planning to go home and curl up with the “Wal-Mart Associate Handbook,” our trainers start reading it out loud to us, pausing every few paragraphs to ask, “Any questions?” There never are. Barry, the seventeen-year-old to my left, mutters that his “butt hurts.” Sonya, the tiny African American woman across from me, seems frozen in terror. I have given up on looking perky and am fighting to keep my eyes open. No nose or other facial jewelry, we learn; earrings must be small and discreet, not dangling; no blue jeans except on Friday, and then you have to pay $1 for the privilege of wearing them. No “grazing,” that is, eating from food packages that somehow become open; no “time theft.” This last sends me drifting off in a sci-fi direction: And as the time thieves headed back to the year 3420, loaded with weekends and days off looted from the twenty-first century. . . Finally, a question. The old guy who is being hired as a people greeter wants to know, “What is time theft?” Answer: Doing anything other than working during company time, anything at all. Theft of our time is not, however, an issue. There are stretches amounting to many minutes when all three of our trainers wander off, leaving us to sit there in silence or take the opportunity to squirm. Or our junior trainers go through a section of the handbook, and then Roberta, returning from some other business, goes over the same section again. My eyelids droop and I consider walking out. I have seen time move more swiftly during seven-hour airline delays. In fact, I am getting nostalgic about seven-hour airline delays. At least you can read a book or get up and walk around, take a leak.

On breaks, I drink coffee purchased at the Radio Grill, as the in-house fast-food place is called, the real stuff with caffeine, more because I'm concerned about being alert for the late-night drive home than out of any need to absorb all the Wal-Mart trivia coming my way. Now, here's a drug the drug warriors ought to take a little more interest in. Since I don't normally drink it at all—iced tea can usually be counted on for enough of a kick—the coffee has an effect like reagent-grade Dexedrine: my pulse races, my brain overheats, and the result in this instance is a kind of delirium. I find myself overly challenged by the little kindergarten-level tasks we are now given to do, such as affixing my personal bar code to my ID card, then sticking on the punch-out letters to spell my name. The letters keep curling up and sticking to my fingers, so I stop at “Barb,” or more precisely, “BARB,” drifting off to think of all the people I know who have gentrified their names in recent years—Patsy to Patricia, Dick to Richard, and so forth—while I am going in the other direction. Now we start taking turns going to the computers to begin our CBL, or Computer-Based Learning, and I become transfixed by the HIV-inspired module entitled “Bloodborne Pathogens,” on what to do in the event that pools of human blood should show up on the sales floor. All right, you put warning cones around the puddles, don protective gloves, etc., but I can't stop trying to envision the circumstances in which these pools might arise: an associate uprising? a guest riot? I have gone through six modules, three more than we are supposed to do tonight—the rest are to be done in our spare moments over the next few weeks—when one of the trainers gently pries me away from the computer. We are allowed now to leave.

There follows the worst of many sleepless nights to come. On the drive home along the interstate, a guy doing over eighty passes me on the right at a few angstroms' distance, making the point that any highway has far more exits than you can see, infinitely many-final exits, that is. At this hour, which is nearly midnight, it takes me fifteen minutes to find a parking place, and another five to walk to the apartment', where I find that Budgie, distraught by my long absence, has gone totally postal. Feathers litter the floor under his cage, and he refuses to return to it even after a generous forty-five minutes of head time. I want to be fresh for my first day in plumbing tomorrow—Menards is still my choice-but a lot of small things have been going wrong, and at this level of finances, nothing wrong is ever quite small enough. My watch battery ran out and I had to spend $11 to get it replaced. My khakis developed a prominent ink stain that took three wash cycles ($3.75) and a treatment with Shout Gel ($1.29) to remove. There was the $20 application fee at the Park Plaza, plus $20 for the belt I need for Menards, purchased only after comparison shopping at a consignment store. And why hadn't I asked what that knife and tape measure are going to cost? I discover that the phone is no longer taking incoming calls or recording voice mail, so who knows what housing opportunities I have missed. Around two in the morning, I pop a Unisom to counteract the still-raging caffeine, but at five Budgie takes his revenge, greeting the prospect of dawn, which is still comfortably remote, with a series of scandalized squawks.

I am due at Menards at noon. At this point, although I have not formally accepted either job, I realize I am officially employed at both places, Wal-Mart and Menards. Maybe I'll combine both jobs or just blow off Wal-Mart and go for the better money at Menards. But Wal-Mart, with its endless orientation, has, alas, already sunk its talons into me. People working more than one job—and in effect I would be doing that for a day by going from my three-to-eleven stint at Wal-Mart to a day at Menards—have to take sleep deprivation in stride. I do not. I am shaky, my brain fried like that egg in the Partnership for a Drug-Free America commercial. How am I going to master the science of plumbing products when I can barely summon the concentration required to assemble a breakfast of peanut butter and toast? The world is coming at me in high-contrast snapshots, deprived of narrative continuity. I call Menards and get Paul on the line to clear up what exactly my shift is supposed to be. Steve—or was it Walt?—said noon till eleven, but that would be eleven hours, right?

“Right,” he says. “You want to be full-time, don't you?” And you're going to pay me ten dollars an hour?

“Ten dollars?” Paul asks, “Who told you ten?” He'll have to check on that; it can't be right.

Now thoroughly unnerved, I tell him I'm not working an eleven-hour shift, not
without time and a half after eight. I don't tell him about the generations
of workers who fought and sometimes died for the ten-hour day and then the eight,
although this is very much on my mind.
[25]
I just tell him I'm going to send my knife, my vest, and my tape measure back.
In the days that follow I will try to rationalize this decision by telling myself
that, given Wal-Mart's position as the nation's largest private employer, whatever
I experience there will at least be of grand social significance. But this is
just a way of prettifying yet another dumb mistake, the one involving all that
coffee. The embarrassing truth is that I am just too exhausted to work, especially
for eleven hours in a row.

Why hadn't I asked all these questions about wages and hours before? For that matter, why hadn't I bargained with Roberta when she called to tell me I'd passed the drug test—told her $7 an hour would be fine, as long as the benefits included a free lakeside condo with hot tub? At least part of the answer, which I only figured out weeks later, lies in the employers' deft handling of the hiring process. First you are an applicant, then suddenly you are an orientee. You're handed the application form and, a few days later, you're being handed the uniform and warned against nose rings and stealing. There's no intermediate point in the process in which you confront the potential employer as a free agent, entitled to cut her own deal. The intercalation of the drug test between application and hiring tilts the playing field even further, establishing that you, and not the employer, are the one who has something to prove. Even in the tightest labor market—and it doesn't get any tighter than Minneapolis, where I would probably have been welcome to apply at any commercial establishment I entered—the person who has precious labor to sell can be made to feel one down, way down, like a supplicant with her hand stretched out.

It's Saturday and the time has come to leave my free lodgings and neurotic avian roommate. A few hours before my hosts are scheduled to return, I pack up and head down to Twin Lakes, where—no big surprise—I find out that all the second-story rooms have been taken. The particular room I'd requested, which looks out on a backyard instead of a parking lot, is now occupied by a woman with a child, the owner tells me, and he is good enough to feel uncomfortable about asking them to move to a smaller one. So I decide that this is my out and call another weekly rental place on my fist, the Clearview Inn (not its real name), which has two big advantages: it's about a twenty-minute drive from my Wal-Mart, as opposed to at least forty-five in the case of Twin Lakes, and the weekly rate is $245, compared to $295. This is still scandalously high, higher in fact than my aftertax weekly pay will amount to. But in our latest conversation Hildy has promised me a room with kitchenette by the end of next week, and I am confident I can get a weekend job at the supermarket I applied to, in bakery if I am lucky.

To say that some place is the worst motel in the country is, of course, to
set oneself up for considerable challenge.
[26]
I have encountered plenty of contenders in my own travels—the one in Cleveland
that turned into a brothel at night, the one in Butte where the window looked
out into another room. Still, the Clearview Inn leaves the competition in the
dust. I slide $255 in cash (the extra $10 is for telephone service) under the
glass window that separates me from the young East Indian owner—East Indians
seem to have a lock on the midwestern motel business—and am taken by his wife
to a room memorable only for its overwhelming stench of mold. I don't have enough
Claritin-D for this situation, a point I have to make by holding my nose, since
her English does not extend to the concept of allergy. Air freshener? she suggests
when she catches my meaning. Incense? There is a better room, her husband says
when we return to the office, but—and here he fixes me with a narrow—eyed stare-I'd
better not “trash” it. I attempt a reassuring chuckle, but the warning rankles
for days: have I been fooling myself all these years, thinking I look like a
mature and sober person when in fact anyone can see I'm a vandal?