Wal-mart considers using customers as (almost) free labor

[bara]

The whole idea does go hand in hand with their policy of not having enough staff to run their stores. The last time I went to Wal-Mart... a necessity sometimes, that place was barren. Shelves barely stocked, not enough employees to do anything, and very few customers.

[XCashier]

http://consumerist.com/2013/03/28/wa...online-orders/

Wal-Mart is considering a program where customers could sign up to be "messengers" or basically delivery people for online orders.

Okay, who thought this was a brilliant idea, and what is he smoking? A preschool child could spot the problems with this setup!

[AccountingDrone]

The whole idea does go hand in hand with their policy of not having enough staff to run their stores. The last time I went to Wal-Mart... a necessity sometimes, that place was barren. Shelves barely stocked, not enough employees to do anything, and very few customers.

Rather like Ames towards the end.

[KabeRinnaul]

The whole idea does go hand in hand with their policy of not having enough staff to run their stores. The last time I went to Wal-Mart... a necessity sometimes, that place was barren. Shelves barely stocked, not enough employees to do anything, and very few customers.

Yep. We generally have about 3-6 registers open (out of 40), because they prefer to call sales floor staff up to help run register when it gets busy rather than actually maintaining the front end. Except they under-staff sales floor, too, so there isn't usually anyone available to go up. It's also why my department (Electronics) has people pulled to help stock Grocery and Toys; help unload trucks; help customers in Stationery, Crafts, and Pets; and pull online orders from all the other departments.

We're kind-of-sort-of paired up with Wireless (cell phones, etc) and Photo Lab as one general area, but at this point we only have one employee assigned to Wireless (which is actually our most profitable department, but we can't sell anything that needs to be logged in without a Wireless associate present, so we wind up missing out on most sales), and three in Photo. This means Electronics is usually covering all three desks, and most evenings we only have 1 or 2 people on the floor to run all of them.

At this point I basically no longer get my last breaks, just because there's never anyone to cover them for me.