It's Below My IQ, but Above My Paygrade

For those who don't know what I do for a living, I'm the Lawn & Garden manager at my local Walmart. My job essentially entails managing the merchandise, sales and my rag-tag group of sales associates for both the gardening and seasonal seasons. From April to August, we focus on gardening and plants, and the rest of the year, we run seasonal (Harvest, Halloween, Christmas, Easter, etc). I have a team of five associates under me and an assistant manager over me. For the most part, it's not a difficult job. The hardest part is figuring out how to transition from one season to the next without making a total mess or sitting on a metric shit-ton of unsold merchandise. Lucky for me, I'm a compulsive planner, so clean transitions are what I excel at, and one of the key reasons I was asked to take over that hot mess of a department in the first place.

This position is far from the first management position I've ever had. I've been in various retail management positions since I was in my early twenties. I've run everything from a department where I was my own boss and only employee, to a forty person sales and receiving team. I've had good managers and terrible managers. I've had little responsibility and waaaay too much responsibility. One thing that all of that experience has taught me is to manage a retail crisis. I have the rare ability to observe a situation, analyze it and determine a course of action, all within about five minutes.

If you've ever worked at a major retail store during a holiday, you know the feeling of being stuck in the trenches of too much freight, too many customers and not enough onsite alcohol to keep you feeling positive. You probably know how it feels to walk into a stockroom and just think, "Where the hell do we start?" You hopefully, also know that the only thing you can do, is just to start somewhere. It's similar to cleaning your house after a total rager (do the kids still say "rager"?) There's vomit in your fridge, neighbors passed out ass naked on your kitchen floor, panties hanging from the ceiling fan, and so many beer bottles that they crunch under your feet. Where do you start? You start by grabbing a garbage bag and picking up one bottle.

I currently find myself in a frustrating position, where everyone I work with has apparently walked into our trashed house, glanced around and gone to live with a friend until someone else takes care of the problem. I can only assume that they all believe that we have house elves that will tidy it right up, but alas, Dobby died in the Deathly Hallows (my apologies to my daughter for the spoiler), so 'aint no one coming to clean up this mess. Our store will be going through a remodel over the course of the next two months, and we're being bombarded with new product to fill all of the new space we'll have, post remodel. This should be an exciting time, but we haven't even started yet, and all hell has broken loose. Pallets upon pallets of freight with no home, and no attempt to figure out where to go with it, just an overwhelming, "Not my circus, not my monkeys" mentality. In Garden Center, we have our own "backroom", so when we get dumped upon, it's a fairly easy fix. When one of my associates sent me this picture, with the caption, "What the hell do I do with this shit??" I was able to instantly tell him where to put it. Props to me for not replying, "Up your ass!" because I'm a professional. 

This is just a tiny fraction of what's back there. You can see the floor in this picture, so take away floor and just fill it with thousands of cases of crap, and you'll get an idea of what I walked into on Monday. I spent all week just trying to make a dent in it. I didn't care what department I worked, I just grabbed freight and tried to manage it. Of the 25 other hourly manager, and seven salaried managers, ONE made an effort to do the same thing. Amy and I threw boxes, we cussed, we sweated and worked our asses off. No one else cared. Fast forward to today, the weekend, my first weekend off in months. 9:30am, I get a call from work. "Can you come in today for some overtime and work freight?" I knew what that meant. If Walmart uses the word "overtime" shit has HIT.THE.FAN. I tell them I'll see if I can find a sitter, and I hang up. I immediately text a coworker and she confirms what I assumed. Our market manager had come in for a check-up and thrown a fit. The salaried members of management were all called in and threatened with "coachings" if the backroom isn't spotless by Monday. My coworkers advice? "Don't come in." Part of me felt guilty staying home. I felt like I should be in there, bailing buckets of water with everyone else, but the larger part of me acknowledged the fact that Amy and I bailed buckets all week, all alone. Let them take a turn. My hammock was calling me anyway.