Calculating Your Weekly Hours – Not So Simple

One would think that adding 2 & 2 would be an easy thing to do, but it really isn’t that simple, not by a longshot.  At least not with the companies I have worked for.  Possible scams..maybe..

Back in the days of Woolworth, they had an interesting way of paying employees.  It was called the 7-8 minute rule.  If you punched out on the 7 minute mark on any 15 minute interval, you get nothing for that time.  If you punched at the 8 to 15 minute mark of any quarter hour, then you got paid for the entire 15 minutes.  Lousy deal or great deal depending on how close one was to that 8 minute mark.  Many times I missed it by just a few seconds and no you could not cheat if a manager was standing around especially at closing time.  Sometimes, I did slow my pace down just to make that 8 minute mark just to get revenge.  To make matters worse, if an employee had multiple 7 minute periods, they could not be combined to give a full 15 minute session.  So naturally Woolworth got a LOT of free time with its employees.  Certainly this screamed “SCAM”, but one just needed to know how to play the clock to fully benefit from their rules. 

All was pretty well until one summer week about my fourth year with them when my timecard was added wrong.  Not just a little wrong, but 11½ hours of overtime off.  Certainly the management was a little embarrassed by this “mistake”, but it seemed more like a purposeful oversight just so they didn’t have to pay me so much overtime.  Woolworth and overtime never mixed well together and they always tried to keep their regular full-timers under the 40 hour mark.   It was at this point I decided to keep careful track of EVERY MINUTE I worked just so I knew I was paid properly.  This would continue right through my last minutes at Staples.

When the company went to an electronic credit card sized punch card, it was much harder to keep track of punches, but  I had marked in my little memo pad every punch in, lunch punch and punch out.  Certainly this was a lot of work, but it let the managers know they couldn’t get away with anything!!

As far as I can remember with HQ, for every minute I worked I got paid for despite the fact that the company most days would send me home before my shift ended.  I really never worried about what they paid me as anything below 40 hours was made up by my unemployment.  One of the blessings of unemployment!

Then there is Staples.  Besides of the break punch scam previously mentioned, Staples made keeping track of hours very difficult when I was first employed with the company, but when they changed to a web-based time clock application it became very easy.  Too easy.  All I had to do was hit Control-Print and my lovely punch indicator printed on the store’s laser printer in living color.  Of course, I don’t think the management liked what I did, but I NEVER trusted them at all.  This was especially true when I was once told during a night that I came in to a store meeting and the manager said “I will punch you in later”, however being the person I was I wanted to make sure that I got all the time in which I was entitled to.  Their reasoning was they didn’t want to overflow the time clock and create time-outs to the system since everyone would be punching in at once. 

I learned not to trust management to input my time once after I discovered that one of my punches were altered by the on-duty manager, because they thought I was late when I was actually helping a customer on the sales floor.  I didn’t realize this “change” until later in the week when I asked another manager to check my punches and discovered that one of them was altered.  The real question here is :  Did they have the right to change my punch without asking me about it?  My answer is DEFINITELY NO!  They took it upon themselves to alter my punch without any authorization by me at all.  Certainly this creates distrust with Staples and that distrust remained until my last day with the company.  The interesting point to be made in all of this is that other employees also began keeping track of their times after I told them of their shenanigans with me.  If there was one thing I was proud of it was getting some employees to be more aware of their hours. 

The only good news for the company now is that they have probably saved a lot of paper because I no longer am there, but whoever said I was a conservative person.

 

NOTICE TO ALL:  I am taking a short break over the holidays from writing this blog.  It doesn’t mean that the scams end during that time, but I will be reporting back again in early January.  My next thing on the topic highway:  the mandatory year in review posting.  However, if you need your fix of me while I am gone, you can connect with me through the following ways (I will still be active on these throughout the holiday season):

• Twitter - https://twitter.com/#!/louisbrown
• Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/louisbrownusa
• MySpace - http://www.myspace.com/louis_brown
• e-mail  - louisbrown24@hotmail.com
• Formspring - http://www.formspring.me/louisbrownusa
• Google+ -  https://plus.google.com/u/0/117653374122289495721

Back In January!!

Commentary: Maine Human Rights Commission and the Stripper

This post refers to the following link:

http://www.wgme.com/news/top-stories/stories/wgme_vid_10245.shtml?wap=0

Here is the proof that the Maine Human Rights Commission are boneheads.  Apparently, they allowed this woman to win her case against PT’s Showclub just because she was black.  Did they ever think she was just no good at what she was doing?  Or was this just the commission just showing its hatred toward a strip club?  Either way, its apparent they allowed this case in favor of the stripper.  Its sad when they seem to be on the wrong side of every case, just like they was with mine, which I will discuss in a future post in lengthy detail.  Once again, shame on the MHRC, don’t you have better ways to spend your time than this garbage?  Apparently not.

Staples Posts My Review -- Sort of

As mentioned in my previous post, I received an email from Staples to review a product my mother purchased. So I decided to do a demeaning review of the product and provided a plug for this blog as well.

Well, the review got posted except for the link to this blog. Shamefully, the edited this review. But I put it into a comment for those who stumble upon this review. I am not surprised that they edited this review because they didn't want my rants supported. Oh well, I still got to get to post it into the comment section.

If you wish to read the review you can find it here

Breaking Scam Info: A Newly Discovered Staples Privacy Violation Scam

Yesterday I received an email from Staples to review a product that my mother purchased at Staples store while she was out of state.  The problem with this is that she doesn’t have a rewards card with the company nor has she ever given out her (actually mine) email address.  So, how did the company get my email address?

The purchase was made with a credit card, which I also have the same card number.  I did have a Staples Reward card (a gold member one) which I have not used in nearly 9 years and I also had an associate card which hasn’t been used in nearly 3 years.  It seems that Staples linked the provided charge card number to one of my former rewards cards, thus getting the email address I signed up with on either rewards cards.  This means that Staples stores the credit card information that is linked with rewards cards whether the customers want them to or not.  Not only is this unethical, but it is very ILLEGAL!  Another great Staples scam uncovered!!  Who says that this storing of credit card numbers is even secure?  I don’t believe it is if the linking for them was so easy to do.  This is all we need is Staples illegally storing credit card information without the knowledge of its customers.  Once again Staples EXCELLENT JOB!!  You are continuing my proof of just how bad you really are!

I also wish to thank Staples for telling me of my Christmas gift as well…they really are a Scrooge and dumb as well…

Commentary: Paul LePage Just Hated 70,000 Mainers

This commentary refers to the following news article click here.

To save MaineCare from going broke, Mr. LePage plans on throwing 70,000 Mainers off the program who don’t have children.  I believe this is not only a mistake, but once again is LePage’s ignorance to his position.  Let me say that I am not on the program, but I did apply for it about 2½ years ago.  I am on a never ending waiting list because like the people he wants to throw off the program I am single with NO children.  And here lies my issue with all this.

I believe that to be fair LePage should look at ALL the participants in the program. This includes all the single teen moms, newly entered people into the country, and everyone else in the program. 

When I went to apply for the program, the Department of Human Services office was about 1/3 full of people who were foreigners, possibly many of them here in this country less than a year.  Another third was filled with the so-called teen moms along with their multiple children, quite possibly from multiple daddies as well. The remaining third were an assortment of people like myself who were truly in need of service.

After a 2 hour wait, I finally got to my interview and it didn’t take more than 15 minutes to be denied coverage just because I didn’t have any kids.  I would be put on a waiting list to when funds would be freed up and I could possible get insurance at that time.  Over 2 years later, I am still waiting.  Which brings me to my point:  Why should aliens (some illegally here of course) and teen moms (who shouldn’t have kids anyway) be allowed benefits when the people like myself who have paid into all the state programs for years get denied and those who haven’t paid anything get all the benefits?

This is where the cuts should happen.  This state, along with other states, encourage teen girls to get pregnant just to get free insurance.  Many of these girls who are under 21 have multiple baby daddies, which means they are ripping the system off even more.  What’s worse is that many of these young girls want no support from their baby daddies nor do some know where their baby daddies even are. 

As far as the foreigners go, this should be a gimme for a denial of benefits.  Why should these people who given nothing to the fund take from it.  They don’t belong in this country anyway, so stop stealing our benefits.  This may sound mean, but lets get real:  the people who earned the privilege of the benefits should get priority to them.  Let them be put on a waiting list instead and stay there. 

Sadly, this state has its priorities all messed up and wanting to kick the wrong people off the system is a HUGE mistake.  Everybody should be reevaluated and those that don’t qualify or those who don’t belong here should be removed.  I bet that when all of these people be eliminated not only will the gap be closed, but people like myself could get on the system.  However, given LePage’s past performance he will do the easy route and kick those off who shouldn't be.  I know if this happens LePage will have 70,000 less votes next election and that is guaranteed.

Commentary: Herman Cain and Staples Management Both Bad

When I first heard of Herman Cain and of his background, the first thing I thought was how similar this guy probably is to a Staples manager, more specifically my last manager Shawn Nichols.  Have I ever been correct about them.

They both share the need to lie, which is obvious given both of their backgrounds.  Both also deny any allegations that were thrown at them.  Cain denied relationships with women and immediately either said he who nothing of them or put out a scathing report against them.  He is the type of person who says “I am bad, but you are much worse”.  Certainly this type of lies has all but killed the Cain run for the Presidency and for good reason.  Nobody believes his denials and certainly the more women who come out the worse it is for him.  He should just kill the campaign once and for all and save the taxpayers money.

Herman Cain and Former Staples Manager Shawn Nichols are compulsive liars, both don’t know the real truth of anything about people.  They both need help.

Former Staples manager Shawn Nichols had a similar reputation of lying and doing so constantly.  In future posts, I will discuss in details his many lies.  The worse thing about somebody like him is the constant harassment, which he posed against me.  Sadly, he got away with it only because there were no witnesses.  The problems I did have witnesses for were ignored in my claim against Staples.  The biggest lies I had to deal with was the reason(s) I was terminated.  And yes I do mean reasons.  One of many excuses/reasons for my termination had to deal with issues that happened over 10 years ago!  If there was a problem 10 years ago, how did I stay with the company for so long?  Certainly, Mr. Nichols and Staples was looking for anything that could possibly be used as a reason for termination, no matter how stupid.  What’s worse is that people ACTUALLY believed Staples and thus denied my fight!  But in reality, I know the real reason for my termination and that is…..<stay tuned…it will be a big surprise>!

Nichols was forced out of Staples and Cain should be a man and leave the presidential race.  Both are compulsive liars who have delusional views of reality and the people in their world.  Sadly, both love to crush everyone who they hate and hope that more people don’t come out of the closet to haunt them.  Overall, I wish Nichols and Cain the worst as both should share a jail cell.  They can spend their hours comparing lying techniques….they will NEVER get bored!

Full-Time or Part-Time: Scheduling Makes All the Difference (or Does It?)

Scheduling must be the hardest part of any manager’s job.  After all, they must pull out all their hair which explains why most of them are bald!  Seriously though, scheduling employees can be a pain especially when the company restricts how much can be spent on payroll which can greatly restrict staffing.  What a surprise that Staples had this more of a problem than anybody else.

But starting in the beginning, Woolworth had a pretty simple scheduling policy.  If you were a full-timer, you were basically guaranteed between 38 and 40 hours per week except department leads which received 44 hours per week (never figured out why they were entitled to 4 hours of overtime per week). There would be the occasional slow period when full-timers received only about 35 hours per week, but never lower.  There was rarely a complaint as long as employees got their requests for time off at least 2 weeks in advance.  Part-timers averaged approximately 20 hours a week and could get more time if they were available.  Since I was hired as a full-timer from day one, I always received at least 35 hours per week.  However, the week following my separation from the company, they were going to go with a new way of scheduling which basically randomly assigned time periods to associates, which meant that everybody would have to have full open availability.  I don’t know how long that lasted but I was glad that I never had to deal with that.

On the first day at HQ, all of us new hire employees were told that we all would be given full-time hours.  Unfortunately, that only lasted all of 2 days.  From day 3 onward, just about everyday I was sent home early sometimes as soon as one hour into my shift.  The reason for this as I found out later was that we were only hired to drop the existing full-timers to below 40 hours per week.  So a scheduled 40 hour week could drop to as low as 15 hours per week, below that of even being considered a part-timer.  Thankfully, I was still on unemployment benefits at that time and my hours lost was made by my unemployment benefits to get up to 40 hours per week.

Now onto the criminal company Staples.  When I was hired back in July 1996, I was hired as a part-timer as does (or did) at the time.  However, my scheduling was ALWAYS for at least 35 hours per week, which actually is full-time hours.  So here I was working a full-time schedule, part-time pay level, and receiving NO benefits (full-time, part-time or otherwise).  It wasn’t until December of 1996 (6 months later) that I finally received the news of becoming a full-time associate. 

However, here is the problem.  I never received a review after 30 days, 60 days or even 90 days, which would have given me a pay increase from my measly starting pay.  When I became a full-timer, I was given the minimum full-time amount of $7.00 per hour and nothing more.  The issue is that I was originally entitled to a pay raise after 90 days and didn’t get that.  So realistically, the company owed me a pay raise at the point of my newly acquired full-time status.  But it didn’t happen.  I brought it up every year in my annual review about this and every year I got the answer of “I will look into it” from the reviewing manager.  Of course, they never did and I figure that the company owes me hundreds of dollars of pay from back raises that never happened.

If you think this is the only problem with them, think again.  When I first started with the company, all the full-timers (and those who were pretend full-timers like me) received 40 hours per week.  This was company policy and this is what I agreed upon when I signed the appropriate paperwork to become a full-timer.  However, around my 7th year, a petition was circulated to all full-timers to sign which would have reduced full time hours from 40 down to 37½ hours per week.  Under this petition, if signed, the employee would immediately be scheduled at the lower hours with absolutely no chance of ever gaining 40 hours ever again!  Nobody who was smart enough signed this stupid petition because nobody wanted to reduce their hours.  However, I believe 1 person did sign it, which made all the rest of us look bad.

With this failure, Staples continued with the 40 hour week until my 11th year with the company.  At this point, each full-time employee was called into the manager’s office and told individually about the “new change”, which forced upon employees the new 37½ schedule.  Nobody had a choice in the matter, it was effective immediately.  Certainly, no way to handle long time employees.

Commentary:

The idea of forcing a full-time employee this new scheduling procedure was just downright stupid.  Instead of hour lunches, employees were forced into ½ lunches, barely enough time to get a lunch. 

The whole reduction of time may have saved the company money in one regard, but that money saved goes into the feeding of the many Vice Presidents and other high-end executives of the company including CEO Ronald Sargent, who seems to get a huge increase every year.  And guess where that money comes from?  By robbing the employees of their time through reducing hours and ripping the employees off in the previously mentioned break clock problem, 

Its sad to say that corporate greed robs the company of good employees, but this company is a wonderful poster child for the Occupy groups to knock for poorly handling their employees.

To make matters worse as far as I am concerned, when I became full-time I signed an agreement on a 40 hour work week.  When I was hired. it was company policy to have full-timers have a 40 hour work week.  Certainly this paperwork would have been kept in my personnel file with the company had my file not been severely altered by the management (I will be discussing this at length in future posts, which will be EXTREMELY IMPORTANT!!).  Of course when Staples made this schedule change reduction they had nobody sign anything, which probably allowed them to drop hours even further without having any evidence left behind.  I, being with the company for over 10 years at this point, should have been grandfathered and been exempt from this change.  However, being Staples they love to watch everybody bleed equally…and yes bleed will play into a future post….no bandage will stop this wound…

Next Up:  Calculating Your Weekly Hours – Not So Simple

Commentary: Black Friday Gets Blacker

When I started working in retail over 20 years ago, the earliest time that stores opened the day after Thanksgiving was 6am.  Now it seems that retailers this year want to start as early as 9pm on Thanksgiving night.

Certainly, this is just SO wrong for employees and customers as well.  Why should employees subject themselves to losing family time just because their job wants them to work on Thanksgiving?  It is a little thing called CORPORATE GREED!!

When I worked at Woolworth, I never worked Black Friday because there was enough help so that I didn’t have to.  At Staples, I never had to work that day either until my 8th year with the company when they wanted everyone to work that day.  It would not have been a bad thing except for the fact that part of my agreement of scheduling was that I had Fridays off and I would work all Saturdays and Sundays instead.  This was an agreement that was violated by scheduling me on Black Friday.  To add insult to injury was that by the time I arrived around 1pm on this day, all the customers had all but disappeared for the day.  So here I was along with 2 other cashiers (usually) with absolutely no customers.  What a waste of payroll!!

Certainly, Staples believes in punishing all their employees equally without even taking into consideration that I had already made an agreement with them stating otherwise.  What really got me angry is the fact that usually I had previously taken trips to Connecticut for Thanksgiving dinner to spend the holiday with my uncle and his family.  Unfortunately,  I didn’t spend the holiday with them during my last 4 years which also happened to be the last years of my uncle’s life.  If you think I am bitter, you are so right.  I could not return over 250 miles just to return to work the next day and feel well rested.

So I feel very sorry for the employees who usually travel and will miss out on spending time with family just so that their employer can make tons on money.  It doesn’t matter if many of these employees would be holiday rate, absolutely nothing can bring back family from the dead.  This is certainly something that the greedy executives should consider when scheduling these unreasonable store opening hours.  Apparently, these companies need the money to pay their CEOs top dollar and make those unbelievable bonuses. 

A Friendly Reminder to Everyone

This is just a reminder that name calling and general rudeness will not be accepted at any of my accounts.  This includes MySpace, Twitter, Facebook and through my Gmail or Hotmail accounts.  I feel it is necessary to bring this up because there has been those people who make their desire to make uncalled for comments that are inappropriate. 

If you don’t like what I have to say then don’t read it.  Its that simple.  I write this blog for the world to read to explain my problems/complaints and other issues with Staples.  My purpose is to keep people from having similar things happen to them on their own jobs or even if they are an employee with Staples.  All of the information that I present is 100% TRUE despite much of it being denied in the past by Staples.

I am also open to any comments/questions that anyone may have about anything I write about.  I will give an honest answer to all of them.  Feel free to ask.

I also encourage people to join my Facebook page, even if you are not a Staples employee.  The reason is that the more people who join the more of a presence it will have in a Facebook search.  The link to the page is http://www.facebook.com/pages/Staples-The-Truth-Nobody-Wants-You-to-Know/#!/pages/Staples-The-Truth-Nobody-Wants-You-to-Know/190692867661863

Thank you for your understanding and continued support…

Addendum to Previous Post (Lunches)

I failed to mention that the punches of lunch breaks DID calculate correctly unlike the BREAK punch, so there is a purposely scamming issue with that punch procedure.

One thing that bothers me, however, about both types of punches is that each of them verbally punish an employee if they try to punch more than 5 minutes early or punch in late more than 3 minutes.  Many times I have had timeout issues that happened that I had to wait longer than 3 minutes just to get the opportunity to punch in.

Each time that a punch is missed, punched late, or didn’t take a break it shows up on a report printed out every day by the managers.  Certainly, I was always on that list because as I said I ever used the break punch.  They must really hated seeing my name everyday on that list…oh well!!

Lunch Time - Another Chance to Lose Time!!

Lunch is such a simple concept.  You go to the time clock, punch out and then disappear for a certain period of time…or so it should be…but it really isn’t…

The simplest times were back in the Woolworth days.  If you worked at least 6 hours, you were entitled to a 15 minute break and a ½ hour lunch or no lunch if you didn’t want it.  If you worked 8 hours or more, you were entitled to an hour lunch and two 15 minute breaks during the day.  Most days this worked out perfectly, but there was the occasional snag that kept me from getting both 15 minute breaks, but I looked at it as “no big deal”.

HQ never really mattered for a lunch break because I was never there long enough to even get one.  I believe I got only 1 during the whole 7 weeks I was with the company and it was a ½ hour in length.

Staples, however, had their own rules and then even violated them.  Here is how it all started:

When I was first hired at Staples, the break and lunch procedures were similar to Woolworth’s.  At least that was the way it was supposed to work in concept, but in practice it NEVER worked out that way.  Why?  The reason has more to do with scheduling (another future post) than with my need for a break.  Usually I started my day at 1pm in the afternoon.  The management told me that I should take a break around 3pm to get one in before I went to lunch.  My lunch period was usually scheduled at 4pm because the other day cashier left at 5pm so I had to get it in before they left.  Of course, having a break less than an hour before my lunch not only was stupid but unfair as well.  Nobody else in the store had to do anything that stupid..only me because of the scheduling of help.  So usually I ended up not taking a break before lunch at all.  To make matters worse, depending on the scheduling, I never got a break later in the night either.  Certainly, there was NO fairness in all this, not only that but it wasn’t legal either.  I felt no need to complain because the management didn't want anything to do with the problem nor did they want to concern themselves with it.  Since there was no human resources person in store anymore, my complaint would go nowhere. 

To make matters worse with the company, about 6 years into my employment with the company, Staples made a major change in scheduling.  Employees would now only get a ½ hour lunch break instead of the previous hour break.  The time employees worked during the day was cut back to accommodate this lunch schedule shift.  So now a situation that was bad got worse, a lot worse.  In fact, the store manager at the time Terence told me one night “don’t expect to ever get another night break ever again…I just don’t have the staff to cover it”. 

At this point, I thought this was a HUGE mistake, not only on personal level, but a legal standpoint as well.  I don’t think Terence realized the implications of what he said at all, but given it was just another stupid thing coming out of his mouth, it didn’t surprise me.  It was then I had decided to make a change, one that they would have to accept to be somewhat fair to me.  I told them that I wanted to take a 15 minute break along with my lunch break (total time gone 45 minutes), so that I would get at least one of my breaks.  Terence reluctantly agreed to this and it remained in effect during the remainder of my employment with the company despite being hated by the future management.

Throughout my entire employment with Staples, I figured that I was probably cheated out of about 100 hours of breaks that were entitled to me.  Certainly, nobody ever care that I ever got breaks, but eventually it came down to that management didn’t care whether or when anybody got breaks.

Interview Section:

Why did you not report the unfair treatment of breaks with the Department of Labor?

Certainly, that came across my mind a few times.  I just didn’t really feel that I wanted to make a bad situation worse by reporting the issue and chances were that Staples would have said it was MY choice not to take breaks, not a scheduling problem.

Terence seems like such a jerk.  Don’t you think he regretted saying what he did?

I don’t think Terence ever regretted anything he ever said.  He was just way too stupid to know what he was ever doing.

It seems that when Staples changed from an hour lunch to a half-hour lunch break, they also cut back employees work schedules as well.  Is that true?

Yes, they did.  And not just to compensate for the half-hour, but a complete scaling back of work hours.  I will discuss this in my next post. 

Next Up:  Full-Time or Part-Time:  Scheduling Makes All the Difference (or Does It?)

Store Review: Books-A-Million Opens at Former Borders Location

It has been a little more than 50 days from when Borders shut their doors locally and Books-A-Million (BAM) opened up. Sadly, the wait was NOT worth it. 

First, let me say that this is my first experience with this company.  Maybe I really was expecting a lot from this store, but instead got nothing but disappointment.  Certainly, this store is not elegant from the outside when compared to the ones on their website.  It looks just like the Borders it replaced.  The only difference between this store and the former Borders is the name on the building.  It did get a fresh paintjob to cover up where the lettering of Borders was, but remained the same color otherwise. I think the paintjob was probably the most work done to the entire building. 

The metal-rotting fencing still surrounds the café entrance and still looks as bad as ever did.  When you get to the main entrance, you are greeted by the store hours which ironically is the same hours sign that Borders had. 

When you step inside the store, I got the strange feeling I was in Borders with the only difference of the magazine racks shaken up.  Instead of being lined up vertical to the windows, the magazine racks are lined right up to the windows and for the first time ever, the racks were NEAT and STRAIGHT.  I wonder how long this will last…

As I continued to walk around the store, the children’s section is in the same place as the old store as well as the video and cd sections.  What’s worse is that the racks are exactly the same racks used by Borders. No wonder they stopped selling their fixtures when the store was closing.  To make matters worse, some of the racks still had the tags on them from Borders of the sales price of the racks.  I don’t know if this was an oversight or they intend to sell the racks, but either way it didn’t look good.

It took me a few minutes to finally find an employee working out on the sales floor, but I noticed that some of them were former Borders employees.  Naturally, like as with Borders, they were dressed in street clothes, but now they have to wear a stupid black apron.  Don’t this company know that you only wear aprons when cooking or dealing with tools?  A company misstep I believe.  Ironically, but happily, some of employees are Borders employees.  They should feel right at home.

A couple of other things disturbed me as I walked around the store.  First, the counters that used to hold the customer kiosks around the store were still in place, but empty which made them look like empty tables.  I wonder if they ever plan on using these tables or just leave them as is.  The other thing still left over from Borders was the e-reader download station.  The giant red signs atop of the table was still there with two computers sitting on the table, one for employees and the other possibly for customers. 

A small café with 3 tables was located where the old Borders café was located.  Certainly, they need more seating than what they have especially since Borders always was full. 

As I was walking around, I noticed that many of the prices of the cds and dvds were higher than anything I have ever seen anywhere before.  Apparently their supplier requires such ridiculous prices.  In a future post, I will discuss pricing to a great extent.

One thing that will anger former Borders customers is that they charge $20 a year to get a discount on their products.  Certainly, in these times asking for that amount is steep considering the payoff.  I will be discussing the topic of membership cards as well in length also in a future post.  I didn’t make a purchase in this store because I didn’t want to feel obligated to get one of their cards.

Before I left the store, I went into the bathroom to see if that had any improvements.  Sad to say, there were none.  The same broken soap dispenser on the wall, the same broken toilet paper roll, and the same broken paper towel dispensers greeted me all around.  Interestingly, Borders had the bathrooms shut down the last 3 weeks of being in business, which made me think they were going to remodel the bathrooms.  No luck on that one at all.  Probably the single biggest disappointment in my whole trip to this store.

Overall, after 50 days, it looks like only about 5 minutes of remodeling was done to the store.  It reminds me of when Office Depot moved in where the old Kids-R-Us store used to be located-just another temporary location.  They moved out just after a year..it was obvious they never had any intention lasting any longer than that.  BAM seems to look like this same tragic potential if they don’t improve.

Pluses:

• Finally a local bookstore to replace Borders
• Displays look nice

Minuses:

• Looks exactly like Borders inside
• Fixtures broken in bathroom
• Membership not free
• Prices way too high
• Empty tables and odd fixtures remaining from Borders

Summary:

This is certainly not a good impression for this company entering into the northern part of the country.  If they think that keeping the store to look a lot like Borders, they are mistaken.  Sadly, there is no “WOW” factor in this store, just a lot of “ho-hum, been there, seen that”.  If you loved Borders, you will be right at home here, just stay away from the expensive membership card.

Grade:

• Store layout: B
• Pricing: F
• Helpfulness of Employees: F
• Functionality: F

Final Grade:  F   -- NOT RECOMMENDED

The Way I See It: Barnes & Noble Violates Privacy Policy

In the last couple of weeks, Barnes & Noble (B&N) has been aggressively sending out emails to former customers of Borders.  These emails apparently are aimed at customers who previously had Borders membership cards to encourage them to shop at B&N.  I really would not have a problem with this except that I have NEVER given my email address to B&N.  So, Borders violated their own former Privacy Policy of “not selling, renting, or giving away” customer information.

This leads me into thinking that Borders could never have been trusted with customer personal information.  What other information about me does B&N have?  Credit card numbers…previous purchase information…home address'/phone number?  Where does it end?

What bothers me even worse is that B&N has purchased the “Borders” name and website as well.  Did they decide to get all customer data with the name purchase?  These questions bother me to the point that if B&N REALLY wanted my business, they would be located within 50 miles of where I live.  Ironically, since they are not within a reasonable distance, it is hard to imagine that they wanted customers outside of 25 miles of their nearest store.  How many people will travel over 50 miles regularly just to make a purchase with them.  My last purchase with them was over 3 years ago and I never have belonged to their rip-off membership program.

It seems that since B&N has no real national competition anymore they can do whatever they want even if it means using customers’ information that they should have never acquired.  I say “JUST SAY NO TO B&N”.  They never had my business and they won’t earn it this way.

In a future post, I will discuss these membership/rewards cards at a longer extent and it may shock some at what they REALLY collect and how they use it…

Do You Want a Break? DON’T TOUCH THAT CLOCK!!

Every now and then, everybody could use a break even if it is just to go use the potty.  Sometimes this easier said than done as I will explain.

Way back in the Woolworth days, if you wanted a break all you had to do was just ask.  Normally the manager just had to find someone to cover for you and you were all set.  The manager would just write down the time you left and if the manager was nice gave you some leeway to your time so that 15 minutes could be up to 20 minutes if someone gets stopped along the way.  It was a wonderful way of handling the situation and was basically fool-proof.  No complaints from me on this one.

HQ had a similar approach but the difference was that somebody only had 10 minutes (not really enough time in my book) and that included the time of getting back and forth.  I never really liked their handling of breaks, but I never had to worry about that too often.

Staples, as would be expected, is a totally different animal.  Let me start from the beginning.

Way back when I was hired back in 1996, the Human Resource person (yes, they REALLY HAD Human Resources in the store back then) Nikki told us new hires to NEVER use the BREAK punch on the time clock.  I always wondered why, but just took her word that it was bad.  About 4 years later and long after Nikki and the Human Resources left the store, one of the newly transferred Assistant Managers absolutely INSISTED that the BREAK punch be used on the time clock.  So like I fool, I decided to do it to see what happens.  The following is EXACTLY what happened and the end result.

First I was very careful to make sure that I took EXACTLY 15 minute breaks (the company’s allowable break time), carefully punching in at EXACT TIMES.  Something I noticed that was VERY strange was that when I punched out, the time clock stopped accumulating hours worked.  Yes, you heard that right:  TIME STOPPED!!  This worried me as to why this was happening.  It didn’t restart until I punched back in and then it only started accumulating time after the next minute after punching in.  So, honestly what happened here?  I also kept track of when I punched in at the beginning of the day, my lunch break (more on that in next posting), and when I left for the day.  I fed all this information into an Excel spreadsheet used to keep track of time and the surprise happened when I got my paycheck.

Nikki’s warning had become a reality.  When I received my check, I noticed that it was EXACTLY 20 MINUTES SHORTER of time than I had calculated.  When I approached the Assistant Manager that originally told me to use the BREAK punch and told her of “my check problem”.  She said “If you have a problem with the BREAK punch just don’t use it, just DON’T TELL ANYONE WHAT YOU ARE DOING!!”  My first thought was “HUH?!?”.  Apparently, something was VERY WRONG and a little research got me figuring out the problem.  To make matters worse was when I asked this manager if she would make an adjustment and give me 20 minutes added on to my current check to compensate for the “error”, her answer was a flat-out “NO!”.  So much for EVER using that AGAIN!!  I also let any manager know about my problem with it whenever they wanted me to use it.  When I mentioned it, they backed off quickly like as if I knew the SCAM…YES I SAID SCAM!!

Here is what happens: 

When anybody hits BREAK OUT, the clock stops.at the point of clock out retreating to the minute BEFORE YOU PUNCHED.  When they clock back in the clock takes a minute to set itself to track again.  So effectively, you lose 1 minute punching out and 1 minute punching back in.

Now you may be saying “Larry, It is only 2 minutes what’s the big deal?!?”

Well, first I am not Larry. AND the 2 MINUTES IS A HUGE DEAL ESPECIALLY WHEN YOU MULTIPLY 2 MINUTES TIMES THE NUMBER OF BREAKS PER WEEK!!  For a full-timer, with 2 15 minute breaks a day, 5 days a week, it results in the 20 minutes I lost.  For part-timers, if they worked 5 days a week, its 10 minutes lost a week.  Consider this money that should be IN YOUR POCKET, but instead goes to the company as FREE WORK TIME!!  SLAVE LABOR ANYONE?!?

I am now going to introduce something called a self-interview.  This is where I will interview myself on topics that we have discussed or have been in the news lately of related (or not related) interest.  It will be in a different color and be preceded by the words “Interview Section”.  Enjoy..

Interview Section:

Why do you think that nobody has reported this “SCAM” yet to the Department of Labor?

Fear…fear of becoming a whistleblower to something that should not be happening.  After all, chances are that someone could get fired for reporting them.  They are that kind of company.

Why do you feel this way?

Honestly, I would NOT have been surprised if this wasn’t part of the reason I was fired even though I knew about it for years.  It just took an ass* manager to do it.

Don’t you think anybody else has ever noticed their shortage in their paychecks?

This is the funny thing. Since way back at Woolworth’s, I noticed how many employees NEVER looked at their paystubs.  They just took their check and sometimes threw away the stub without even ripping it up.  They don’t have any idea how many hours they got paid for.  It is sad to realize how many employees are SO stupid and are so ignorant on what they are getting paid or the consequences of their tossing of paystubs. 

So, Staples is praying on the logical stupidity of their employees…

Exactly.  The more stupid employees they have, the happier they are..which is probably why I am no longer with them..They couldn’t take my “intelligence”.  Sadly, this will continue until the company goes out of business or somebody finally has the guts to speak up against this abuse.

They must cheat their employees in other time ways as well don’t they?

Oh yes, and that starts my next posting topic when I discuss lunch..always a yummy topic..well usually…

 

Next Up:  Lunch Time -  Another Chance to Lose Time!!

Punching Out – Run, Louis, Run (Or Take Your Sweet Old Time It Don’t Matter Anymore!)

One would think that punching out would be as easy as punching in.  Depending on the company, it was.

Back in the Woolworth days, punching out was as simple as the person (usually at the mall entrance) calling “Punch Out” on the store’s intercom.  Since customers and employees were given both a 10-minute and 5-minute warning when the store closed, everybody was usually out by 10 minutes after the store closed.  What was hilarious is that one older female employee slowly made her way to the time clock as the time got closer, then ran like a train when the call was made. 

At HQ, it was just a matter of someone (usually the supervisor or manager on-duty) coming up to you and telling you to go home, even when sometimes it may be hours before your shift ended.  They really didn’t care what you had worked that day before sending you home.  In fact, I had only been on duty for 1 hour when they told me to go home.  And yes they only paid me for 1 hour even though they legally should have paid me for a minimum of 4 hours.

At Staples, as usual, was much different.  It was a matter of begging sometimes to ask to go home or dying or doing some other desperate action.  In fact, one day I stayed a mind-numbing 2 11/2 hours longer than I should have after being there already nearly 10 hours.  Certainly, this was during back-to-school season, but still is uncalled for especially for a front-end associate.  I always wondered why everybody had to stay especially since the floor people weren’t doing the job they should have been doing all day long.  But then again, Staples has never been fair anyway, which is what this whole blog is about.

Of course between punching in and punching out, you want breaks and a lunch probably.  I discuss those next couple of posts.

Next Up:  Do You Want a Break?  DON’T TOUCH THAT CLOCK!!

Punching In…Not As Easy As You Would Think!!

Through the years, I have lived with many ways of doing the very simple task of punching in to work.  It may seem like that, but over time the process has been mucked up by the technology behind the scenes.

Way back in the Woolworth days, it was a mechanical time clock.  You took your card, dropped it in the slot and the card would punch with the time and day of the week on it.  The card was good for 2 weeks—it was turned to the backside for the second week.  Thus one card was used for one pay period as we were paid every 2 weeks.  The only problem was when somebody punched the wrong card or for some stupid reason punched the wrong side.  In a future post, I will explain how time is calculated, a more hilarious approach the different companies took.

About 6 years into my employment with Woolworth, they finally updated their technology to use small magnetic cards kept in a rack similar to where the punch time cards were kept.  The problem with these cards is that it was much more difficult to tell if someone used your card by mistake.  It was also harder to keep track of whether you punched in or out with these cards.  If ever there was a time to keep track of hours, this was it. 

I don’t really remember the system HQ used, but I believe it was similar to Woolworth’s system.  It is hard to remember what I did for just 7 weeks!

Staples, on the other hand, was a nightmare right from the beginning (SURPRISE!!!).  During the first couple years, the clock was located in the breakroom and was a push-button interface unit  After the first couple of years, the store remodeled and the time clock was moved to outside the offices in the front of the store. 

So, here is my beef up to this point.  At both Woolworth and HQ, you punched in and then hit the sales floor.  No problem if you happen to run into that customer who needs help for 20 minutes finding something that doesn’t exist.  When Staples moved the time clock to the front of the store, it became a race to make the time clock and not be late while at the same time avoiding helping any customers to be slowed down.  But wishfully it wasn’t always that easy. At one point I was held up over 15 minutes by a customer, then I was chewed out by a manager for being late.  If they knew that I was with a customer (look down the aisle dumbass), then they would never have said a word to me.  Sadly it took me an entire pay period to get my time adjusted because the manager that chewed me out would not alter my time even though I was helping a customer. 

Punching in with the Staples time clock was not overly difficult as long as you remember if you are punching in, punching out, or taking a break.  At around the 5th year with the company, our punch-in code was changed from our social security number to a randomly assigned 7 digit number.  At around my 10th year, the other shoe dropped and the time clock was changed to a web-based time clock.

The biggest difference between this clock and the original one was that not only did you have to input your employee number, but you had to enter a user-defined password into the sign-in (punch-in) screen.  There was 2 obvious problems with this system.  It was extremely slow and sometimes would time-out (no log-in for you) if too many people from various locations were trying to sign-in at the same time.  I sometimes saw a wait of up to 3 minutes to log-in because of all the system traffic.  What made this system worse is that the log-in system was back-ended into Staples.com (a high traffic site anyway at the time).  To make matters worse was that about every 6 months, the log-in password had to be changed.  Adding insult to injury, no repeats of previous passwords could be reused and it was difficult to keep thinking up new passwords.  But here is the real rub, according to the company’s privacy policy (ha ha), the company does NOT store employees’ passwords.  If this was true, why could I NOT reuse my old passwords again?  I will be discussing Staples’ double talk privacy policies in a later post. 

What really ticked off the managers most about the new punch-in system had more to do with me than with the system.  From the first day of this new system, I decided to keep track of my punches by getting a printout of the time punch screen.  Certainly the managers didn’t like the idea that I was keeping track of my punches for a reason I will discuss later.  Maybe, this was just the beginning of the hatred toward me.  I eventually talked about 3 other employees to do same thing as they realized how much it helped in keeping track of their hours.

Next Up:  Punching Out – Run, Louis, Run (Or Take Your Sweet Old Time It Don’t Matter Anymore!)

One Employee—Too Many Hats

The one thing common to all my jobs is that I started out as a cashier.  Beyond that, each job took a very different turn.

Woolworth was probably the most diverse of any of the companies I had worked for.  After about a month with the company, I was trained to be a Customer Service person..or as we called it there “the worst place in the store to ever work” (and that was so true).  Later,  I will get into the grittier details of the job.  After about a year with the company, I became a front-end supervisor.  This is probably the second worst position in the store.  Dealing with the whiny cashiers was more of a case of patience than thrills.  I am sort of glad that I stayed in that position for about a year. 

When I wasn’t needed at the customer service desk, I also spent some nights and weekends at the Sporting Goods department, the Camera department, the men’s department and even occasionally in the women’s department.  The sporting goods department was certainly my least favorite as I knew absolutely nothing about the products in the department.  My favorite department was of course the camera department.  Here I played with all the toys and occasionally  played with the Sega Genesis unit when nobody was looking.  I could also play VCR tapes and play the radio and cds all day long.  There was even that rare occasion that I played cashier over in the store’s restaurant, but that was very rare.

HQ, however, did not offer much variety.  Initially, I was hired to work the returns counter, but ironically I never once got trained there during my 7 week life with the company.  I could not even tell anyone where the counter was because I never got there.  The only other place that I ever saw besides the front registers was the tool corral.  I considered this place punishment because I knew ABSOLUTELY nothing about tools.  I was only supposed to work the register in the department, but more often then not I was left by myself to help the customers while the actual employees who were supposed to work in the department was elsewhere.  In fact, one day, both of the people who were supposed to work in the department took lunch at the same time leaving me to fend for myself.  When the manager on-duty found out about this , he was furious and almost blaming me for the whole situation.  This just made the management just look completely stupid.

At Staples, I held one position and that was cashier, no customer service, no cashier, no customer service.  The reason for this confusion has more to do with the lack of consistency that managers had regarding me with the company.  Some times I was considered a cashier, other times customer service.  Since everyone in the store was sort of called “customer service”, this made the title even less meaningful. Even though the store had a “customer service desk”, anybody could do returns as long as they had the proper register credentials. More on that later.  Staples enjoyed blurring the line between cashier and service desk person and it showed.

There wasn’t much fundamental difference between how returns were done at Woolworth and Staples, but the details varied greatly.  In a future post, I will get in to the grit of the return process of both companies.

Now that I have the positions in order, it is time to punch in…

Next Up:  Punching In…Not As Easy As You Would Think!! 

Dressing for the Role

Before I begin, let me tell a story.  A few weeks ago, I happen to be walking through the local mall and glanced over at one of the stores.  All of a sudden, I saw a breast pop out of a shirt of a female store employee.  Not being prude, I continued to watch to see how long it would take before this employee realized what happened.  Since I was about 20 feet away and behind a display, I could easily look without looking like a prude.  It took about 5 minutes to realize her wardrobe malfunction and button herself up accordingly.  My point is that this employee was wearing street clothes with just a lanyard identifying her as an employee.  What bothers me most about this is just how many stores have similar problems. 

For example, during its existence, Borders female employees regularly gave their customers a show because every time they bent over, their breasts would be fully exposed.  Don’t they realize this or are they purposely not wearing underwear?  To me, I would be embarrassed as a female if I didn’t wear underwear all the time.

As another example, recently I have noticed an increasingly number of female employees at Target wearing low cut sweaters and then wearing even lower cut shirts underneath them.  This means that their cleavage is shown to the fullest extent and in some ways even more than I think it should be.  My question is why are these female employees not told to go home and put on something a little less revealing.  I believe the answer is that many of these employees are managed by MALE managers who enjoy the show they provide.  The reason I say this is that while I was employed at Woolworth, there was one manager who constantly was making comments to me as his thoughts of the young female employees and the young female customers who enter the store.  Ironically, this 60+ year old manager was married to a girl barely out of high school.  So I could understand his flirtiness with the young women.

It seems that more and more companies are moving away from wearing street clothes and moving into company clothes.  Among the companies now doing this are Sears and Radio Shack.  Apparently the suits are leaving the retail industry once and for all.

Way back when I started at Woolworth back in 1989, guys had to wear a dress shirt, nice pants and wear a tie.  They were given a red vest to wear over their nice shirt.  Attached to the vest was a huge nametag.  This nametag was almost as large as the contestant tags on “The Price is Right”.  Interestingly, nobody in the store had their name engraved on their nametag, they were all from a cheap DYMO labelmaker.  It really makes you think you could be disposed of at any time.  I felt lucky I was with them as long as I was.  The women of the company, however, had a choice of wearing either a vest or wearing a smock (with 2 pockets!! – how lucky is that). 

With only a 7 week lifespan at HQ, my nametag should have been a Post-It note, but this company was a little kinder in giving a small nametag with a name entered again with a DYMO labelmaker.  The most important thing about this company was that I could finally ditch the fancy duds.  We were assigned an ugly green shirt to wear and some of the employees wore an ugly green apron as well. Beyond that, it was anything goes…and I do mean ANYTHING!!  The employees were allowed to wear short pants (I did..my legs looked great back then..very sexy).  However, some of the girls wore pants that were so short that they really didn’t qualify as pants in my book.  Again, since this company was dominated by male managers, it was like a feeding frenzy to see all these hot looking girls dressed this way.

Staples, however, was different..much different.  This company has had as many wardrobe changes as Vanna White (well not quite).  My wardrobe never changed:  red shirt, black pants, and black shoes (sneakers actually).  Managers shirts evolved from wearing pink-striped shirts to gray shirts to now I guess green shirts.  The electronics department evolved from red shirts to green and black shirts.  The copy center evolved from red shirts to blue shirts.  The only thing that remained constant was the nametag.  It was a small nametag that usually had a DYMO-made name with the words of “Sales Associate” engraved underneath.  I was lucky that I was hired way back to have an actual engraved nametag.  I felt proud of having my name engraved in this tag.  In fact, at the time of my termination, the store manager asked for the nametag back, I ignored his request since this was a personalized nametag with other attachments (I will get into that with a future post).  Never would I ever depart with this nametag.  Ironically, the management’s shirts changed 3 times during my employment with the company.  First it started out being a pink pin-striped shirt, then moved onto a black-pin striped, then finally a gray shirt.  I guess the shirts fit their attitudes.

The interesting thing about these companies is how they reacted when someone came in dressed improperly.  Depending on the circumstances, Woolworth let the improper wardrobe slide.  HQ didn’t care at all, as long as the important areas were mostly covered (and I do mean mostly).  Sadly, Staples had no forgiveness in its dress code: wear the wrong shoes-go home and change (off the clock of course). wrong pants-see you later.  The management seemed as much concerned about their dress code than anything else.  Why should management really have to be so rigid all the time when people do have lives outside the company walls (or at least that is the way one should think).  Ironically, the company offered a full catalog of wardrobe items that you could order to have that “Staples-logo” with you all the time in your personal life.  Possibly, they might have even carried Staples logo women’s undergarments too….

 

Next Up:  One Employee—Too Many Hats

The Way I See It: LePage Hates the Unemployment Fraud?

This commentary refers to this story:

http://www.chron.com/news/article/LePage-Maine-targets-unemployment-fraud-2198012.php#loopBegin

Let’s do some math here:

The state claims 6.5 million dollars wasted on unemployment benefits.

Take that number and divide it by $300 (roughly the average benefit).

Take the result and divide it by 13 weeks (the average unemployment period-not really).

The result is roughly 1700 people are defrauding the state.  I highly doubt the number is that high, but just another way for Mr. LePage to manipulate the numbers.  I know myself that I NEVER defrauded the state, I just could never get a job.  Maybe, Mr. LePage should look at reality before jumping to such a conclusion.  Just saying that people should take the first offered them doesn’t apply when you are never offered one in the first place!!

The Way I See It -- Walgreens Fires Employee Who Fires

This commentary refers to the following story:

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/fired-walgreens-gun-toting-michigan-pharmacist-filled-robbers/story?id=13705438

I feel there is always something wrong when an employee cannot defend him/herself in a possible life-threatening situation.  I don’t know of any employee handbook that says that “just stand there, get shot, and die”.  Certainly, nobody would ever in their right mind ever say that because it is stupid policy, yet this is exactly the way most businesses operate.

What bothers me the most is that Mr. Hoven could have any sort of weapon be used to attack the would-be robbers, not just the concealed weapon he was carrying.  He could have had a baseball bat, a knife, a can of mace, a large rock, or any of hundreds of various items to use against the attackers.  Sadly, the unappreciative Walgreens decided to turn this hero into a poster child of doing the wrong thing.  The problem is he saved to employees from getting shot themselves and yet company policy states that you can’t carry a concealed weapon.  Sadly, this is where logic and policy collide.  Not in a good way either.  How would Walgreens have explained to Mr. Hoven’s family that he got killed because he didn’t defend himself when he could have done so?  Certainly, blood would be on the hands of Walgreens along multi-million dollar lawsuits.  It is natural for anybody to defend themselves (if they can) when being attacked. Anybody would have to be stupid otherwise in not doing so.  And this is where policies are not only bad, but really wrong.

Apparently, most policy makers are lawyers who sit isolated from reality and have no clue on what life is outside their little boxes.  Policies are meant to be BROKEN WHEN NEEDED!!  Not every policy should ever be followed to the letter, otherwise most people would be unemployed within a couple of weeks of being hired..

Here is what Walgreens should have done:  Mr. Hoven should have been spoken to about what he did and explain what the consequences of what he did.  He should neither have been fired nor been put on any sort of suspension.  He saved people’s lives—he should have been commended for that, not condemned.  I hope that Mr. Hoven wins his case against them for their foolish termination.

The reason why I bring up this story is that over the years I have been the victim of crimes at each of the three companies I have worked for..and one of them regards a life-threatening incident, which I will describe all of them in a future post.  In all of those cases of mine, policy was violated and I became the victim with no recourse.  Certainly in my cases, a different result would have come if the companies paid attention and showed compassion not ignorance, but what can be expected from stupid companies anyway?  And that is the way I see it…

The First Day (Wish It Was The Last?)

Like any job, the first day is usually the do or die feeling.  The feeling of being overwhelmed by the amount of material that a new employee is presented with can be daunting.  Many potential employees don’t survive even that first day after finding out what everything is all about.  I can’t blame them—it is hard sometimes.

Besides what appears to be an endless slew of paperwork to fill out, there is the notorious training videos to watch.  Way back in the days of Woolworth, the videos were on VCR tapes and there were not that many of them.  Short and sweet training this way..done in a couple of hours.  Same was true with HQ because they really didn’t care anyway.

Staples was a very different story.  It seems that there was endless videos to watch.  Some were on videotapes, others were on CDs.  A full 8 hours was needed to get through it all and even then all the training was not completed.  It would take another 2 to 3 weeks to complete all the required training to be considered fully trained.  The biggest difference between Staples training and everybody else’s was that Staples training was interactive.  This meant no sleeping or “ho-hum wake me when its over” training.  The biggest problem with Staples’ interactive training is that many of their so-called quizzes resulted in the old “ask a question and have no right answer there”.  This made taking quizzes almost impossible.  In fact, a couple of quizzes actually had to be purposely helped by management because they were absolutely impossible to pass otherwise.  I think this was intentional just to discourage employees and make things they want to learn confusing and incomprehensible.

One such video that is now part of the orientation is this one:  It was done as part of a store meeting in 2005 and made many people angry:

Originally distributed to store meetings in 2005

I think its interesting that someone actually was able to film this without getting caught or be fired for posting it. Thanks to the anonymous donor for the link to this video.  It should also be noted that many other retailers have videos similar to this, but the message is clear. STAPLES HATES UNIONS AND DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT OR ELSE!!  Sounds like thug retailing to me…more on that attitude in future posts…

Next up:   Dressing for the Role

The Way I See It – Obama and LePage Got It Wrong

After hearing President Obama’s jobs speech last week, I came to the conclusion that he is going about this whole thing the wrong way.  Certainly, one could play a great drinking game every time Obama said “Pass This Bill”, but the real problem is not lowering corporate taxes, but increasing them.  Yes, we need to take money away from big companies that have been hoarding money and taking it overseas.  The government should be punishing companies for not hiring and only lower taxes when they REALLY hire the unemployed. 

Extending unemployment benefits won’t fix anything either, as states like Maine top out benefits at 72 weeks.  It would not matter if Obama extended the benefits forever, they will still limit them to 72 weeks.  So people who really need help will never get it and would just be more tax dollars wasted.

Cities and towns should also stop giving tax breaks to big businesses as they take their money out of the country and contribute nothing to local economies.  Since most employees live out of the towns in which businesses are in, they don’t help town economies either.  So lets end the corporate welfare and raise those taxes and punish big business once and for all..!!

As far as LePage goes, he states that Maine has only 24,000 unemployed and 21,000 job openings.  Sadly, he is once again, misinformed about both numbers.  The last state statistics say that over 50,000 people are unemployed and possibly more jobs are available (or possibly even less depending on how often job banks are updated.  It is sad that LePage thinks that training is all that is needed to produce a fix to this odd game of musical chairs. If LePage was really thinking (I have previously stated that he doesn’t), he never would have painted this fake rosy picture. 

I am hoping that Obama’s job bill fails and LePage stop saying stupid things, but hey 1 out of 2 wouldn’t be completely bad.  And that’s the way I see it.

Searching For That Job

Way back in 1988, I needed to find a job.  I was a college student, who had run out of student loans and had to drop down to a part-time basis in college to afford my ways.  So I decided to look for a job.  Back then, there were many choices:  bookstores, many stores at the mall, and now defunct stores of Lechmere and Ames.  I had decided to work at Woolworth at the mall.  I figured I had a better chance here than any place else, because my father knew the manager Bernie.  The interesting thing was that I got hired on my birthday.  What a wonderful birthday present, I thought.  A FULL-TIME JOB WITH BENEFITS!!  A rarity in today's job market.

Getting hired at HQ was almost as easy, because this company was desperate.  They needed help to keep their full-timers from getting overtime.  I barely had my application submitted and got home when I got a phone call from them wanting to interview me.

Staples, however, was a different story.  I submitted my first application with them shortly after I got the boot from Woolworth.  Heard nothing at that point, but didn't care because I had the job a couple months after at HQ.  After the job at HQ disappeared, I submitted another application to Staples and this time I had my meal ticket.  The person who took my application was a former employee at Woolworth who knew me quite well and was able to get me an interview.  This proves the point that you really need to know someone to get in the door of any company.  About a week later, I got the job.  Ironically, about 6 months after I was employed there, I was told that they didn't have my application on-file and wanted me to fill out a new one for the record.  Was this a warning of things to come?  Maybe it was....

One thing I want to mention is that in all 3 of these jobs, they all had paper applications in which to apply for the job.  Unlike today, where most jobs are applied for online and you are blindly submitting somewhere out there.  Not only that, but with today's Internet applications, the companies can ask quiz type questions to test your knowledge of various things.  One application I filled out a few months ago had 200(!) questions on it besides the standard application items.  This probably all adds up to the fact that I am not currently employed.  Some computer "sees" I am unemployed and for how long, then sees my answers to their endless questions, then says "REJECT" and I never hear from them.  Welcome to the 21st century of hiring...or not hiring as the case may be.....


Up Next:  The First Day (Wish It Was The Last?)

The Way I See It: EEOC vs. Kohl's

This commentary refers to the following story:
http://www.natlawreview.com/article/eeoc-sues-kohl-s-department-stores-disability-discrimination

I need to write about this lawsuit as my own interactions with the EEOC is less desirable and somewhat hilariously sad. I will describe my own experience with them in a future post.

First, let me say that the EEOC is a clueless government agency, that picks its fights by levels of stupidity.  This case ranks near the top of the stupidity meter, even though it feels like a "legitamite" case.  So, who will win this lawsuit?  Drum roll, please...

The winner will be Kohl's (or even better, be dismissed).   Here's my reasons why:

1:  It is not stated whether Ms. Manning was either a full-time or part-time employee.  If she was just a part-time employee, then Kohl's (nor any other employer) obligated to give her a set schedule.  They may have guidelines and time frames for part-timers, but like most companies part-time scheduling are not set in stone.  If she was a full-timer, then Ms. Manning may have a little bit more to support her case, but then again full-timers sometimes have their schedules changed if given prior advanced warning.  Many companies also have rotating schedules which Ms. Manning didn't like or didn't want.  Many companies also go by seniority when scheduling as well, even if someone transfers in from another location, those people are given seniority and given priority scheduling.  Also, no mention is given to what Ms. Manning availability was when she originally applied for when she was hired.  If Kohl's didn't like her availability, then they should not have even bothered interviewing her in the first place.

2:  Ms. Manning also claims that the change of hours created a "life-threatening condition".  Oh, please.  Ms. Manning, there are thousands of people who work in various jobs many more times stressful than working at Kohl's and have diabetes and aren't complaining.  Seriously, unless the store is having Ms. Manning land 747s in the parking lot, I can't think of any position that would be that stressful.  I think the most stressful thing about her diabetes that Ms. Manning should worry about is looking like Wilford Brimley with his big walrus mustache in her old age.

3:  Ms. Manning also states that she had discussed her problem with her manager orally.  Huge mistake there.  Anybody who has worked in any job that telling a manager anything will be the same as talking to a brick wall -- they never listen -- NEVER!!  Unless, you have something in writing it means nothing.  As far as the managers laughing at her, I am not surprised, but I expect them to deny it in writing.  Managers will always deny everything even if its in writing (a future post by me will affirm that one).  As far as bringing in a note, the manager can just deny he/she ever saw it and could also deny that any conversation ever happened.

4:  As far as accommodating other employees, more than likely they probably were accommodated for a once-in-a-while time not a permanent need. This is a huge difference because managers don't want to deal with disabilities in the workplace.  Yes, I said it.  They will do anything to eliminate employees with disabilities including lying to either get an employee to quit or eventually get fired, as was my case.

If Ms. Manning's illness was so life-threatening, why did she bother to continue to work?  It seems to me that there is a lot more to this story then what has been revealed.  I don't ever expect Ms. Manning will ever see one red cent, because the company's managers would be in denial of everything and consider Ms. Manning a problem employee.  It was this type of spinning of the facts that got me terminated from Staples.  Ms. Manning should just walk away from this whole situation and hope that she has not been black-listed by Kohl's as I was from Staples.

As far as Kohl's changing their ways and improve training to managers and employees, I highly doubt that this would EVER happen in a million years.  Companies would rather just not hire problem employees than suffer the consequences of hiring a problem potential employee.  There are way to many people looking for work that would be suited for Ms. Manning's position and never create a problem. 

And the Rest Here on Retail Island!

Besides the Store Managers and Assistant Store Managers, there are the others who play parts in the survival (or ultimate end) to employees and companies in general. Here are most of them:

Assistant Managers:


Back in the days of Woolworth's, these managers were usually hired at store level by the Store Manager.  This created the perfect opportunity for people like Bernie to stack the deck with his drinking buddies.  That is exactly what he did.  Sad to say that if you ever had a problem with any of them, the only person you could see was the person who was Human Resources (or what we called Personnel).  In fact at one point I actually had to do this when one of the managers decided one day to do physical harm to me.  As would be expected, they denied harming me even though I was pain for weeks.  Most managers, however, were good-natured and worked well with other employees.

At HQ, I never met anyone who was assistant manager and maybe that was a good thing given that the other managers weren't so hot either.

At Staples, assistant managers were burned through like red shirt crew members on "Star Trek".  Sadly, nobody really stayed long enough in the 2 to 3 open positions to really get attached to.

Sales Manager


This position didn't exist at either Woolworth or HQ.  Smart move for them.

At Staples, however, this became the position that nobody ever really wanted and it was obvious.  To bare the brunt of bad news or being the happy recipient of how well the store was doing was probably the most stressful position in the entire store.  Sadly, I saw this position replaced about 5 different times at least during my 12+ years with the company.

Ironically, I have seen this position up for grabs 3 times in the last 9 months as it has been advertised as part of the State of Maine Career Center job listings that I subscribe to.  I have been tempted to send out an application to this job just to irritate the company just for the fun of it.  I believe that very rarely does Staples advertise through state jobs boards, so they must be extremely desperate to hire someone for this undesirable position.

Personnel/Human Resources


No matter what you call this position, it is necessary to have someone in the store to have this position.  They help with just about any problem you may have even if it is with other managers, at least that's what the concept should be.

Woolworth had the position nailed correctly.  During my employment there, someone actually was personnel and performed scheduling, worked to help out employees, and most importantly was there TO LISTEN!!

HQ had a personnel person and during my seven weeks there, it became apparent that she had been overwhelmed with the problems in the store.  The feeling was basically hope for the best, but don't expect results.

When I first started at Staples, they actually had a personnel person.  Her name was Nikki and she was a very nice person.  She did well getting me in the door and getting me prepped for what would come in my career with them.  Sadly, after about 6 months, her position was eliminated from the company and from that point forward Human Resources (as they called it) was either a manager on-duty or a phone call to home office in Massachusetts.  This really presented many problems as the fact that you could not talk to a manager if they were the problem in the first place and calling Home Office was like calling an uninterested party.  About 2 years into my employment with Staples, they had introduced another useless option of getting help.  It was a group of psychiatrists who worked for Staples that you could call by phoning an 800 number.  Well, one Sunday afternoon, I called and got the response "Sorry, we are closed. Please call again between 9am and 5pm Monday through Friday. If you need help otherwise, please dial 911 to get further assistance"

"Hello, 911 .. My manager is a jerk. I was told to call this number because the company that my employer hired to assist in our problems isn't open on weekend and the answering system said to call you instead.  Hopefully, you can help me"  Of course, I never said that, but maybe it would have been hilarious if I had done so.

Front-End Supervisors


The front-end supervisor (or front-end babysitter, as I like to call it) is the best friend that any cashier can ever have.  I always got along with everyone in that position and I feel they were my friend.  I have my own emotional attachment to the position as I was one for nearly 2 years at Woolworth under Bernie's evil reign.  Certainly the position at Woolworth meant standing at the front of the store and usually chatting with the young (mostly) female cashiers.  There was much downtime there and not much to do.  So the money was easy and not very stressful.  Until, of course, the weekend came and back-to-school season was the thing.  This was when all 8 registers at the front end were ringing and the little desk bells at each register rang off like a song constantly (cashiers are never satisfied).

At HQ, the front-end supervisors varied greatly.  One was a very nice young lady (about half my age unfortunately) and the other was an old man who used to work as a manager at the local grocery store and was always a mean person.  I could not wait to leave this company after 7 weeks given the type of treatment that I got from this jerk.

At Staples in the beginning, we actually had someone who had the title of "front end supervisor".  She was a very nice lady and stayed in the position for about 3 years.  She did not leave by choice, the position was eliminated completely in the company.  For the next year approximately, managers took turns playing front-end manager and reluctantly.  Sometimes, there lack of speed kept customers waiting for up to 20 minutes for them to respond to the cashiers.  They usually were responsible at times for the whole store especially at night which accounts for their tardiness.

About 4 years into my time with Staples, they introduced the C.S.L. (Customer Service Lead).  This new position were basically the former front-end manager position without the manager key-holder training (a manager never-will-be position).  While this position was only held by only one person in the store, it was apparent that this person could be considered overworked because nobody cared about how well they performed.  I always found it interesting that I was never offered the position given that I had previous supervisor experience, but then again we are talking Staples here--home of the stupid.

Up Next:  Searching For That Job

The Way I See It: Department of Health and Human Services Video

First, let me say that I have not nor will I waste time watching the DHHS videos.  I am more disturbed over the fact that Mr. LePage says that the "interviewer was not properly trained".  I believe that no matter how much training you have or how many years you have worked in a job, there is ALWAYS the chance that someone will try and get away with something.  In the 20+ years I worked in retail, I occasionally had people who tried to pull a "fast one" on me.  Sadly, no matter how much training you have, the unexpected can always happen.  What makes this worse is that this was a setup, complete with a hidden video camera.  To blame the employee in this case is stupid and Mr. LePage should know this.  However, given his background as manager of Marden's stores, he proved his incompetence as both a governor and representative of the state...again.  Sadly, Mr. LePage (and I will not address him as governor because he is NOT my governor - I did not vote for him and never would) thinks that his "experience" as a store manager gave him all the training he needed as governor.


Well, Mr. LePage, you are sadly mistaken, just like all the other retail managers I have worked with and known over the years.  If anything, you fooled 39% of the voting people last year who voted you as governor, the other 61% knew better.  I wonder if that person who was the client was one of the 61%..my guess would be yes.  


As far as the incompetency of the DHHS employee, I would say they were probably very capable in their job, unlike the governor.  As I will explain in a future post, I believe scammers are more of the norm not the exception


So, in conclusion, Mr. LePage, unless you personally know the DHHS employee, you are best not to say anything at all rather than insult them as I can speak from personal experience. Better yet, just shut up for the next 4 years and accept your one-term (or shorter) life as governor.


And that is the way I see it...

Assistant Store Managers - After all they are ASSES!

Over my 20+ career in retail, I have worked with a lot of Assistant Managers.  Some have been wonderful and others have been just wonders as in "I wonder what the hell the company was thinking when they were hired!".

Way back in the Woolworth days over 20 years ago, I had the privilege to work with Warren.  He was the kindest manager one could ever meet. He was fun to be around, never yelled, and always seemed happy.  Maybe it was because he always wore these high quality 2 and 3 -piece suits that always made him feel so giddy.  It was amazing that he could be so happy working with angry Bernie. I guess it helped they never talked to each other.

After Warren left the company, we got Chuck.  He came from the former Portsmouth, NH store after it closed.  Anybody who ever went there during the last couple of years like I did, they would wonder why this location lasted as long as it did.  It looked and felt like a store out of something of early 1970's.  Chuck was a nice guy as well who kept us entertained during the end of Bernie's stay and through about half of Mikey's stay.  After Chuck, we no longer had anyone who had the official title as "Assistant Store Manager" as the company was slowly dying off.

At HQ, I never met anyone with that title and probably it was a good thing given the entire environment there.

At Staples as previously mentioned, a couple of the assistant store managers graduated to the position of Store Manager eventually.  However, the attitude of these people changed dramatically between the two positions.  At one point the company even wanted to eliminate the position from our store because they felt it was not needed.  Maybe, they should have done that.  Especially given that the final assistant store manager I dealt with was the worse I ever had.  The name of this person is Abe Madrid.  What made Abe a bad assistant store manager was that he came from the same store as Shawn Nichols did in Bangor Maine.  These two together created a very bad environment as they worked against the employees in every way possible as I will be explaining in future posts.  Bad + Bad = EVIL (VERY EVIL}.

Next Up:  And the Rest Here on Retail Island!

Meet the Managers

Store managers rule how stores work..or in every case I have seen - NOT WORK. Way back in the Woolworth days when I was hired the manager was Bernie, who we employees dubbed him as "Little Saddam".  He never talked directly to most of his employees. He would always talk to them through the assistant managers.  He did, however, talk to a couple of the employees, but was always sounded mean.  Only a couple times did he ever talk to me and when he did he addressed me as "Mr. Brown"...like I didn't have a first name.  His rudeness made him a very bad manager, but ironically he lasted with the company for most of its 25+ years at the mall.  Eventually, the company replaced him  because apparently he was ripping off the company with false inventory reports among other things

After a couple months of not having a store manager, we got Mikey...who was dubbed Mikey Mussolini.  As Woolworth was collapsing, he was brought in from being a district manager from the New York area.  There was 2 obvious things wrong with this.  First, he did not have retail store experience and secondly he had no idea on how to treat Mainers.  This led to many problems including many confrontations that proved his incompetence.  The only thing I really took away from all of his bad management and one piece of advice "Customers will fraud you if you given them the opportunity every time".  This is a lesson that showed itself many times over the next few years as I will explain.

During my short term at HQ, I did not have much interaction with much of the management staff, but when I did they always acted like jerks, which probably explains why there was always so much tension between associates and managers.

Now speaking of tension, we have Staples.  When I first started with the company way back in 1996, the first manager was Don.  He was a hothead, but he could also be very nice when he wanted to be.  Unfortunately, about a year and a half into working there, he had to quit for health reasons.

Next came Mark, Don's former assistant manager.  When he was assistant manager, he was sort of a nice guy and fun to be around.  When he became store manager, all that changed.  He got a big boy voice and decided to start acting tougher.  Sadly, he is still with the company, but thankfully not locally.

After Mark, we got Terence. Huge mistake.  He formerly was Mark's assistant manager and was very clueless.  His former position was as manager of Service Merchandise and we all know what happened to that company.  Note to any company:  NEVER HIRE SOMEONE WHO WAS A MANAGER AT A FAILED COMPANY -- THE COMPANY FAILED BECAUSE THEY WAS PART OF THE PROBLEM -- NOT THE SOLUTION!! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!

Interesting Story on Service Merchandise


A few years ago at the South Portland Maine location, I happened to walk through the Service Merchandise store and saw sitting on a shelf in a corner a Packard-Bell computer.  Since nobody seemed to be around, I wanted to look inside the unit.  I easily was able to get the side panel off the unit and began looking around inside the unit.  While I was doing that, several employees had walked by me and not a single one asked if I needed help.  After I was done looking inside the machine, I left the machine opened with the parts sitting on the shelf beside the unit.  I went back to the store a week later and the computer was still sitting there in pieces.  Another week later, I went back again and the unit was gone, but the price tag was still sitting there.  Ironically, the unit never returned to the shelf and there never was another computer again in Service Merchandise to sell.  Apparently, this store never cared enough about this machine or the customers enough to want to sell it.  Just another sad reason why that company is no longer with us.


After Terence, we got Amy.  Apparently, according to stories I heard, she came to our store as manager with the understanding that at the end of being there for one year, she would be promoted to district manager position.  The biggest problem with her was that she was a manager who always did most of the floor jobs herself. Certainly this is something that managers just don't do.  However, because of this she spent very little time interacting with employees.  After the year was over, she was not given a district manager job, so she abruptly decided to leave the company.

During a week off from vacation, I came back to meet up with our new manager Shawn Nichols.  Little did I know that this guy was nothing but trouble.  As I will be explaining along the way in future posts, not only was Shawn a  bad manager, but he was also a COMPULSIVE LIAR!!  Certainly not a quality anyone would want from ANY manager whatsoever.  He made the last 6 months of employment with the company absolutely intolerable.  It also continued even after my employment ended as well.  Nobody should ever have to put up with what I put up with.  Neither Shawn nor Staples have any shame for what would happen over the next 2+ years.

Commentary: Borders 


As another example of Borders failure can be seen, Waldenbooks which closed up in the Maine Mall, 3 years ago, also had a management problem.  The issue with them was that because that they were gossiping females, they spent most of their time talking to each other while ignoring the customers and being just plain mean to them a lot of the time.  Several times I would walk into the store and saw rolling racks of books that needed to be put on shelves and boxes full of magazines that needed to be put up on shelves as well.  


It is all this ignorance by management that led me to believe that they are a major reason for their own downfall.  Staples should take a lesson from Borders failure, but unlike Borders there problem extends throughout the whole company, not just store management as I will be explaining in the future.


Next Up: Assistant Store Managers - After all they are ASSES!