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!!