Safety Not Welcome Here?

This week’s post was inspired by an incident that almost happened last week.

When I was walking through the entrance of the local Walmart last week, a customer with an overflowing cart was heading right toward me. Yes, they was going through the enter door despite that there were quite a few people in front of them using the correct door. When I told the customer that they were going through the wrong door, the woman’s response was “Who cares? Does it really matter?”

This led me into thinking: What if this was the highway and she was going the wrong way? Would she have the same attitude then?

My thought was that maybe. The store wouldn’t have “Enter” and “Exit” on the doors if they didn’t care about safety. At least they tried except that the words are up about 20 feet above the door. It really doesn’t really help all that much.

Walmart is one of those stores that really don’t seem concerned about safety, at least not the local one. Consider this: back when this store was built a few years ago, the company said that the racetrack would NEVER be cluttered with merchandise. For those of you who don’t know what a racetrack of a store is it is the main walkway that circles a store, sometimes with straight paths that lead from the back of the store to the front. Unfortunately, after a couple of years, the racetrack area would become not just a little cluttered, but a complete hazard. It is not bad in just one part of the store, its bad everywhere throughout the store. To add insult to injury, many of the aisles are so narrow that you can hardly walk down them without knocking something off the counters.

But do the employees care? I hardly doubt it because nobody ever seems to make any adjustments or pick things up that fall on the floor very often.

In comparison, Target never has anything on their racetrack and the store always looks pretty safe to shop in.

The same can’t be said, though, of Books-A-Million. Ever since they took over the Borders location nearly 2 years ago, the rugs still have sections that are loose and that sections don’t come together properly. I know there are sections that I always trip over. Sadly that nobody ever has thought of fixing this problem.

Then there is Staples. Staples is too often an accident waiting to happen and sometimes do happen. Over the years that I was employed with them, I saw merchandise fall on people that wasn’t properly placed on shelves, overheads with merchandise that hung over the side of the shelf it was on and other hazards. Add to this the occasional employee who decides to climb a shelf without a ladder and you get the idea.

Speaking of ladders, they are supposed to be chained and left near the back of the store when not in use. How often does this occur? Rarely if ever despite that all the ladders are supposed to be chained when not used. The excuse that is used is that it wastes time to chain the ladders all the time. What the employees don’t realize is that customers will try to use the ladders themselves to get to merchandise when they think nobody is watching. I saw it many times over the years and thankfully no customer got seriously hurt.

To add insult to injury of Staples’ problems, there is no real racetrack area to their stores. Over the years, with all the Staples stores I have visited not a single one of them had a racetrack area or anything that closely resembled it. Some people may say that this may not be overly important, but if you needed to leave the building quickly it would be almost impossible to do. Since I haven’t visited the local Staples store since my termination, I don’t know if they have ever improved the layout, but during the 12 ½ years I was there, it was always a disaster.

So the bottom line is this: Stores need to step up on safety, not just for the sake of the customers but also employees as well. It is the store’s responsibility to create safe shopping environments, even though they usually are blind to their own problems.