Archive for March 29, 2009
Get It In Gear, Walmart!
by John Weckerle
We’ve been very favorably impressed by Walmart’s corporate citizenship in the Edgewood area, and hope they’ll continue. However, we’ve recently had a few experiences that we would prefer not to repeat.
One class of experiences involves the purchase of alcoholic beverages – specifically, in our case, wine – and the checkout experience. We seem to repeatedly find ourselves in situations where we have to wait at the checkout line because a) the cashier does not have the required State certification; and b) there is no manager nearby to complete the sale as required. This problem reached the ridiculous stage yesterday. After waiting nearly ten minutes, I went over to the customer service counter and asked them to send someone to the the register. The person on duty said she would “send somebody right over.” I returned to Register 5 and resumed my wait, along with my wife, mother-in-law, and the people behind us. Finally, a rather unapologetic manager-on-duty named Phyllis arrived and told us that she had been “busy in the office.” I told her that I thought the wait was unreasonable – we were standing there with people lined up behind us for at least seventeen minutes after everything else had been rung up – and she replied that “someone decided that she should be doing something else.” I told her that, if they were going to have uncertified people working the register, there should be a manager nearby. She responded curtly that “he’s at lunch.” This was at 4:30 p.m. on a Saturday.
This didn’t just affect us, it affected the people behind us who had already loaded their items onto the conveyer. Walmart should either stop using uncertified cashiers or make sure that managers are available to assist. In fact, they should do the latter regardless of the former; nobody dissatisfied enough to ask for a manager should have to wait a long time to see one.