Walmart is known throughout the corporate world for revolutionizing the logistics of retail—the processes by which goods move from the point of production to the trunk of a customer’s car. More than any retailer before, it has broken down this process into its component parts and maximized the efficiency of each. It was one of the first retailers to make use of the barcode to keep track of its inventory; one of the first to integrate its operations vertically, cutting out wholesalers; one of the first to use its own fleet of trucks and develop its own network of distribution centers close to its stores so as to minimize the inventory it kept on-site and reduce both overstocking and outstocking.1 Not only does it collect detailed information about every product it sells across its stores over time, but through its Retail Link system, Walmart shares many of these data with its suppliers—a process that helps suppliers modify their production and marketing techniques, while also making them acutely aware of whether they are living up to Walmart’s sales expectations.2 In sum, Walmart has used its market power, combined with information technology, to squeeze its suppliers—sometimes to the edge of insolvency—and pass those savings on to its consumers, profiting itself on the sheer volume of stuff that comes and goes.
Given such systematization, how does one make sense of what we find at the Walmart in East Windsor, New Jersey [#3266]? It is almost 2 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon in March. The fitting-room associate, who runs the intercom, has announced that all associates starting their shifts are to meet by the jewelry counter for a 2 p.m. meeting. A few people begin wandering over to the counter around 2:05, but the meeting does not begin in earnest until at least 2:10. An assistant manager—a 30-something West Indian woman—tells the assembled associates that they will be “zoning” (i.e., straightening out) the grocery section for the first hour of their shift. But before she can finish her instructions, she gets told, via her headset, that she is needed at the registers in the front. A slightly older white man takes over. But before he has time to say much of anything, he is cut off, this time by a customer who approaches with a shopping cart, asking the assembled group to point her in the direction of the cutting fabric. As the man running the meeting turns his attention to the customer, the meeting melts away before it has really begun.
Watching men roll large pallets of goods across a Walmart shop floor, it can feel as though Walmart is its own sort of assembly line: a steady churn of stuff from truck, to bin, to cart, to shelf, to register, and out. This is right on one level, but it misses two dimensions of the retail sector that make it different from the assembly line, both of which we saw in one mundane moment of disorganization in East Windsor. First, retailers like Walmart (and many other service-sector companies) are server systems, meaning there is unavoidable uncertainty in the flow of customers and items.3 Second, at retailers like Walmart and across the service sector, the traditional two-way relationship between workers and managers is replaced by a three-way relationship among workers, customers, and managers.4 These new relational dynamics change dynamics of control in subtle but important ways as well.
In this chapter we suggest that the experiences of Walmart we observed in chapter 2—the sense of creativity, autonomy, and community that some workers find there some of the time; the frustration with the arbitrary authority of managers that many workers come to resent—are structured by these features of work in the service sector.5
SERVER SYSTEMS AND UNJUST AUTHORITY
The central structural fact about retail work is that it is a server system. Customers flow in at unpredictable times and purchase unpredictable things. They make unpredictable demands on the workers who serve them. Or so it seems. But there is a typical flow. People are more likely to buy doughnuts in the morning than TVs. Ammunition is more likely to be sold during hunting season than it is the week before Christmas. Each of the million products sold at Walmart has its own schedule, each day, down to the hour. And product schedules are correlated with one another. The schedules for peanuts and soda are more similar than the schedules for hosiery and avocados, because customers—whose bundles of goods make up their shopping baskets—generate each product’s schedule.
Down in Arkansas, some cluster of corporate operations research engineers have designed algorithms that pore over the hourly sales data for each store and predict optimum, store-specific minimum staffing levels for each hour the stores are open. Those minimum staffing levels are then transformed into schedules for assistant managers and department managers and associates. The minimum staffing level is that specific level that maximizes profit, moving the most product out the door with the least labor. Somewhere along the line, these corporate engineers have figured out just what the optimal wait time at checkout is for each store. A little wait may be better than none at all, because people make impulse purchases of items displayed at the registers while they are waiting in line. But if the lines are too long, people may just leave. The retail industry, led by Walmart, figured out a long time ago what the airlines recognized more recently: customers are willing to absorb a lot of the costs of business to save a minimal amount of money. These engineers also know that people buy products when those products are fully loaded on the shelves, and so they need to make sure that associates can keep their areas stocked. The goal is to reduce idle time for staff to zero by shifting it onto customers without that shift becoming so obvious or burdensome that people stop going to Walmart to buy things.
How much Walmart can shift this burden onto customers varies by location. People tend to wait in longer lines in poor communities and communities of color. What Walmart (or any retailer) can get away with is strongly correlated with the mean household income or percent of African Americans in their catchment areas, presumably at least in part because there are fewer alternative places to buy things. In these places Walmart has market power over both its workers, who do not have many other places to work, and its customers, who do not have many other places to shop. Figure 3.1 shows the association between the average Yelp review for a Walmart and the characteristics of the neighborhood in which it is located. The reviews are significantly worse in poor communities (figure 3.1A) and communities of color (figure 3.1B).
Using the same analytic techniques as we did in our Glassdoor analysis earlier, we also investigated which words are most associated with reviews in African American communities versus those most associated with reviews of stores in white communities. In stores in predominantly African American zip codes, reviewers are more likely to use words like “worst,” “unorganized,” and “nasty” to describe their experiences. In contrast, in stores located in white zip codes, reviewers are more likely to use words like “typical,” “friendly,” and “smaller.” The single word most highly correlated with reviews of Walmarts in communities of color is “ghetto.” Shoppers at different Walmarts have starkly different experiences.
No algorithm works perfectly. And so the everyday problem that Walmart faces even with the most precise algorithms available is the simple fact that shit happens. The minimal server-allocation system can take into account a whole host of disruptions and slowdowns caused by patterned customer behavior, but it cannot account for all of the strange things that the 100 million customers who come to the store each week might (and do) actually do. When one of those things happens, giant queues can form at the register. And when that happens, people with full baskets can just decide to walk out, abandoning everything in their carts, thus leaving even more chaos behind them and elongating the queue.
And so while Walmart has rationalized much of the logistics to maximize the efficiency of the flow of goods through its system in light of varying demand, there is a huge element of uncertainty in the production process to which Walmart responds by allocating to their managers a high degree of discretion over staff allocation. If lines appear at the registers, managers shift associates off the floor to work them; if cashiers are suddenly idle, managers have associates move stock. Outside of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on the Monday morning before the 2016 presidential election, for example, there was such a run on guns and ammunition that additional staff had to be allocated to what was usually (at that time of day) a relatively sleepy department. This helps to explain the puzzle that while Walmart is hyperrationalized, many associates do not have the kind of stable job descriptions we expect in a bureaucracy.
DIRECT CONTROL AT THE POINT OF PRODUCTION
Contrast the situation at Walmart on any given day—shifting personnel, chaotic arrivals and departures of goods and persons—with the typical factory characterized by the systematic movement of goods down an assembly line at fixed speed. Customers introduce an improvisational element to the service sector. It is uncertain exactly when they will come, what they will want, what they will do.
If associates feel under the watchful eye of managers who track their productivity with obsessive attention to detail, managers are—in turn—under the watchful eye of performance algorithms that drive them to sell more products. They also get to do fun things like decide strategies for increasing sales or set the parameters within which employees can experiment with what condiment goes best with fried chicken in Omaha or give advice on the displays the associates set up and later post “shelfies” of. Managers are the ones who frame how employees ought to respond to the requests and behaviors of customers—the customer who returns a box of condoms saying they did not work because she got pregnant; the customers who are trying to wire money to children they seem not to know or “lovers” they have never met; the diabetic who complains that Walmart is discriminating against diabetics because the sugar-free pecan pie is 50 percent more expensive than the normal one; the customers who come in with snakes or ride horses that poop in the aisles.6 They are the ones who are responsible for scheduling employees so as to accomplish several different objectives at once—matching the somewhat predictable but varying flow of customers with the supply of labor; allowing employees some degree of say over when they work, how many hours they work, and what department they should work in; staying under budget. At the end of the day they are left to try to figure what combination of carrots and sticks they ought to use to incentivize labor productivity.
On the assembly line, the structuring routines built into the machinery limit the extent to which the manager can wield arbitrary authority over work. A manager cannot simply take people off one task and put them on another willy-nilly, as the line would likely stop; managers cannot change much about the structure of production, just its tempo. In this setting the inflexibility, predictability, and interdependence of the production process provide the foundations for worker voice: management demands that impede the functioning of the line will likely be seen as illegitimate; there are defined work rules around which workers might negotiate; and there is the credible threat that disobedience by a small fraction of the workforce will disrupt production for everyone by stopping the line entirely.
Control over labor encoded into the technical means of production—that is, the assembly line—does more than mute the discretion of supervisors. It directly enhances workers’ structural power. Richard Edwards, in Contested Terrain, argues that employers’ reliance on technical control in the early twentieth century, itself a response to workers’ resistance to managers’ arbitrary authority, created the conditions of possibility for the sit-down strikes of the 1930s and the growth of industrial labor unions: “Technical control linked together the plant’s workforce, and when the line stopped, every worker necessarily joined the strike. Moreover, in a large, integrated manufacturing operation, such as auto production, a relatively small group of disciplined unionists could cripple an entire system by shutting down a part of the line.”7
All of this is missing in the low-wage retail sector. In settings where the routine is dictated not by the fixed capital of machinery but rather by the ceaselessly changing flow of customer demand, workers can be moved from one task to another under the seemingly legitimate claim that such shifting is aimed at improving customer service.8 In such contexts it is not difficult for managers to make life difficult for workers they have come to dislike or would like to see fail. Even those managers with the best of intentions toward all of their employees end up favoring some over others, if only because the some they favor are those that they trust to get the job done. From the perspective of the worker, though, the exercise of managerial discretion over their time and activities on the shop floor appears tainted by favoritism. That this perception makes it harder for workers to align with a single voice may be an unexpected benefit of the Walmart management strategy for labor control, as it surely acts as a powerful impediment for collective action.
UNFAIR MANAGERS AND THE RHETORIC OF CUSTOMER SATISFACTION
Against this background, it is not surprising that the perception of managers’ arbitrary and unjust authority frustrates associates most. Under some theory of sales, every tiny little thing matters, and if one holds that theory, then pretty much everything employees do is up for grabs. Vickie Allard, from the store in Rosemead, California [#5154], remembers the moment when she was told by a younger male supervisor that she had to change her name tag from “Vickie,” the nickname she had used since her father used it in her childhood, to “Victoria.” She complied because “he’s the boss, you know, what am I supposed to do?” But it stung. She wasn’t allowed to decide the name on her own name tag? “That was the first time I had ever encountered such disrespect in a store or any, or any establishment I worked for.” It is hard to imagine how one’s name tag could influence sales one way or another. But under the prevailing understanding that managers have discretion over employees limited only by what is not related to customer service, a demand as absurdly illegitimate as the name-change demand might be justified.
It’s the frustration of giving birth to a child and then having to pee more regularly than usual, only to be chided by one’s superior, or being disciplined for stealing time for having diarrhea while on the clock. It’s the casual banter with a manager that suddenly becomes serious: I had to go get a [scanner] from a co manager. He jokingly said do you have a dollar. I jokingly said back I work at Walmart I’m broke. He then gave me a 10 min lecture on how I shouldn’t say bad things about the company that he works for. A long thread on the discussion board concerns whether or not it complies with dress code for an associate to wear a rainbow pin. On the one hand, the fact that Walmart sponsors an “associate resource group” in support of LGBTQ associates—Walmart PRIDE—is discussed as evidence that the pin would be acceptable. On the other hand, an associate responds that if a customer comes up to you saying it’s offensive to them then you have to take it off; another says that its acceptability depends on the store and that her store—in Ohio—had a guy who had to remove his rainbow pin.
One of the recurrent problems facing associates is that they confront multiple levels of authority, many of which are not in sync. Vickie, for example, didn’t know what she was supposed to do if an item’s stock keeping unit (SKU code) was missing. Type it in herself? One assistant manager said yes; several weeks later she was written up for doing so; a few weeks after that she was chastised for doing the opposite. An associate like Vickie has several different managers to whom she might have to respond: her customer service manager (an hourly associate in charge of the front of the store), a support manager (an hourly associate one step up from CSM); or any of the salaried managers on the shift (assistant store managers, store comanagers, and store managers). People in these different positions likely have different problems they are trying to solve at different times, and so they respond to the same everyday uncertainties differently. April Williams, from a store in Dayton, Ohio, described the absurdity that would sometimes result:
You have your immediate manager, who tells you something and you go off and do it. And then another manager sees you doing something, and you just finish up doing what your immediate manager told you to do, and another manager will see you, thinking that you’re not busy, and give you something else to do. And your immediate manager will be, like, “Where are you at? Where have you been?” It’s, like, “Well, manager level B told me to do this.” “Well, I need you over here…I need you to do this.” So it’s kind of a struggle between your immediate manager level A versus your higher-level manager, level B, and then sometimes level C comes in and wants you to do something, and it can be—it feels like you’re getting jerked in 18 different directions, and it’s like you can’t complain, because you do what the top-level manager, the highest-level manager that tells you to do something, that’s the manager that you listen to.
Many times workers’ frustrations also revolve around unpredictability and favoritism regarding work schedules. Walmart’s scheduling policies, like its policies regarding sick time and paid time off, have been in flux. Consistent has been the company’s aspirations to match work hours with customer traffic as predicted by the company’s algorithms—what it calls in its most recent iteration “customer-first scheduling.” The fact that customer demand varies based on all sorts of factors means that Walmart, ideally, would have all of its workers on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and could match immediate changes in traffic (say, the announcement of an upcoming snowstorm) with immediate changes to people’s schedules. But the flow of labor is not as flexible as the flow of merchandise. In light of widespread opposition to such just-in-time scheduling practices, the company has put in place a system in which workers can indicate the hours they are available and are given their schedules two weeks in advance, though these schedules may vary within (and sometimes even without) the hours that associates indicate they are available.
How do managers decide on which hours to give which associates? Should associates who are available more of the time be rewarded with more of their preferred hours, since they are willing to shoulder more of the uncertainty for the company? Should more senior associates get more predictable schedules or more total hours, or should the regularity and number of hours be distributed based on worker productivity or some other metric? Naturally some people appear to receive better schedules. And the scheduling matters, because that is how people get their hours. If they don’t get hours, they have less money. And if they have less money, they are even more subject to the contingencies of the things that might happen to them, putting them at risk of being even less available.
In some perfect, algorithmically efficient world, the answers to these questions and more would all have been encoded in software, and managers could not be blamed for any favoritism. Even better for the company, perhaps, would be if Walmart could treat its employees like Uber treats its “contractors”—associates could log into work whenever they felt the inclination and would be paid more or less for each product scanned or shelf stocked or pallet emptied depending on the labor supply and demand at that hour. For now, though, hours are passed down from the home office in Bentonville to the regional manager to the district manager to the store manager, who then—along with those further down the chain of command—have to decide on matching particular hours to particular people.
It is easy to blame managers, and there are certainly bad managers at Walmart. But the problems are deeper, if only because managerial authority here is not constrained by anything inherent to the work. At the end of the day, managers are responsible for increasing sales at the lowest possible cost. The fact that workers do not have fixed schedules makes it easier for Walmart to make more money. It also makes it more difficult for Walmart workers to create and maintain community. It puts them directly under the eye of managers whose opinions and thoughts about them matter not just during their time on the floor, but also for how many hours they get and when, when they are trying to balance competing obligations.
CUSTOMERS
Under some circumstances, as discussed earlier, customers can feel like family for Walmart workers. This is particularly true at stores where regulars make up a relatively high proportion of shoppers and work schedules are relatively fixed, allowing for repeated interactions among the same customers and employees over time. It’s also likely to be true where customers are literally workers’ family and friends. These tend to be Walmart stores in more rural areas. But it is also the case that Walmart workers experience customers as their adversaries.
How does it come about that customers are seen as the enemy? How might we understand this opposition? After all, all of the energy devoted to aesthetic stocking, the shelfies, the desire to make even the worst Walmart a place that one’s grandmother could feel okay about shopping in, seems oriented toward making things work for customers. That is all true. In the imaginaries of thousands of Walmart workers, aesthetics, distinction, control all seem possible, and those Walmart associates “go for it.”
The problem is that these desires fundamentally contradict the real Walmart, which at the end of the day is about low prices. Walmart’s primary concern is to offer the lowest prices within whatever turns out to be the competitive catchment area for the buyers who come into their stores. Buyers tend to come to Walmart not because it makes them feel good, not because they mistakenly believe that Walmart supports their community through charitable contributions, not for any other reason than they know that, on average, their shopping basket is going to be cheaper than the same basket purchased anywhere else and they can get all sorts of cheap things in one place.
A 2016 survey by Market Force Information found that Walmart was ranked the lowest across all grocery stores in virtually every dimension of customer preference, from cleanliness to checkout speed.9 The American Customer Satisfaction Index recently gave Walmart 68/100, the lowest of all retailers. ConsumerAffairs gave it 1.2 stars out of 5. People don’t come to shop. They come to buy. The millions of people who go to Walmart would be happier if it looked better, was cleaner, faster, whatever. But they are coming for the prices, not the atmosphere.10
From its inception, Walmart’s business model has been premised on offering customers the lowest prices. The company’s motto has reflected this priority, even as it has changed over time. First it was Always the Low Price. Always. After the Better Business Bureau challenged this claim, Walmart modified the slogan to Always Low Prices. Always. This one stuck until 2007, when the company changed its motto again—this time to Save Money. Live Better. At the time, the business press suggested that this represented a significant shift in the company’s mission—it was no longer just about price at Walmart, but about what savings could make possible. But it was a shift in framing more than a shift in content, and the thrust was still the same—if you shop here, you will save money.
These are not the lowest prices possible. In today’s market they are not always even the lowest prices around, as competitors, online and off, have cut prices in order to compete. But the prices are certainly low, and they are widely understood to be the lowest. And so the company’s defenders, including people like Jason Furman—Barack Obama’s chair of the Council of Economic Advisers—argue that Walmart should be understood as a hero for the poor,11 a corporate Robin Hood. In 2005, a company-commissioned study from Global Insight reported that the company saved consumers $263 billion in 2004, more than $2,000 per household. This assumes all sorts of indirect effects on prices in other stores, but the effect at the individual household level is real enough. Some scholars have suggested that the Consumer Price Index—a basic economic indicator produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and used to measure inflation and set interest rates—ought to be adjusted in light of the savings that Walmart makes possible.12
Recall that the largest single period of abnormal returns for Walmart over the last 30 years occurred during the years surrounding welfare reform. The other peaks? All during recessions (see figure 3.2). Financial analysts refer to Walmart as a “bear market stock,” since it tends to outperform the market during periods of economic contraction. When times are hard, people are more likely to spend more of their money at places like Walmart that promise the lowest prices around. As a commentator from Slate put it, “In a pinched economy, consumers are embracing their inner skinflint. And Walmart is a penny pincher’s paradise.”13 For similar reasons, analysts have suggested that Walmart may underperform during periods of economic prosperity.14 One of the arguments that Walmart makes is that poor people depend on the company’s low prices. True. They also depend on the company for jobs. And one of the reasons that they are poor is that they are not paid enough for the work that they do. The poor people depending on low prices at Walmart are like the people who work at Walmart.
Walmart has always had an easy response to demands for higher wages: it can’t change much without raising prices, and if it did that, then Walmart customers would lose out. Walmart frames the customer and the employee as antagonists, competing over the same piece of the same pie. The company has often pointed out that it has operated on a slim 3 percent profit margin for the last 20 years, that its prodigious profits are a result of its massive scale. In response to widespread criticism about a range of different issues, one of the largest companies in the world goes micro, portraying itself as an advocate for the “average working family,” a lifeline, a way to survive.15 The economics of this argument are contested and shaky,16 but that is beside the point. If Walmart acts as though the interests of its workforce are antagonistic to the interests of its customers, this goes a long way toward making it be so.
Rebecca Sanaith felt as though customers knew that the low prices they enjoyed were a direct result of her and her coworkers’ poor working conditions. Rebecca believes the same story too. The customers “know we don’t get paid right and we get treated wrong. They’re just like, ‘But it’s cheap…This place is ghetto but it’s cheap. I know they don’t pay their associates right, but it’s better for my pocket.’ ” In her mind, customers believe that the low prices they are paying depend on the low wages that Walmart is paying. This is probably not actually the case. Most customers don’t really think about the mechanisms by which low prices confront them. Still, in the minds of some associates, customers and workers meet on the shop floor thinking that they are structural adversaries. The reality is different. Decomposing the sources of low prices is complex, but wages are not the sole drivers of price at Walmart.
Across the service sector, customers do not interact with managers or executives; they interact with those serving them: cashiers, customer service representatives, bartenders, concierges. And in most service settings, part of the service workers’ product is the experience he or she creates for the customer.17 In fancy hotels or boutique clothing stores or expensive health-care facilities, this is the experience of luxury. A central part of the worker’s job is to be cheerful, caring, and helpful, to anticipate the customer’s needs, to establish rapport, to make the customer feel seen and understood. The luxury worker’s job is in part to make the customer like him or her and, by association, like the business and spend money there. This feels good for the customer. When workers can believe that the service they offer is important or the place they work is providing something useful, it can feel good for the workers too.18 Workers want to feel that they work at the best place as well, that their building really is special, that their clothes are really well designed, that their sports club is best at whatever it tries to be (a fitness center, a spa, a place to have health food), that their garage really is good at fixing cars, and so on. Absent those beliefs, the manufacturing of emotional responses can alienate the worker from his or her own emotional life.19
The problem at Walmart is that what the organization says it is the best at—low prices—is seen by some customers and some workers to be partially secured by workers’ mistreatment. It doesn’t need to be. Walmart could attribute its capacity for consistently delivering low prices to the incredible economies of scale it achieves, to its unusually effective operations research guys who model the transportation networks that get materials from farms and ports and factories onto trucks, to the fact that its associates work harder and smarter than everyone else. But until recently, Walmart’s opposition to even modest increases in the minimum wage, its fierce resistance to any form of collective bargaining, its massive investments in defending itself against class action suits, in short, its public face, simply strengthens the perceived alignment of low wages and low prices.
The fact that in some places workers are able to develop a unique store identity, link their imagined futures to “a great company,” or still believe in the wisdom of Sam Walton is a remarkable testament to how important finding dignity at work is, in whatever little corner one can build it. But where it seems Walmart really doesn’t care, where the customers think the workers are garbage, where the workers think the customers are scum, where everyone thinks the stuff that is sold there is junk, where the whole scene is totally “ghetto,” where no one has a reason to invest in an imaginary community linking customers and workers, the antagonism between customers and workers is fueled and refueled through countless everyday encounters. And the perception that there is an inherent antagonism between the interests of workers and the interests of customers is reinforced by the organization of work at Walmart.
CUSTOMERS THINK THEY ARE THE VICTIMS OF ASSOCIATES
At Walmart, workers are not given the luxury to make the experience of shopping luxurious. In truth, a “luxurious” Walmart would probably look like a Walmart that wasn’t doing everything to make prices lower. And so Walmart can’t look too good. Pallets of stock on the floor communicate the idea that no effort is being wasted in making sure that prices are absolutely rock bottom. The associates can’t be seen as doing nothing, because otherwise customers might start to think that some of the hourly wage that is going to the idle worker could go into an even lower price on the shelf.
Associates at Walmart are busy. They have boxes to unpack, pallets to unload, long lines of customers to get through. One associate wrote in frustration: Have y’all ever been told you were going overboard with customer service? Despite Sam Walton’s famous “10-foot rule,” whereby associates were to smile, greet, and offer to help any customer who came within a 10-foot radius of them, in practice it is impossible for associates to use the 10-foot rule and complete all the tasks they are asked to do: If you’re busting your butt trying to stock, it’s kinda hard to do the 10 foot rule. You’d probably get fired for not doing your job stocking.
The weird thing is that amid the massive field of “we cut all costs” signifiers, customers have the idea that the associates should take care of them. There emerges a sense of dissonance between the customer’s and the associate’s understandings of “service.” One associate writes about a grumpy old man who complained that the workers are always in the way putting stuff away, to which another responds, You know they’d be griping more if we didn’t have it out. The associate sees her “service” as consisting of moving the goods—making sure that things are stocked and in place, shelves are full and appealing, aisles are clear. The customer, unable to find something, is seeking interactive service, emotional labor, information delivered with a smile. The customer, assuming that service workers are there to serve them, feels entitled to interrupt the worker’s stocking work, because it does not appear to them as work related to their needs. The worker feels interrupted. Walmart workers from all kinds of different regions and backgrounds seem irrationally irritated by one specific question they get from customers: “Do you work here?” They assert it’s a stupid question, and they have a point: Why ask someone wearing a Walmart uniform whether they work at Walmart? But the wrath for what is likely almost always a rhetorical question may be related to the fact that this is a question that customers ask as a way of trying to interrupt whatever the worker was doing before.
Customers may not get the smiles to which they feel entitled. The structural sources of workers’ stress are invisible to them—the disrespect they get from managers, the inconsistent scheduling, and of course, the low pay. Instead, they experience the worker’s stress directly as the worker failing to serve them. A long line may well be related to understaffing, but the customer does not see staffing decisions get made; the customer sees a “lazy” cashier who ought to do more to speed up the process.20 And because customers are interested in themselves they actually think that they are the victims of the long line.
Jamal Green was one of the fastest cashiers in the business, but it was still hard to keep customers happy: “So, you will have a lot of angry customers, and a lot of this stuff was out of our control, where it was due to understaffing, or something like that, where it’s the wrong price, or long lines, or something like that.” It is frustrating to be working your hardest and still feel as though you are the target of customer ire. Karen Ford, the cake decorator from Cincinnati, could understand customer frustration:
You know, you come in there, and there’s nobody to wait on you. Have you ever went in Walmart and had to stand in a long line, or went to get some food from the deli, and there was nobody behind the counter to wait on you? This is going on all the time.
According to workers like Karen, customers’ attributions were off: “The people look at you like you’re doing something wrong, but it ain’t us, it’s the company not having enough workers.” Carlos Sánchez, from a store in Orlando, Florida [#1084], said that due to low staffing the “customers are getting on your case, and it’s not your fault.” Asked how that made him feel, he answered, “Horrible! You feel like you’re being attacked. And it’s not your fault.” Michael King, who wound up leaving his store in Elgin, Illinois [#1814], because of the stress, remembers how depressed everyone seemed who worked there:
They would just sit there and kind of have their head down, complaining about having to cover, like, three departments, and their department being such a mess, and yet, you know, they would have to spend time helping out another department because there’s just—there’s just nobody working there.
The perception that there is nobody working at Walmart arises because no matter when you are there, the company has sought to minimize the number of people in the store—a number calculated previously from all the microlevel sales and flow data in that store for that time of year. Workers often feel, rightly, that they are blamed by customers for decisions made much farther up the chain of command. And customers get unhappy with workers even for things that don’t have anything to do with Walmart. When California passed a law charging a small fee for plastic bags, customers got mad at associates for it: People are being really rude about it…I’m getting berated over something I had no control over…. Granted in retail/cashier position to them it’s always our fault.
THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT
Sam Walton didn’t invent the idea that the customer was always right, but he did help diffuse it. Here’s another of his famous aphorisms: “There is only one boss—the customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.” Everyone knows that the customer is not always right, that the customer is not literally the boss, but it doesn’t matter. The idea that one should act as if the customer is always right, that the customer has more authority than the worker, makes good business sense. The marginal cost of replacing a product—which for anything that actually costs anything is driven back to the supplier or easily written off as loss—is never worth the potential diffusion of negative sentiment through interpersonal networks. In communities where such networks are dense and intact—like the communities Walmart came out of, in small towns in rural areas of the country—arguing with customers is a guaranteed way to send your business into the ground.
But having the customer be “boss” is also a management tool, a way to offload an element of performance reviews, to subject the employee to constant supervision without spending a dime. There are exponentially more customer “bosses” than salaried staff. Think of the disciplining power of tipping systems at restaurants, the ways in which “comment cards” at hotels or “brief surveys” after calls with customer service representatives or even Yelp reviews might allow managers to watch their employees more carefully. These are all strategies of making the customer a part of management.21 Sam Walton must have realized that all of this customer supervision is free. He also must have realized that if managers, particularly those hourly “managers” at the lower levels of the store who still have routine customer contact, treat all customer complaints as legitimate, they would not waste associate time or their own time trying to get to the substantive reality of the situation. By giving a small gift or taking the price off or apologizing; by disciplining the associate; in short, by acting like the customer is right even when the customer is obviously wrong, one could send the customer out the door, satisfied quickly, without a scene. Surely some managers are able to play front and backstage simultaneously, satisfying customers while simultaneously confirming through a subtle conspiratorial look or sign or follow-up conversation that they know the associate is right. But surely others are not, and surely some come to believe as a result of their acting that the customer really is always right and the associate is always wrong.
Here too there is unevenness in the control that customers can exert over associates. In communities where Walmart workers and customers overlap and are close-knit, customer complaints may risk tearing the social fabric in which they are embedded. Consequently, complaints (and control) from customers are probably reduced. In contrast, in the communities broken apart by poverty, customers may have more incentive to complain (what is known is that if you complain you get things) and they pay none of the costs, because they do not pay a relational price for getting free stuff.
Leilani Griffin, who worked at a Walmart in Cincinnati, remembered, “If a customer complained that you didn’t help put her bags in the car, knowing that you did…she’ll tell your manager that, and the manager will believe [the customer].” She continued, “I believe the customer’s always right, but…the customer could be always wrong, too.” Dawn Mills, from the Walmart in Franklin, Ohio, said, “Walmart lets customers, lets rude people like that, get by with anything and everything. They reward them with giving them a gift card if they complain enough. That kind of thing.” Jason Matthews, from the Walmart in Glenwood, Illinois [#5404], said, “Due to the fact that Walmart [thinks the] customer is always right you have some customers that will come in there mad at the world and will literally take it out on you verbally and physically. Walmart will not do anything to protect you.” Patricia Bowman, who worked as a cashier at a Walmart in Merritt Island, Florida [#771], reported, “We have customers cuss us out constantly.” But what made it worse was that managers “take the customer’s side 90 percent of the time.” She continued: “And when you’re being cussed out because you’re not selling alcohol because they’re underage and don’t have an ID, you don’t need that and you don’t need management apologizing to the customer. You need them to back you on that.” Vickie Allard, from the Walmart in Rosemead, California, referred to one of her supervisors as the “Queen of Hearts,” because “if a customer spoke out against you…. It was off with your head.”
Customers played another negative role for many of those who worked at Walmart: as the audience for the abuse to which they were subjected by management. The presence of customers added to the humiliation they felt at the hands of their supervisors. Ann Regnerus, the former gravestone cutter, described how management at her store would “chastise you, right in front of the customers.” She continued,
And they’d call you up on the intercom and they’d say stuff like, “And you will be held accountable!” And I was just thinking, man, this is, like, right out of 1984, you know? It’s, like, Orwellian. And it was just abusive, really.
In stores where associates know their customers, such public admonishment would be embarrassing and degrading. Losing face is uncomfortable. Losing face in front of friends is something one hopes to avoid as an adult.
In the late nineteenth century, as modern industry increasingly displaced old patterns of work in the United States, the Knights of Labor—a radical predecessor to the better-known and more conservative American Federation of Labor—expressed concern about whether political freedom was possible among a class of permanent wage earners. These early labor activists thought wage labor was a form of domination not only because of laborers’ dependence on employers for a wage but also because of the employer’s everyday authority over the labor process.22
Labor’s attention to interactive domination during this time arose naturally from the changing organization of firms during this period. As documented by Richard Edwards, quickly expanding companies like McCormick Harvesting Machine Company and Pabst Brewing turned to what Edwards calls “hierarchical control” to convert labor power—workers’ time—into actual labor. When companies had been smaller, owners’ personal ties with their workers helped to blur class lines and inspire workers’ loyalty to the boss.23 But as the sheer size of firms prevented such personalistic ties between workers and owners, companies hired foremen and managers to serve the same control functions previously served by the owner himself, now without the boss’s charisma: “The result was arbitrary command rule by foremen and managers, who became company despots encumbered by few restrictions on their power over workers.”24
It was these forms of arbitrary control, as much as concerns about wages and benefits, that provoked the first concerted wave of labor agitation in the United States. In 1894, the Pullman Palace Car Company, on the South Side of Chicago, just across the street from the Pullman Walmart where Anthony and Beth met for their interview, had been the epicenter of one of the most militant labor actions in American history. Eugene Debs, the head of the nascent American Railway Union, and later the most successful Socialist Party presidential candidate in history, led a strike at the plant and an associated rail boycott that froze the movement of merchandise from Chicago to the Pacific Ocean. For both the workers at Palace Car Company and the railway workers who supported the boycott, foremen’s despotism, brutality, and arbitrary exercise of authority were central grievances.25
Edwards goes on to argue that many of the changes to the structure of the industrial firm over the course of the twentieth century—from technical innovations like the assembly line, which reduced the discretion of management by encoding control in impersonal machinery, to later organizational innovations like bureaucratic roles, rules, incentives, and job ladders, which reduced management discretion by articulating standard operating procedures according to which supervisors could punish unproductive and reward productive behavior—were responses to workers’ outrage at and resistance to the despotism of their immediate supervisors. This is what Edwards described as bureaucratic control; it suffused the “core” of the U.S. economy. Simple, despotic control remained, but only on the periphery.
What is surprising about the centrality of Walmart and other massive low-wage service-sector companies in the contemporary U.S. economy is that, with respect to the exercise of arbitrary authority, they represent a return to a form of workplace control that seemed, in an earlier historical era, to have spawned such intense resistance.26 But a closer look reveals a more complex control system, one that draws on old systems but is nevertheless something new. This is Walmartism.
The arbitrary authority of managers here is tightly coupled with a penetrative system of observation, measurement, and feedback that constrains both workers and managers—a system assembled from technological innovations unavailable to Walmart’s nineteenth-century counterparts, an array of different kinds of cameras and counters and scanners; and from social innovations emerging from the relations of production in the service sector, the most important of which is the deployment of customers as indirect agents of control. Likewise, Walmart draws on elements of “flexible specialization” in the organization of its workplace—departmental cross-training; just-in-time delivery of goods and schedules; a rhetoric of horizontalism, teamwork, and “open-door” problem-solving—but does so without the investments in human capital or power-sharing with which this term has traditionally been associated.27 And without all that much flexibility either: despite the uncertainty introduced by unpredictable customer traffic and tastes, and the resulting managerial discretion, the set of services delivered by Walmart associates—as a whole—is quite routine.28 Where Walmart as an employer is most “flexible” is in its scheduling practices. But this flexibility is, in reality, merely a strategy by which the company forces employees to absorb fluctuations in consumer demand.29 It also serves as a strategy for labor control in other ways: unstable schedules reduce the extent to which workers form relationships with one another, reducing their likelihood of recognizing common interests; and since workers are often underemployed and those who are able to work across multiple departments have a higher chance of getting more hours, the company incentivizes associates to enhance their skills at no cost to the company itself.
Even simple control is not so simple at Walmart. Managers still watch workers and give them orders, tell them where to go and what to do. But the stress of subordination is heightened by the cross-talk of different layers of supervision—from above (store managers, comanagers, assistant managers, zone managers, department managers) and below (customers)—who issue contradictory and therefore impossible to resolve orders and thus create double binds for associates. It is also heightened by the absence of any machinery through which workers can structure their tasks and thereby limit the legitimate demands of those who have authority over them.30 Meanwhile, associates are watched constantly: by cameras, customers, scanners, and supervisors. Even peer pressure—which at one point was a resource for the labor movement, both to set the pace of work and to maintain a union shop—is reconfigured by management as an element of control.31 Recall, for example, that collective incentives tied to injury create pressures for workers to work hurt so as not to reduce their friends’ quarterly bonuses. Residual elements of bureaucratic control tied to the invention of internal labor markets remain as well—“There’s opportunity here!”—but this is more rhetoric than reality, and the job ladder narrows quickly. Walmart expects and counts on the fact that most of its workers will leave soon after they begin.32
As we have seen in previous chapters, this form of control relies on a series of broader social, political, and economic changes that have eroded workers’ power in the low-wage labor market by increasing their dependence on it, and—in a closely related development—have thus allowed employers to break down previously sacrosanct boundaries between work and home, primarily through unpredictable schedules, which interrupt any stable notion of family time; but also through instruments that reach beyond the workplace, like personality tests, drug tests, credit checks, health screenings after injury, and so on.33 Meanwhile, Walmart remains the employer, and retailer, of last resort. Those who work at Walmart cannot afford to shop anywhere but Walmart or places like it.34
THOSE LEFT BEHIND WANT RESPECT
Spending time in the aisles of Walmart, it is easy to convince oneself that the good life is something purchasable: that it consists of a microwave ($35), a fishing rod ($18.31), and a 50” flatscreen television ($269.99). Material security is, of course, important to everyone. But for many of those who work in the low-wage service sector, these material goals are secondary to something more basic: a feeling of respect and recognition at work. This should not come as a shock. Historically, as Elizabeth Anderson notes, the most powerful social movements for equality have conceived of inequality as referring “not so much to distributions of goods as to relations between superior and inferior persons.”35 That understanding is what gave energy to the early American labor movement.
The desire for respect at work may be important for everyone, but it is likely particularly pronounced in the service sector. Where fixed capital investments are high, where employers rely on what Edwards calls technical control, workers’ experiences of authority are likely mediated by the machinery of production: power is expressed through the speed of the line rather than through the direct encounter with middle management. Even without such technical control, where individuals work independently on machines as operatives, “control processes are simplified,” because “machines are easier to control than human beings” and because workers become socially integrated with their machines.36 This integration induces a process in which the machine and the operator interact in an established manner defined by the machine, which soaks up the avenues for discretion that were once negotiable between the craftperson and the supervisor.
Once the machine becomes the principal point of interaction for the worker, other social relations in the workplace change as well. While technical control can give workers new sorts of structural power vis-à-vis their employers, workers’ interactions with machines may also limit possibilities for interacting with other workers. More critically, supervisors no longer have to be skilled operators; rather, they need only be the supervisors of the behaviors of workers now circumscribed by their machines. Freed from the requirements of technical know-how in a specific industry, middle-level management can appear on the shop floor as specialists in supervising sets of human-machine interactions. Distance between management and workers increases (no longer can workers imagine that they will be able to take their technical skills to management, since those skills are irrelevant), and increasing distance may also decrease the arbitrary exercise of authority. This is not to say that disrespect is uncommon in manufacturing, only that it is likely experienced as more structural and thus less interactive and, hence, less arbitrary.
The situation at Walmart and many other low-wage service-sector employers is unlike the industrial factory. There are fewer machines that pace or coordinate workers’ tasks. The machines that remain—like the cash register and the MC40 scanner—measure individual activity more than they manage it. In the meantime, managers have few skills outside the technical know-how they have garnered from working on the floor; managers, at multiple levels, confront the uncertainty of customer traffic and tastes by giving orders to associates, who must navigate different managerial requests at the same time they confront customers who want more help than Walmart has been organized to give. This often leads, among associates, to a feeling of being at the mercy of others’ arbitrary whims, even (perhaps particularly) at a place as meticulously programmed as Walmart.
For the reasons outlined above, workers in such settings today seem to care more intensely about dignity than wages, more about voice than benefits, more about community than hours. The labor movement once knew this: recall the motivations behind the Pullman strike and the leaders of the Knights of Labor. For complex reasons, which we discuss in chapter 4, the movement forgot this element of its collective history until relatively recently. The leaders of OUR Walmart recognized it. But to turn this recognition into action, to reorganize around respect, they would have to overcome obstacles posed both by Walmart—one of the most vicious anti-union employers around—and, equally problematic, by what was left of the labor movement itself.