February 3, 2015 - Ayrises
Contradictory Hypocrites.
1.) I was hired on for 25 hours and could not work earlier than 11AM. This was on my application and verified at the job offer. I said I would work 35 hours MAX and only rarely. I am a college student and have lots of fun diseases like fibromyalgia, wherein it LITERALLY kills me to be overworked. It was their goddamn HOBBY to over schedule me. Just me. I asked the other cashiers, making 20 hours a week like I wanted. Or my husband in hardlines, who is employed full time, requests a full 40 hours weekly, and got less hours than me. They scheduled me for a FULL WEEK of 8AM starting shifts at 40 hours (and my husband got off at 12AM-1AM, meaning I got to bed at 3AM after handling laundry & food and had to be up at 6:30AM). I made it clear to them we only had one car and lived kinda far away during hiring and the first week. I get my schedule when my husband brings it home to me on a day off- I got the sick AGAIN from disgusting “guests” handing me drool covered toys and whatnot and Target couldn’t be BOTHERED to put hand sanitizer on ever lane- we fought over the 5 bottles for the whole front end. So I come in, throwing up, while I drop off my husband. I am in so much pain that I am in tears, trying to explain to them that EVERYONE AGREED that this was not my availability and was completely unacceptable. The Lady in HR just kept saying, over and over, “we can’t always schedule you and your husband for the exact same shifts”. I UNDERSTOOD THAT. But she just kept repeating it when I said “I said I could not work this early at the start. Your website wouldn’t let me set my availability so I had to give it to you by hand. Either way, I cannot drive my husband to work, I get off 3 hours AFTER his shift starts and I simply cannot work at 8AM.” She says again “But we can’t always schedule you for the same shifts.” Over and over. She eventually tells me that I had to put up my ENTIRE week’s schedule on the shift pick up board. Of course, no one was willing to pick them up. I eventually bargained them to start at 10AM, (still before my availability), and bribe my damn mother to drive my husband to work like a child. I had to go in and change my availability again- which I got severely reprimanded for since I hadn’t been there 90 days yet. Also because no one bothered to enter my real availability since their god damn website says that 11AM to 10pm isn’t a viable availability. Because 11AM comes AFTER 10PM somehow.
2.) So Target makes it really painfully clear that they do not want you to “hit compliance” or not get a lunch break before 6 hours. As cashiers, you have NO CHOICE but to get a some kinda TL to let you go for breaks. And they will TORTURE you with them. Every team huddle, they go “Get red cards, Don’t hit compliance!” like it is going out of style. Now, you can’t FIND a TL anytime you need one. EVER. Cashiers can’t have walkies or PDAs for some reason, so there is no way to check merchandise or get a hold of someone who knows something or can do something. That phone or flipping on your help light are a LIE. The phones don’t work half the time and no one is looking for the little help light. I know the TL are busy doing shit with angry customers but there is no reason target can’t buy more 5 dollar walkies for the 3 cashiers working at any given time…. Off topic. Anyway, I was at 5 hours and starving. I had an 8 hour shift and they never gave me my first break to get a snack at. I already flagged down the GSTL to let him know It was time for my lunch. He waved me off and said he’ll send me soon. There is NO ONE buying anything and nothing to zone. 5 cashiers are standing at the end of their lanes waiting for someone to just stab their eyes out. The GSTL passes buy again to give someone else a break. I flag him down, say “I am pass-out starving, there is no one here and I am 30 minutes to compliance, can I please get my lunch?” He replies, while walking away, “don’t worry, I won’t let you hit compliance.” He pretty much runs off. I get 3 employees come to my line for lunch-purchase, (I am the fastest cashier and they know it.) and it just makes me HANGRIER. My vision is getting dark from low blood sugar and I am ready to bite someone’s d*ck off. They ask why I look so ill and I tell them that I am going to hit compliance and got no first break. They’re all hardlines (which tells me how empty the store is) so they don’t understand that I can’t “Just Go” to lunch. 10 minutes till compliance, all the other cashiers were let off for breaks or clocked out. Suddenly, everyone needs $300 grocery carts. I am rushed like shit, slurring my words from exhaustion and dehydration (“guest can’t see you drink or eat!”) . Someone comes as I start a new over-filled cart from some hateful bitch 6 minutes until compliance to let me go lunch. I can’t exit the transaction or pass it over, as it’s against policy. And the little ditz they send won’t help me bag to get through the cart faster, she just checks her nails while I bag what seems to be every can of beef stew in the store. I finally clock out for lunch ONE MINUTE before compliance. I’m so exhausted I lose the first part of my lunch to vomit. I can’t drink the store’s tainted ass water (due to the fibro, makes me more dehydrated), and the vomitting took up alot of my lunch so I couldn’t go buy a distilled bottle that is all the way in the back of the store, so I am super dehydrated. My tongue feels like sandpaper. I can barely stand up to clock back in 31 minutes later. Since I got my lunch so late, I didn’t get a second break and I was starving again because there was only half a sandwich on my stomach after 10 hours of being awake. And the mother fracker has the gall to let me off my shift 45 minutes late, and I saw him on the end of the store. He was Fake Zoning, or unadjusting and readjusting the same set of items to appear to be working, and moving the abandon carts back and forth like a ninny. The next day I get yelled at for almost hitting compliance, leaving late, and not getting enough red cards. I could barely talk from how dry my tongue was a was seconds from barfing just asking if they wanted to buy a 10 cent bag. Not that asking gets red cards.
3.) BAGS. FREAKING BAGS. I work in a hippy town- there’s no free bags here. It’s literally illegal to give out free bags, and the bags you do give out have to be at least 70% recycled material, so we have really weak paper bags that cost 10 cents each. The handles break off and if you put more than 6 cans in they’ll break in the lot. NOBODY wants to pay 10 cents for the bag. Every single “guest” informs you one of three things.
1.) forgot their bags in the car. 2.) didn’t realize this was a hippy town. (and is somewhat offended) 3.) 10 cents is an AFFRONT TO THEIR VERY SOULS
when you ask a yes or no question of “would you like to buy a bag for 10 cents?” You have to ask an average of 3 times to get a yes or no answer. And it’s often “no”, leaving you to just re-stack the other items at the end of the lane, filling it with SO MANY GROCERIES that you can’t check out the next person until you re-load their cart, because they will stand there, THROWING A TEMPER-TANTRUM ABOUT A DIME. Adults! These people are supposed to be Adults! I work minimum wage, pinch every penny, and don’t give two cow turds about a dime! Took being yelled at about bags, multiple times a day. I had people, like of every age group, drop all of their items and walk out of the store over a dime. Piles of items, multiple bins of abandons that make me drop everything just to clear enough room to be able to check someone else out. If they would have let me get a word in, I would have said “I’ll give you a free bag, but please keep it in mind for the future”. But they were so busy ranting and screaming they gave me no chance to be polite. I learned the best I could do was also pretend to be greatly offended by the bag laws (even though I support them) as soon as I have the chance. Usually when they fake double-check the TERRIBLY OVER PRICED BAGS cost. The bags across the street cost 99 cents but that ten cents was just THE WORST. It was a good day if I managed to get all of my breaks (on time or not) and I didn’t get screamed at over a dime more than twice a day. Because I, the Target cashier, have SO MUCH POLITICAL SWAY and can change the laws JUST FOR YOU, bitchy middle-aged with the $5,000 purse. I am also lucky that I am a tetris-cyborg and can fit a ridiculous amount of groceries into a single bag. Most people who “forgot their bags” and “guess they’ll get one maybe” usually only ever had to pay a max of 2 bags and I would find ways to get them a bag discount (like split order sharing, purses, pockets, ect) if they were nice about it. People who brought in their own bags were like mana from heaven. They knew what was going on and were so happy about remembering or helping the environment or whatever that they are generally pleasant. Except the people who brought bags, hid them from me, and then walked out silently holding the item outside the bag. That’s just weird for everyone.
4.) Red cards. Everyone agrees. We Harass customers with the damn things, If they wanted one they have one by now. A lot of days, most of the people that went through my line had red cards. There was one day, after my last break wherein they stopped me, during my break, to harass me about getting a card. So I asked everyone when I got back. Every person, all 49 people I checked out between last break and close had Red Cards. I got the whole spiel with the chart again the next day. Where in my conversion rate sucked but everyone reviewed me with 5 star ratings. I got more people to fill out the survey than all the other cashiers, but since I didn’t move many red cards my job was on the line even though I was clearly good at it. I got my mom to come in on one of those days she dropped off my husband (see above) and sign up for one so I could buy her groceries without her needing to move. They wouldn’t fire me just before Christmas, but they made it pretty clear they wanted to. I don’t understand how I can be a fast, polite, friendly, and knowledgeable employee and they still want to fire me because I con’t want to pester people buying one pair of dollar-bin socks for the damn cards. Other employees knew I was a good cashier, they came straight to me. I knew I was a great cashier because buying lunch was like TORTURE LINE since everyone else (minus about 4 people) was so slow and disinterested. Customers picked my lane over neighbors because they saw how fast they moved.
5.) The registers are broken and disgusting. Is there no cleaning team? Why are there spiders and gray dust on every register? Why do items show up on someone’s PDA but not scan on the register? Why are the keys black with finger gross and the screens smudged and blurry? Why are all the bags of flour inherently broken? Why does no one clean the catch tray under the belt? Why was I the only person with a problem with these things? It is so much less suicide inducing to clean the registers after zoning is done than it is to stand there on the cold hard ground. The only registers that got really cleaned were the ones I was at. It was just really odd.
I liked that the registers are labeled POS because that’s what they are. Only half of the registers in the store weren’t completely unusable at any given time, and another quarter broke during the day.
6.) I get sick of having the same conversations every day. This isn’t really a problem problem. But I had the same conversations multiple times every day. Usually about bags. You HAVE TO strike up conversations as part of the job. “Vibe” the customers. If you don’t, reprimand city. So anyone who is willing to talk you have to talk to. Now this IS a problem, people who LOVE to talk will hold up the line with chatting. But you can’t tell them just please sign the card reader so I can check out these nice people. And the other people in line get pissy. And I get pissy, because I am only passionately pretending to give a damn about their stupid first world problems and their dog’s birthday. I’m an introvert. I like to smile, make sure they’re doing okay, and check them out as fast as possible. That should be all I need to do. Not waste my energy chit-chatting. Any introvert knows it is tiring to talk to strangers, and MAN breaks where I don’t have to smile or talk to anyone could not come faster.
7.) Someone left a dead flower at the end of my register. I have no idea what it was doing there or supposed to mean but it haunts me.
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lol they can always pay 1 dollar for a target canvas bag.
Wow.... so they've been aware of your medical conditions at hiring time and haven't complied? If it's at all possible get a medical note from a doctor (even an urgent care center one) talking about a need to get lunches on time, have a water bottle at your station, etc. Employers don't like to argue with medical notes like ever. Any and all reasonable accommodations for medical conditions must be met by employers.
On another note, if they do not comply, call the hotline OR talk to HR about it. Heck, why not report the lack of break compliance while you're at it? Not that this will necessarily do anything to change the situation but may be that's the point. Of course document (or record if your state allows such) the conversation. If none of this works as in nothing changes or they even retaliate against you, file a complaint with the EEOC. They may find you have been discriminated against and either give you the right to sue or even sue on your behalf free of charge.
There is help for you out there. Don't think there are no options for you because of your life circumstances. I hate hearing of this serious misjustice they are doing you. Reading this made me cringe very badly. I am able to relate in a way because I'm pregnant and for a while they kept pushing my breaks further and further apart and told me to get a note to be allowed water. It was a hassle getting them to stop pretending They never got my medical note and to start complying. Awful mess really...