April 6, 2013 - FDEG4161

Target Needs to BURN

I worked for Target for about a month before I got canned a couple of days ago; and I’m not even depressed that about it. It was a nice experience at first, but after a while it just became ridiculous and I found myself disgusted. I had heard stories that Wal-Mart treated their employees like crap, but Target has taken that crown.

When I applied to Target, I was supposed to be interviewed for a Hardlines position. The ETL I interviewed with seemed pretty excited to have me, but I think that excitement quickly faded when he realized that I actually posed some kind of threat to his job (I’m a college graduate and I grew up around a family business, so I wasn’t a spring chicken). He actually at one point looked me dead in the face and said, “I better be careful, or I just might lose my job to you”. At first I took that as a compliment, thinking that he actually appreciated my prowess and my desire to learn. NOPE! After my drug test and background check came back, HR called me and said that they could not offer me a position in Hardlines, but rather a position in Softlines. This should have sent up a huge red flag for me, but instead I brushed it off and accepted the job anyway. Target’s little anti-union video should have been my second red flag, but again, I dismissed and ignored it.

Softlines at my store only had 1 TL, no ETL (they had just recently hired one and were training him at another store), and were SEVERELY understaffed. My TL, although nice, was a complete control freak after working to the looming bullseye for 16 YEARS. She always took the time to nitpick my work to death rather than point out anything I did right. I was constantly getting “coached” for little shit that I might have forgotten or they had neglected to tell me during my training. I once spent 9 miserable hours working as the store operator and I had ‘0’ training in this area because for some reason it was not a part of my training sheet. The entire day I had a line of people waiting to use the fitting room, trying to zone two zones, hanging up clothes, repackaging, answer the phone that was ringing off the hook, and pricing clearance items. My TL did NOTHING to help make the day go by easier. No tips, no tricks, just, “How is this hard? A monkey could do your job!” This quickly became old and I found myself doing my best to avoid her when she was on the clock; when she was off the clock or had a day off, I was able to breathe a sigh of relief. I will also admit that I did zone rather slowly because, like a normal human being, I was trying to learn where everything was and how to do it properly. Apparently, to my TL, this wasn’t good enough because I should have completely zoned all of my assigned areas, did all of the re-shop, AND retouches to all of my zones before leaving for the day. For someone who had been there by two weeks at this point, that seemed a little far and out for my capabilities but damn if I did not try. Once our ETL had finished his training and arrived at our store, he was utterly useless. He was nowhere to be found for about 85% of the day and wandered around the store doing cthulu knows what the other 25% of the time.

God forbid if someone from Softlines didn’t answer the call for backup in the front end. If we didn’t respond, we got screamed at by GSTL or the LOD over the walkie. Tuning the walkie out, unfortunately as we all know, was simply not an option. We were as equally expected as the regular cashiers to sell those fucking Red Cards and I got sick of that shit QUICK. I think the entire time I was there I only sold 3 of them, luckily I was never “coached” about this so I can’t complain too much; however, the looks I got from the “guests” when I did ask was enough to murder a litter of innocent kittens. Eventually I just quit asking and skipped the prompt over altogether when it popped up on the screen. Besides the Red Card glares, the “guests” themselves were just downright awful people. They were constantly rude to the employees (I once had a lady scream at me over a pair of socks that our store didn’t even sell), they left their trash everywhere if they didn’t shove it into an employee’s hands to have them throw it away for them, and they were constantly trying to get away with using bad coupons/defrauding on prices.

On the day I was canned, we were bombed to fuck and back. Almost the entire Softlines department had been completely destroyed and we were short-handed that night. Our TL and ETL didn’t even bother to schedule either one of themselves to close that night, in fact, our TL showed up for only about 3-4 hours of her 8 hour shift before leaving for the day and our ETL was out the door by 6:00pm. Our TL didn’t even leave an evening zone breakdown for us to follow, so the operator and I had to scream at the ETL for about 2 hours to give us one before he left for the night. In addition to our department being destroyed had having to freak out for a breakdown, we had no one to do sign takedown and we had enough re-shop to last us a week. I was assigned the two hardest hit zones that night, boys and girls, I wanted to shit I was so pissed off. I was working my ass off to make my zones look beautiful, but it was all futile. Every time I folded a table, adjusted racks, or picked up any stray items, it was all back to the way it was by the time I turned around again. Of course, we had a visiting LOD from a completely different district working that night (something to do about another LOD training to become the AP ETL and she was his replacement for a couple of months), and damn if she didn’t call me every 5-10 minutes asking me if I was completely finished. I eventually got so pissed off at this, I shut my walkie off. I was in close enough quarters of my team members to hear any backup calls from their walkies, so I wasn’t completely cut off from the world. It took me close to 2 1/2 hours to zone boys (I still wasn’t finished, but that doesn’t matter, right?) before the air-headed LOD ushered me into girls. The girls zone looked like a small scale replica of the atomic bomb going off in Hiroshima. Everything was EVERYWHERE, including random empty cups from Starbucks littering the tables. Once I had gotten the racks zoned and shit picked up off the floor, I did my best to start folding the tables. By 10:00pm, I was exhausted and bitter about the day’s experiences. But it wasn’t over yet.

10:30pm– 30 minutes prior to me clocking out for the day, I get a call on the walkie (I eventually turned it back on) to go to clerical. I drop my items, head over, and I’m ushered into an office with the door snapping shut behind me as I took a seat. The LOD looked me dead in the eye and went on a tirade about how I zone way too slow, I constantly give her attitude (okay, maybe shutting the walkie off accomplished this, but I was never rude to her face), I apparently couldn’t handle stress well enough, and I wasn’t a “team player”. I was surprised because I had only ever been coached on being slow while zoning, every other complaint was news to me. She tells me that my behavior/work ethic doesn’t live up to Target’s “Best Practices” and “Brand” and for that I had to be let go. But not before asking me if I could stay just one extra hour to help them close up.

I was so disgusted, I threw my badge on the desk and told the LOD to burn in hell. My experiences may not have been as bad as other might have been, but they were enough to let me know that I was GLAD to have been let go.

TL;DR- Fuck Target.

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