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Antiwork

Is it normal for security cameras to be used to monitor retail employees as they work?

I worked at Sears a few years back as a teenager before the store closed. There were security cameras in plenty of places around the store, for security purposes obviously, but they were also used to watch the cashiers sometimes. During slow days when there were barely any customers to help, everything was cleaned up, no further instructions were given from management, and nothing else was to be done, my cashier buddies and I would lock our registers and sometimes just hang around at our station talking to each other, showing random memes that made us laugh, etc. in between customers. Obviously busy days were different, this was really only on slow days where we’d get maybe only 5 customers in a single hour, which became more common around the time the store was really losing business. I’m not sure when exactly the store decided to go into liquidation, because…


I worked at Sears a few years back as a teenager before the store closed. There were security cameras in plenty of places around the store, for security purposes obviously, but they were also used to watch the cashiers sometimes. During slow days when there were barely any customers to help, everything was cleaned up, no further instructions were given from management, and nothing else was to be done, my cashier buddies and I would lock our registers and sometimes just hang around at our station talking to each other, showing random memes that made us laugh, etc. in between customers.

Obviously busy days were different, this was really only on slow days where we’d get maybe only 5 customers in a single hour, which became more common around the time the store was really losing business. I’m not sure when exactly the store decided to go into liquidation, because we only found out from the news, but I’m assuming the managers were talking about that amongst themselves for quite a bit.

I remember one time, one of the managers who was not physically around suddenly called one of my coworkers’ personal phone to yell at her to get off her phone. She told her she could see all of us through the cameras. Apparently some of the other cashiers in different departments would also occasionally get calls from that manager if they were caught looking too lazy on slow days, phone or no phone. Managers didn’t seem to care if everything was already done, we were told that if we weren’t standing then we weren’t working, there was always something to clean, and we even lost our chairs at one point. I’d just go through some random aisles and pretend to organize the same shelves every now and then to avoid them if they were in particularly bad moods. We only got paid about $8/hour and had no benefits (or severance pay) since we were only scheduled maybe 39.5 hours per week maximum.

I’ve seen comments in this sub mentioning that cameras aren’t really checked until after an incident has happened, but I’ve seen others with similar stories to mine, so I’m wondering if this is a normal thing in retail stores particularly, and if this is a red flag or something. I live in a US state with two-party consent laws, if that helps. I was a teenager at the time so it didn’t really seem much more than mildly annoying to me until I eventually joined this sub and learned what kinds of things to look out for.

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