TLDR: deaf Grammy, 20 yr employee is setup for failure so they can fire her
My wife’s mom has been deaf her whole adult life since a fever took her hearing when she was young. She tries to wear ears but they’ve never been something she could fully get into or figure out because, she’s pretty uneducated and not very tech savvy.
Anyways about 5 years ago she was fired and here’s how it happened and good olé WM knew exactly what they were doing.
Grammy worked for about 15 years on fabrics. She knew everything there was to know about needles and glue and crafts and fabrics which sounds honestly awful but that’s where she found herself when she finally got over her fears and struck out to get a job after a divorce and depression. So if you were in need of some floral garbage to accent your window or some sort of fake flower to stick in a fake vase in your fake home for your fake life she was your go to Grammy.
The recession hit (maybe it was ten years ago) and WM decided to consolidate and modernize their departments and they realized that they’re no Michael’s they’re a mom & pop business sinker and who needs a giant fabric dept when you’re trying to maximize profits and eliminate veteran jobs… you know, those that got their nickel raises for too many years now and it actually equaled a few bucks. Can’t have that. What would our SG&A look like.
So Grammy got moved. Where would you put a 60+ year old Grammy so that your customers are best served? Technology department of course!!! Brilliant Jim. Raise for you.
So Grammy goes to technology and someone has to learn televisions (color ones), computers (that you can carry), phones (that don’t flip open), portable batteries, video games galore and all this expensive crap you gotta keep locked up behind glass! Wtf, we never had to lock up the scissors or the yarn!!
Well she got to learning although you have to repeat shit a lot cuz she can’t hear you. Wajoosaysonny? So I’m sure that frustrated Blaine, Tendra, & Prestyn. However they understood and didn’t complain outside of simply being frustrated (I actually don’t know any of the stuff in this paragraph as true and is complete speculation).
It’s also imperative in the WM v Amazon battle coming out of said recession that the customers face time be awesomely satisfactory and you better not keep them waiting or else, or else, they might frickin go buy something on Amazon. So you gotta be right on top of them.
To accomplish this and this very very valuable stuff behind the glass that everyone wants you need to sign out the one lock key at the beginning of your shift and be solely responsible for everything and anything you do with these locked items and the locks and the timeliness. In Spanish this is spelled as ‘impossible’. So Prestyn, Blaine, Tendra & Grammy concoct a scheme that they’ll just give whomever needs to unlock something throughout the day the key so that the customer doesn’t have to wait ten minutes hunting for Grammy who had to walk someone to the bathroom, or clean up a spill on aisle 3. It’s truly the only way to make it work.
Unfortunately they also found out that their ingenuity actually wasn’t creative at all… everyone’s been doing it. Where have you been?
Well the key went missing one day. Grammy checked it out so Grammy got fired along with her ~$17/hr. Hooray for shareholders! Oh they found the key the next day sitting on a shelf but no take backs. Grammy you’re fired.
Being uneducated and loyal Grammy just cried and cried and cried and is too crushed and old to try at another fake capitalism retail store so she lives with us now and we try to never take her to Walmart.
I tried to encourage her to sue but she didn’t have the bandwidth or energy and I didn’t have it either.
So there’s my antiwork BS capitalism story of my lifetime. I’m sure I have others but this is for Grammy. She no longer remembers short term stuff at all (dementia) but she remembers walmart, the good and the evil.