Decoding WAL*MART - The Truth About Walmart – From Sam’s Great Vision to Corporate’s Greedy Revision

Sam Walton started Wal-Mart with the best of intentions and he continued to sustain his vision until the day he died. Things changed after that. The Wal-Mart we know and hate today is not the cultivation of Sam Walton but the creation of corporate American politics and corruption.

Right now Walmart is an evil and sadistic entity out to make money stepping on the backs of its customers, small businesses' and especially its employees. It seems Martha Stewart's very path to the top is contagious.

Sam Walton is getting his name dragged through the mud when he himself was not nor did he wish to be corrupt. If he is walking around as a ghost right now I'm sure he's thinking "dam I should have renamed this place before I died!".

The really disturbing thing is that the owners of Walmart now are not only corrupting his vision and very ideals of his company mission, but their using his work to trick people into becoming a part of the problem, using Sam's real promise as a lie to manipulate people into the company!

A Basic Bait and Switch maneuver only with employee labor.

The irony is they still promote the vision that Sam had in their orientations only they do so as a way to trick the new employees into believing Walmart is really out for their best interests when the reality is they aren't (anymore)..

Walmart walls in break rooms to hallways have posters adorned all over the place with Sam's true intentions and promises, speeches and inspirational messages, but the reality of Walmart is that corporate America has abolished his vision for money.

Sam's very concepts created to liberate his employees and make them an integral part of the company are no longer in application in reality but are now being used to trick people into believing the dream is real. It's a shame that corporate America took a good thing and created a monster.

The whole thing reminds me of that little boy on the television series "Charmed", I don't know if you watched the show but its about three good witches protecting "innocents" from "daemons" and somewhere in the middle they had a baby boy who was supposed to be a very powerful "witch" or "force" with powers that could become ultimately "evil" or "good" and so the witches constantly struggled to keep him on the "good" side but the evil out there kept taking him and "converting" him to the dark side.

This boy had ultimate power of potential but like any power and potential it can easily be converted to either side of the yin/yang forces.. Sam started out wielding the powerful vehicle of Walmart for the "good" then when he died the "evil" took over and now Walmart is cloaked within the "good" but ultimately is "evil" in its intensions of "greed".

You will hear "aware" employees and managers of this fact who watched the videos but after years of dedicated service to the corporation, stating that Sam Walton would turn in his grave if he saw what they've done to his empire, his dreams and his vision of the future. The sad reality is when something gets this big and the creator dies it often becomes corrupted and money being the root of all evil.. Takes over.

If you ask me the Walmart now is akin to the matrix the "machines" in the movie "The Matrix" created, a way to cloak people from the truth, to use them as their buildings become "People Storage" and slave labor for the cheapest labor possible.

Walmart stretches their employees to their limits for chump change making them stress out to the max, while paying them nothing. The people who escape this job often feel like neo did when he realized the truth.. That the "Wal-Matrix" is the world that has been pulled over their eyes.. To turn the average person into a battery for Walmart machine to function.

I worked at Wal-Mart starting out as a cashier then moving up the ranks to CSM (Customer Service Manager). What I witnessed at this company was staggering to me.

At first glance it seems like it would be an interesting place to work (if you visit a store not in an oppressed part of town) but the truth is Wal-Mart follows uncanningly close to the on goings of a "Cult".

They lie to you, tell you grand stories, make promises to relieve you from oppression then once your in continue to feed you the (mental) poisoned cool-aid in small doses to keep you sick so you don't go else where, but not enough to kill you..

Then they work you to death using promises that won't happen to keep you working just hard enough not to quit but not giving you enough to satisfy your needs. By the time your in your fourth month your so broke and struggling they cherry pick those people who show ambition and try to capitalize on their desperation to pay their bills and make them promises to become "management".. (Enter evil Morpheus to make the proposal in the "back office" of the building.. void of any witnesses..

To this day I don't completely understand the atmosphere's way of making people feel "important" when working there and how people find it impossible to quit but their is a certain "social" part of this job that makes people want to stay. I think I've figured out how this corrupt system works in part, and its based on psychology and entrapment using peoples pain and dreams as a launch-board.

Recruit! Recruit! Recruit! FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!

When someone fights the system they fire you to snuff out your influence. The even take steps after your fired to start rumor mills to destroy your credibility to assure your talking to other employees doesn't affect them. It's uncanny how fast you become "that guy" when your fired no matter what loyalties people had with you.

At Roseville Wal*Mart they used (when they fired me) Matt, Maria, (both CSM's) and a few other managers. I didn't make the connections at first but knowing a lot of people in the building I discovered where the "rumors" i inevitably heard about came from.

The part that really gets me is these "rumor starters" probably didn't even realize they were used by management to carry out these rumors. It's about credibility, generally the cashiers believe whatever a CSM says to them.. This was apparent to me when I heard the types of rumors that were spread and discovered on one of my revisits to the store who actually believed the lies.

It's like Wal*Mart employees stop thinking for themselves and start letting their environment take over. The truly amazing thing is not only do they not realize this is happening but they will fight you tooth and nail if you bring it up! The system works apparently!

What will really baffle your mind is that the very thing that makes people feel the need to stay is the very real vision/dream Sam Walton had for his employees. People stay at Walmart I think for the same reason they stay in bad relationships. Because they are left with the hope, the lie of the first couple of months.

Sam had a real dream to follow through on his vision and he was completely dedicated to realizing that vision up until the day he died.

Enter "Agent Smith"

Shortly after his death the corporation became corrupt and his very ideas were redirected to become the "Dream Generator" of the company's orientation speech. Although Walmart stopped actually acting on this vision shortly after Sam's death it continues to "sell the dream" with no intentions of following through on their promises.

When people start at Walmart they truly believe this is real because they use Sam Walton himself in his videos to sell it to new employees.

The sick part?

Sam was completely honest in his approach to give this to his employees and do the videos are not only powerful and convincing but they are being used immorally by the corporation to trick people into working hard for peanuts.. By the time they realize they'd been tricked their knee deep in devotion to the company and can't figure out why!

When I started at Wal-Mart I was going to stay for a few months then get a "Real Job", but I ended up staying much longer than anticipated. Wal-Mart has this way of eating away at your self esteem, your ability to want more for yourself and if your there long enough your ability to leave the "herd".

It's no wonder you barely find a person working there smiling or working hard to get you through the line, or even a cashier that's as more than a simple and unrealistic "hi, How are you today", barely even waiting for an answer.

When I started my thing was that I couldn't believe how easy being a cashier was. Being a social butterfly myself I enjoyed interacting with customers and for the (low) pay the job was very simple and even a bit fun. Maybe it was the ease of getting good at checking 1000 items per hour (they actually have a way you can print out your "clock speed" know there as your IPH (Items per hour).

Cashiers who were fast (and their are only a few who give a dam to try usually new people or motivated individuals) like to race other cashiers for the "top spot". I started off with 300-600 per hour and within a few weeks I got to about 900- 998 per hour which felt pretty good.

What really nailed the fun was the customers watching their items ring up and bag (perfectly I might add) so fast that they were in long lines for less than 10 minutes and making a big deal of it. I learned to entertain the people in line with my speed.

I actually took this to the internet to learn to check faster by learning how the check stands worked, how the barcodes scanned How barcodes worked and how those 9 interlocking lasers worked, how the scanners themselves worked and so on so I could figure out the most efficient way to scan items into the system, The best way to spin a can of tuna for example and so on.

I also looked up the door alarm anti-Theft contraptions (EAS) found on most Walmart products, to learn how to assure everyone of them got "deactivated" as Wal-Mart tracks who'd register didn't deactivate a customer and this goes on your annual report.. Another way to assure you doesn't make that 40 cents an hour raise.

I wanted to break out of being a cashier and spread my wings and my manager often took me into the office to give me a pep talk in how I should work towards "department manager" in the store.

Janice would often tell me the marvels of how the position paid 90 cents an hour more but contained the responsibilities of owning your own business (meaning tons more work no real pay increase). She would try to manipulate the reality by telling me how glamorous the training was.. she said "I mean where else in the world will a major corporation like Wal-Mart let you run your own business right here in the store?"

I wasn't nor am I now gullible and I saw right through this. I offered to become a CSM a position with more responsibility but more freedom, and a fun job at that, but lacking the over worked conditions with the underpaid raise. To me this position was worth the .90 an hour raise because the work to me was easier and I had more fun than cashiering.

She worked hard to cultivate my motivation towards department manager but I wasn't having it. I did somehow get manipulated into at least "interviewing" for the positions but my honesty saved me from passing the interviews. Apparently when I told them I wasn't going to do ten times the work for .90 more pay per hour this didn't sit right with them, although I impressed upon them my motivation to excel at my work.

I eventually became the CSM I wanted to be and loved the work but in my ploy to advance myself learned to network with managers in the store and befriended just about every one on a personal level. I did this to probe for the truth about corporate Wal-Mart so I could determine weather or not I wanted to climb the ladder or stay where I was.

What I found out shocked me and I refused to move past CSM. In fact what I learned before becoming a CSM made me want to become a CSM more. I learned that (found out on the down low) that CSM being the bottom rung of management wasn't considered truly a managerial position (where by respect is given by the upper management) and that those in this position wouldn't have much of a chance of moving into the "Assistant manager training".

As a CSM I learned that becoming an Assistant Manager was like giving your balls over to the CEO of hell. I saw highly motivated, optimistic managers come in fresh (our store was a training store for assistant managers so we saw them come in fresh then train) and within two months become the most negative, stressed out, hateful type of people imaginable. I saw the management training program convert angels into Hitler's practically over night.

Curious as to how this happened I inquired many of the new managers, befriending them as they were fresh recruits, giving them management advice I learned from some of the top players, and gaining their trust.

Don't get me wrong my intentions or motivations were not negative I really considered these guys friends (till they converted and became the most sadistic sons of bitches I'd ever met, turning even on those that helped them get to where they were), and I wanted information as well as resources, friends, and a basic network. The whole you scratch my back I scratch yours concept.

What I learned was that Wal-Mart mentally beats their new managers up on a daily almost hourly basis. They used a basic training type of regimen where by they would push them to their potential limits and beyond, forcing them to learn tolerance and efficiency in the most uncomfortable ways, threatening to replace them if they failed in their missions and making them believe that they could not have any fun at work because this is a business not a social networking site.

They had their managers so afraid of losing their jobs they worked twice as hard to keep them. They worked them so hard they didn't even have time to want another job as they had no bandwidth left to think about hating the job, although they often spoke down of it. It was uncanny how badly they treated them.

I used to think (before working there) that Walmart attackers were just small businesses who couldn't compete fairly but truth is Walmart although starting out as an honest company has really done many things that prove their nothing like they portray themselves to be.. just take a look at how ever Hilary Clinton is a part of the scandal!