The Horrors of Walmart Layaway

As a former Walmart employee and usual Walmart Layaway associate (annually), I have a few horror stories about the whole experience that should enlighten the ignorance to how all of your lovely Christmas items are being taken care of. Just keep in mind that poorly paid Walmart Associates are taking care of your “hard earned” Christmas gifts.

On any given day (At least this is how it worked for me) one associate was responsible for Walmart layaway. This means that one associate is responsible for opening layaway accounts, binning news orders, retrieving layaway orders, and directing customers to management when they ask why there is only one layaway associate. You get what you pay for folks, that’s the plain truth. When the layaway associate has a day off, nothing gets done. Inexperienced associates are pulled from various departments to “take care” of everything while the layaway associate is gone. I remember walking into a disaster everytime I came back to work. Nothing was kept together, and no one ever binned anything into the system. I kept a written log of everything I did each day so I could keep proof of everything I did; an attempt to avoid the dreaded “WALMART COACHING POLICY.” The store manager would routinely throw away my notes from each day, saying “No hand written notes!” Associate innovation isn’t really encouraged at Walmart Stores, if it’s even encouraged at all.

My least favorite part of the whole experience is having to be outside in negative degree weather to get to the outdoor toy bins. I can’t tell you how many “unrealistically-angered” customers I had to deal with because parts of their orders were in multiple toy bins. The locks would always be frozen and sometimes I would have to use spit to thaw out the lock (you do what you can to survive while in Walmart Layaway). There were times when I was horribly sick with a cough and I would still have to come to work with no help; I would have be out in the cold with a huge line of customers for hours. There came a point when had to just leave when it was my time to go, even when there was still a long line of customers, otherwise I would have lost one of my hands or one of my fingers to frostbite.

I will never use Walmart Layaway and I do appreciate how I was treated by my customers and how I was treated by management during my time at that store. Walmart was the most challenging, least rewarding job I have ever had.

The moral of this story, and I direct this to the people at Corporate Walmart: You get what you pay for.