I read that thread about Gursimran Kaur
Normally I’m kinda numb to all the various horrors of imperialist-monopoly capitalist society but today is one of those days where I feel a little bit more in touch with how I feel. I can’t really cry anymore but this had me on the edge of tears :(
They aren’t accepting any more donations rn but I put it here anyway too: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-the-family-of-gursimran-who-lost-her-life-at-walmart
I started writing something expressing my sympathy and my experience working for Walmart, then it spiraled and spiraled into an essay and it started to feel out of place and I burned out when I started writing about absolute surplus value so I thought I would elevate this concept to a thread and write a little about it :/
I don’t wanna overstate it but it was a fucking horrible experience. I’ve gone through 2 periods of working in a Walmart “supercenter” and both ended with me having some kind of mental breakdown and losing my job. Tbh the only reason I’m not homeless rn is I was able to move back in with family after the last time. I have ADHD, probably autism too, and idk… it’s like I can handle it for a while, like a year or 2, and I just start progressively decompensating until I can’t even drag myself out of bed anymore even with the threat of losing everything. Ofc, this is intentional, the turnover rate is extremely high and the point is to work people as hard as possible until they burn out… but I did meet some “lifers” too during my time there.
I was never locked inside a fucking oven though, I can’t even imagine how horrifying an end that would be :(
I have been locked inside freezers or coolers though, I’m just glad there were people around to let me out and that store management was generally fast to get the fucking inside latches fixed. And the rate of work is usually so fast that safety is an afterthought. I’ve had neck-breakingly heavy boxes almost fall on me, tripped in really bad places, had people almost hit me in the head with things, like a pallet once (wtf, I was getting something from a low shelf on the sales floor and someone threw a fucking pallet right past my head onto the floor, I looked back at him and it was like he didn’t even register I was there, he turned his brain off and was on automatic mode idk)
All these memories are really tied up with Marxism for me too cuz one of my work coping mechanisms was listening to theory audiobooks or podcasts all day whenever I could get away with it lol. I should have been doing union-building but I’m a total mess so instead I was doing that 
of building a precise model of this duplicitous world inside my head or whatever
It’s all such a blur whenever I think about it, hard to pull anything concrete out of those times to put in words tbh. Bad shit would happen to me like a coworker or customer (most likely the latter) would yell at me or I would focus on and worry about some social mistake I made and I would start to break down, not be able to talk to people or keep up social conventions like the right amount of eye contact or saying the right words or… idk, some days my brain just totally melted and I was acting “weird” I guess, idk :(
One thing that stands out to me is how many days where we could barely keep up with work or a lot of previously mentioned similar bad things would happen and at the end of the day I could just barely keep it together enough to clean up and drag myself to my car before totally collapsing and just crying for a while before I could find the strength to go home and go to bed. And the overtime 
, and actually I don’t mean regular overtime even cuz that’s really bad enough but at least you’re usually not alone, I mean the overtime where you somehow got yourself into some situation where everyone else in your department has left but you’re still there trying to clean up or finish something or the boss gave you something you thought would be easy but it wasn’t or some similar thing. Baddddddd feeeelinngggg, cuz if you truly can’t handle it on your own, the other departments DO NOT wanna help you cuz they’re busy drowning in their own work so they will be really mean about it if you try to get help, mostly the management. That didn’t happen often but yeh
The only positive I can remember rn, and its a HUGE positive, is solidarity with my coworkers (the non-class-traitorous ones). Cuz it’s not just me experiencing all this stuff ofc, I saw other people break down in similar ways or get stuck in bad situations and I would try to help, sometimes they would help me. Even just little things like advice or help with a task or helping cover up your slacking for you lol really helps make the misery better. One of my coworkers at the last store I worked at was going through a really hard time raising a kid on her own, was really tired and broke all the time, so I would try to help her out with tasks sometimes, listen to her talk about stuff, bought her lunch once or twice, even just gave her a hug sometimes. In hindsight I feel like I have this habit of overextending myself socially, maybe should be better at setting boundaries :/
I think people bought me lunch a couple of times too lol. A lot of my coworkers were really cool, but ofc there were the misanthropic class-traitorous types who would snitch on you to the boss, rationalized their job being terrible as being the fault of all their lazy never-doing-any-work coworkers. Would try to turn it to a more class-conscious management-antagonistic direction if it came up in conversation, worked sometimes at least. Cool ones would help with stuff or give advice all the time, I’m not sure I could have made it as long as I did without that
I’ve been unemployed for a while now, except for a brief time at Amazon (DO NOT RECOMMEND, it was even worse), and now I don’t know what to do 
, I’m a self-taught computer-toucher but all I know for doing for work is retail so I’m probably gonna have to go back sometime and start this working-burnout cycle again :(
I could go on but I feel like is getting too long, I hope you liked, would love to hear your stories too. Will try to reply if I have the energy lol. Feel free to ask any questions too if you want
Sorry for this being kinda a mess, I’m writing even worse than usual today for some reason
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I have worked retail for almost 20 years.
I just started doing some side jobs for a contractor I met at the grocery store and while the labor is more intense than running a cash register for sure, it’s such a better time. Usually its just me and the boss tearing apart bathrooms or doing dump runs, or organizing his workshop and cleaning up the property he lives on, and he even makes me lunch sometimes or buys us beers for our lunch break. All around really missing when I used to do construction and masonry and landscaping full time.
I don’t think most people (not most people here they usually know what’s up) in general have no idea what kind of dystopian hellscape retail actually is. The constant everpresent psychic damage incurred from being expected to be polite and pleasant all the time while barely working above minimum wage and basically having to lick the boots of the customers while your managers tell you “we are all family” or some variant thereof while every time you have to miss a day they make a point to tell you they are writing it in their little book.
When I worked at 7-11 years ago, a coworker and friend was killed in the store. They had the doors open within an hour of the crimescene cleanup crew leaving and all my boss said to me after I had to be the one to find them (murder/suicide situation) was that I "could take tomorrow off if I wanted.
There is a special place in hell for retail owners
It is truly fucking brain-melting, I’m really glad you found some other work
I can’t even imagine how it must have felt to come across that, I’m so sorry
for all the execs who set this system up and all the lying, back-stabbing, soulless middle-managers and bosses who gleefully carry out their ordersI don’t remember anything like that from my time in retail but other violence was common. Idk, I think the process of basically locking up all the goods and necessities of life like this attracts desperate people and anti-social behavior (besides the anti-sociality of this entire thing) like this. Ime the cops would just show up randomly and you hear about what happened later, whether it was someone getting stabbed or worse. I completely forgot to mention it, even though it was like one of the most important things I wrote about in my first aborted essay, was that we would often have homeless people camp around the store. Part of our job in my department involved being outside and my coworkers would tell me about how they would just hear or see people, especially at night, just laying in the underbrush who would sometimes ask them for stuff like food or water, hungry, cold people just laying right outside this place of immense wealth, THE CONTRADICTION IS ACTUALLY SO BEWILDERING, ITS FUCKING WILD
Usually I ended up being assigned to stuff inside so I didn’t see anyone like that but I really still feel like I should have done something more though. This thing I will never forget though: I missed a day or it was maybe one of my off days but I came back and one of my best friends (we got the job together) told me something had happened yesterday. He told me that during the bitterly cold night the day before, someone had come across a body in that same underbrush I mentioned before, THE BODY OF A PERSON WHO FROZE TO DEATH RIGHT OUTSIDE A MASSIVE WARM BUILDING and that the cops and EMS had showed up, took the body away, then it was right back to work. I have no words to express how angry, how sad, this makes me. I’m on the edge of tears again, I had forgotten the details until I wrote it out again ;w;
Ofc, I don’t know for sure why that person died there or if they even died there or if they just ended up there somehow but I still feel certain that it was the social murder it seems to be. And we only hear about the sensational, the unusual violence and death. That person dying alone out there wasn’t a fucking national news story, my coworkers collapsing from exhaustion or from working while sick isn’t news (also forgot to mention that happening a few times)
Fuck, I just keep remembering more stuff as I keep writing, trying to stop pulling out my hair rn
“I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with Blood. I had…vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed, it might be done.” — John Brown.
My retail job swung it as a “good thing” when they cleared out the homeless encampment next to our store
I’m really glad you found some other work
Oh no I am doing that inaddition to working at the grocery store. I am working 7 days a week rn for 3 weeks so far.
I tell people in my parents’ generation that retail put me as close to suicide as I’ve ever been in my life and they usually give me that face that means they think I’m lying or exaggerating. I wasn’t even working it for that long, only like 7 months!
My experiences were light in comparison to yours, and most long-term retail workers’, I’d wager, but I distinctly remember this moment where I was watching the clock as usual and I reached this horrific moment of clarity where I could almost FEEL the seconds of my limited lifespan disappearing with each second that ticked away. I have never forgotten the chill of that moment, one that was in retrospect me listing very close to oblivion, because the staleness of my world in that moment seemed worse to me than being dead.
13 + years in retail and yeah.
I never had quite the exposure to danger that working with food does, but there certainly were risks. I remember we used to store furniture on some really tall shelves. Because space was limited we had to store heavy boxes on the top shelf. How more accidents didn’t happen I’ll never know. But the one time one did happen a coworker fell and got a concussion. There was a whole back and forth for him to get workers compensation and I don’t remember what ended up happening. He did end up coming back to work for a while though.
I think the mental trauma of working retail really is something that feels like its not spoken about enough. And I mean, that’s not shocking. We’re all just little worker bees who are supposed to go about our business and not have a care in the world. Never mind the amount of pressure that is put on us by management, who are just passing on the pressures that are put on them by the higher up who are constantly drive for profit growth at all costs. Or having to interact with customers who think very little of you. Or having to make ends meet with a paltry wage.
I was lucky to have some more reasonable managers over the years. Like my first manager was great. Early on he noticed that I was struggling a bit in my first position as a cashier, so he decided to move me to floor associate instead of trying to make me fit in. And there was one time where my burnout was really affecting my work and he noticed and sent me on PTO the next week. He was a good mentor also. He ended up being laid off during a company “reinvention”, as they put it, because he wouldn’t accept a similar role with significantly less pay.
Speaking of reorganization aka, trying to push the limited of understaffing and lowering wages over time, in my years working retail I’ve noticed how every company does this, which is just another factor that leads to more stress. about 3 years into my first job I worked my way up to technician, so that I’d be doing electronics repair. This was a position I had originally applied for. At the time I was hired they had a team of about 4-5 techs. Their pay was twice the minimum wage at the time. By the time I became a tech the team was down to 3 members and as the minimum wage rose pay had dropped to be more in line with the new minimum wage. So when I talked about how much I was getting with the other techs they pointed out that I was earning less than they were. While it was disappointing I didn’t really care enough at the time, but I should have made a bigger deal about it at the time. Over time the team shrunk and once they fired my last partner in tech I was left to do everything by myself. Thankfully I had coworkers that were able to give me a hand from time to time, but once the pandemic hit I was left to run the department entirely by myself for a time. Even after we hired more people after things got back to “normal” I was saddled with a huge workload. I finally left after 10 years with that company.
Things are only a bit better at my new company just because the aspect of having to work with customers has been completely removed. But I see much of the same happening now. At one point my team was composed of 4 of us. After one person left we stuck with just a 3 member team. Which is “fun” because if turnover becomes an issue, which it had for a while because of pay and other factors, we’d become a 2 member team. Last year we were at 2 for about 6 months of the year. And the amount of work we have is ridiculous. But instead of restoring the team to the 4 that it was originally supposed to be the idea of a “floater” who would work between my location and another was proposed. The problem being that the other location is no where near as busy as this one, which makes justifying additional help for them difficult becuase any time they’ve been down to 2, which is less time than us, they could easily handle it. On top of the understaffing issue we’ve also had more and more work put on our plate. So now, as a manager, I have to think of a bunch of stuff and juggle a bunch of tasks that really should be more easily handled by staffing the various departments in the company appropriately.
Sorry, crashing rn, getting rly tired so I can’t write as much as I want to to you
I noticed the exact same patterns during my time in retail, ofc cuz these are classic absolute surplus value extraction rate-increasing techniques. If you can make people work harder by cutting staff but keeping the rate of work the same you can effectively increase the time they spend working for you rather than the time spent for themselves. Cutting wages is the most direct, overt way but extremely effective as well ofc if you can get away with it
Walmart in particular has been known for this since the 1980s but they have an ever-expanding sophisticated highly-computerized system for managing logistics, inventories, and labor and depending on where you work, some to almost all of your job duties require you to interact with their computer system to complete it which gives them a pretty good profile of what you’re doing, where you are, and how fast you’re working at any given time. It’s like having a little boss with you at all times watching you. Even if you, the lowest-level laborer, aren’t directly having to interface with this computer system and tell it all about what you’re doing, your boss probably is when they assign tasks to you (or the system can infer the information from other inputs to it). Idk, I ripped last few sentences from my aborted first essay and I could write a lot more about it but when you have such a good model like that you can calculate exactly how much you can cut staff, down to the minimum possible, and force a bunch of rates on people while only needing a small amount of management to enforce them. If you ever need more profits you can’t get in other ways, you can always cut staff more or raise rates. Tbh I have no doubt they would switch to piece wages for some workers if they thought they could get away with it. It’s the Amazon model ofc, although ime Amazon is much worse
Good managers are rare but I know what you mean, they can shield people under them somewhat from this stuff, rly makes it a bit better
Okay am hitting a posting-energy wall here, have to log off I think
Ty though, still rly appreciate your reply
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You didn’t lose your job, your job lost you.
