On Sale

The store cut back on hours and the employees who could afford the cuts got a chance to have a small amount of time off. But increasingly, as the economy remained weak, employees had to sign up for any shift they could find.
That was how I signed up for a cart pusher shift. Not being adept at directing a stack of more than three carts at a time, I was relieved when my coworkers, two strong young men, suggested I collect the stragglers from the parking lot. The managers had been skeptical that a 47-year-old woman who usually wore skirts to work could handle a shift with the carts. Granted, I didn’t wear a skirt that day. Jeans were allowed for cart pushers, back room help and custodians. The rest of us had to wear dark shirts and tan bottoms. When I saw a coworker shortly after I left Big Box, he joked that I had probably burned all my navy and khaki. I hadn’t, though I never wore it. I wondered if, among the right crowd, it would make a really scary Halloween costume.
So mostly, that glorious fall day I spent in the parking lot taking carts after customers using the handicapped parking spaces were finished with them. It was a dry, comfortable, beautiful day and I welcomed the chance to be outside, away from the managers and even away from most of the customers.
But the cart pushers, who were paid less than we cashiers, had a hard job. They worked in rain, snow, sleet and blistering heat. They also provided carryout service, and if they couldn’t get inside right away to help a customer, they heard complaints. If a customer’s car got a tiny dent from a cart, they heard about it. They occasionally had to jump out of the way when a careless driver ignored them in their fluorescent vests and nearly ran them down.
I’m proud to say that the day I worked the carts, the store manager toured the lot and complimented us on how good the area looked, free of trash and stray carts. We almost never received a compliment. As I told the lower-level managers, who were as surprised as we cart pushers were to get praise, it was the men who had done the vast majority of the work. But my attention to the stray carts had made a difference, I was told. And it was true.
If the the store would routinely staff the lot with just one more person, the lot would look better, the customers’ cars wouldn’t be hit by runaway carts and the carryout service would run faster. Some people told me that customers didn’t expect good service when they paid bargain prices, but that wasn’t my experience. And frankly, the customers had a right to expect good service. The only people receiving low pay for working at a discount store were the rank-and-file workers. The managers earned reasonable pay.
The children of the company founders were billionaires. There was plenty of profit to be made at a discount store; the profit just didn’t go to the people who did the hardest, dirtiest, most thankless work.
After that day, if I had time and didn’t have a line of customers, I tried to do at least a few of the carryouts myself for my customers, unless they had something really bulky or heavy to load. It was good to do something different, and it felt really good to have the freedom to decide to shut off the light at my register, signaling my unavailability, and perform another task. Self-direction was scarce, and I longed for the freedom to decide my own fate.