Sam's Club reviews

I started out in carts and they made it very clear that they valued the carts over the safety of their employees. As soon as the customers cleared out, they would send us out into lightning filled thunderstorms and ridiculously cold and hot weather. You had to be almost passing out or freezing to death before they would let you take a couple minutes to breathe. After two years, I was finally moved inside. I was transferred to the Cafe area which was a level 3 job (compared to carts which was a level 1), so I thought I would be getting a raise. They told me it was a lateral move and that, "the AC was my raise". I stuck with it, happy to not be outside and hoping to move elsewhere in the near future. In all honestly, I never had a problem with management until I switched to the Cafe. The people over me honored my availability and the few times I needed time off, they approved it in a timely manner. The people who controlled the food areas, were not as friendly. I had to wait until the last minute to have things approved and I was constantly being told that I had to work past my availability. It eventually got to a point where unless you were one of their favorite people, you did not get hours. I went through a two month period where I was getting 4 to 12 hours a week. When I talked to the person who made my schedule and explained that I was getting 4 hours some weeks and couldn't live off of that, I was told "Oh. Well you have 12 this week." Yeah, that's not the point and that's really not that much better, now is it? I made a few adjustments to my personal schedule and opened up my availability quite a bit. It went okay for a while. Then the 4 hour weeks started rolling in again. When I asked what I could do to fix it, I got, "I dunno. That's just what the computer is setting you at." I came in a few more weeks, thinking if I get one more week with a total of 4 hours, I'm leaving. I looked at the schedule and saw I had literally ZERO. No thanks!

Once you open up your availability, you're more prone to getting 5+ day workweeks of 4,5,6 hour days (which are lame). I'd rather work four (8) hour days than 5 6.5 hour days. It's retail, so any pits and woes you can imagine with a retail job are here. Be prepared to work on most holidays (except Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years (there's another holiday I'm forgetting...). Expect busier stores around the holidays too. Retail: Prepare to do, re-do, and re-do-again, your area depending on which boss/corporate/third-party rep is touring the floor. They all have their own preferred ways/or learned ways. They all expect their way to be the visible way when they walk through. Imagine yourself as a marionette, and each manager holds one string. Now picture every manager pulling the strings in different directions, all the while blaming you (or at the very least being blatant in their opposition) for moving in the direction of another string. [Hmm...this is actually a decent metaphor. I hope someone reads this. Are you real?][Am I real?] What really is lame is their (new?) automated system which sets the starting pay. I've been at the same club more than two years. I've gotten raises twice, but because Sam's just upped their company-wide minimum wage, my last increase was "big" only because it was getting us higher than the minimum. Anyway, a new associate was brought in and the system started them off at 2 dollars more than any other associate in the department because of (5 years total in retail and 1 year related in the department) experience. Two dollars more an hour and I could tell within an hour of training the associate (yeah, isn't that a nice way to end your training session) that it was a waste. It's not like I even asked the associate what they were making. It came out in natural conversation when we were discussing the potential certification which would bump our pay significantly over two years. "Yeah, I can't wait to make ___." [Does math in head...] Bringing in higher paid, new associates, meanwhile, those of us with proven performance are getting hours cut. Oh that's another con. Full or part time, prepare to have your hours cut at the whim of some magic number. Because that's the ultimate guiding light. Who cares if the store/department suffers because of cut hours and crap scheduling (another con; by crap scheduling, I mean overlap during days of little activity and ghost towns during busy weekends). So the department is suffering? At least we cut our payroll enough where its under some arbitrary limit. And don't think the standards go down just because there are fewer people working in the department. Listen, I like working here, but it can be a bear at times. I'm a fairly optimistic, glass-half-full person. Overall, the morale is pretty low, if I had to guess. But then again, if some kid comes in with "experience" and is making two dollars more an hour than you (and is making fifty cents less than a supervising associate) it's easy to see why morale would tank.