Boys make music - Girls only listen, and other lessons from an unpleasant trip to Walmart

First let me say that I am sympathetic to the plight of those tasked with making images with which to advertise children's underwear.

The bog standard approach to advertising adult underwear seems to be having an idealized picture of a pretty damn ideal looking adult wearing just that underwear and looking sexy doing it.  Try that with kids and you might get fired, at the very least you'd get a lot of funny looks and a fair amount of complaints.

Children seem to fall in a sort of underwear advertising gap between babies, where showing them wearing nothing but the product being sold is apparently the only way to go and widely viewed as adorable, and adults where showing them wearing nothing but the product being sold is seen as sexy.

So how do you make pictures to advertise it?  The solution at work in the Walmart was to have the pictures not have underwear in them at all, presumably the children in the pictures were wearing underwear, but being fully clothed it's not like you could see the product.

Without the labels ("boy's underwear" and "girls' underwear") you'd have no idea what was being sold.

This solution gives the person making the advertising enormous freedom.  Completely free of any need to indicate what the hell it is they're selling, they can have the kids in the pictures doing anything.  Anything at all.  This is what they chose:

That's not a videogame controller the boy has, the image isn't the best, and I only looked so closely in the actual store, so it's impossible to tell if it's toy, prop, or instrument, but the thing appears to have actual strings and as I recall that impression was stronger in person.

Regardless of the actual reality of the image (actual reality: the boy was posing for a picture) we're clearly meant to think of him as playing a guitar.  He's fingering on the fretboard and his other hand is in position to strum.  He's engaged in his activity to the point of completely ignoring the camera.  The image is telling us that this is a music maker, and his primary concern at the moment is his music.

Message received: boys who wear underwear make music.  I have no idea how the underwear is meant to play into it, except for the the fact that that's what's being sold.

Whoever chose what the display would be could have had the boy doing anything, they chose to have him be producing music.

That was the one I saw first.  It was a while before I saw the matching one.  In another world one might hope to see something similar.  A little girl with her own guitar, or perhaps she has a different instrument of choice, maybe she's rocking the drums or at a keyboard, or whatnot.  Or doing something entirely unrelated, sure they're both by the same company in the same store, but the male and female versions don't need to both reflect the same topic.  The product is underwear, not music, after all.

But they are on the same topic, and yet completely different.  They're both about how kids relate to music (and this is related to underwear how?)  Boys get guitars, girls get mp3 players.  Boys make music, girls listen to it.

The girl is also much more presenting herself to an audience.  Unlike the boy, she's completely facing the onlooker.  I'm sure someone else could read something into that, but I really have no interest in that, I'm more interested in her prop.

The girl isn't producing, she's at most singing along.  She doesn't even get to be vocalist (her prop is not a microphone), she's just fan.  She's got a recording of someone else's work.  Perhaps she's listing to the song the boy produced on the guitar.

Strange message to come away from the clothing section of a store with: buy your boy underwear and he'll be a musician, buy your girl underwear and she'll listen to musicians.

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On the plus side, there was a giant tribble, none of the pictures of that came out very well though.  Onto the other lessons.  (Also without pictures.)

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The first is, I suppose, make sure your cashiers are ready to work unsupervised before you have them working unsupervised.  The guy was nice, and he knew what to do when he went beyond his limits.  He called for help.  He didn't shout or scream or anything like that, it is possible to call for help electronically and that's exactly what he did.

No one came.

Eventually he was able to figure things out on his own, until the next thing (produce appeared to be his kryptonite) and again he called for help.

No one came.

I, just a passenger on this shopping voyage, walked back a bit to quietly double check that this glacial lane was indeed the one labeled "Speedy" the people behind us had no idea what they were getting into, nor, for that matter, did we.

Eventually he was able to figure things out on his own, until the next thing.  He called for help.

Guess.  Go on.  Guess.  I bet you can guess.

I didn't keep track of the way the goings of the people behind us fit into the rest of the ordeal, but shortly after we started being rung up, two groups got in line behind us.  They both left in their own time.  The first when someone decided that rather than help the guy by showing him how to do produce (which someone should have done for him until he could do it himself before he was left on his own) they'd open up the next register.  The second eventually joined them.

Now we were the only people in line at the speedy checkout aisle.  Looked like a golden opportunity, after all we didn't have much stuff and were already in the process of being checked through.  Of course new people came.

One at a time two more parties came.  For a time they were both waiting behind us.  One at a time they left.

When the next person came, quickly followed by another as I recall, I warned him that problems were being had and the last four groups gave up on the line.  When the next two groups came I warned them, but upped the number to five on account of the person who heeded the warning.

Both tried to stick it out, only one made it to the end of the ordeal.

During this time I wasn't just waiting, I was also looking around, which is when I learned another lesson:

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"New" doesn't mean what you think it means.

We were right by the "New Releases" and the more things dragged on the more I noticed that none of them were new.  I searched the titles looking for something that might qualify as slightly close to new maybe, and thought I found it when I saw that one was a special 25th Anniversary edition.  25 years after old might be new.  So I picked it up and checked when it came out.  The 25th Anniversary was three years ago.  Three years old isn't a new release in my book, but it might have been the most recent release on the "New Releases" rack.

"New Releases" by the way, written in giant letters.

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Anyway, back to the checkout line.

It amazes me that we were only trapped in the process of being (failed to be) checked out for a mere 20 minutes.  It felt like much longer.

Regardless, after all of the problems in ringing the stuff up, there was then a problem with payment.  (Apparently Walmart isn't on good terms with the company that does the Walmart credit cards that Walmart encourages you to get, and that can cause problems.)

At this point there are brave/foolhardy people waiting behind us frustration is rife, the person I'm with offers to just go over to the customer service desk so that everyone else can be checked out normally, but some time will pass before that happens.

The cashier's unwillingness to dump the problem on someone else's lap is really his only mistake.

By the third time he called for help only to get none he should have realized that he was being denied the resources necessary to do things right and been willing to let go and have the problem be solved at the source, the people who were supposed to be helping.

Which brings us to another lesson I glossed over:

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Creating a non-disruptive system by which an employee can call for help when they get in over their head and don't know what to do is a good idea.  Refusing to answer those calls for help is a Walmart idea.  Walmart ideas are bad ideas.

Throwing someone in the water and hoping they figure out a way not to drown is a bad way to teach people how to swim, but if you told them it'll be ok because you'll be there to provide help if they need it and then you're not, you may very well be evil.

More realistically and less metaphorically, training is important, and the cashier clearly should have had more of it, but it can't hope to cover everything and sometimes people will screw up or forget or otherwise need the help of someone who is better at this than they are.

The ability of employees to receive additional assistance on the job is vital.  The ability of customer facing employees to do it in a hurry even more so.  They need to be able to say something like, "I'm having some trouble here, but in a moment one of my superiors will be here to straighten things out," and they need to be able to mean it, otherwise minor problems turn to catastrophes and everyone ends up being screwed over.

Walmart clearly recognizes that fact because they have a system in place to provide said assistance to cashiers.  The Walmart in question clearly doesn't give a damn about that fact, because they ignore said system unless they feel like responding to it.

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I'm a little unclear on the order of events here.  The cashier called for help again, and improvised.  I'm not sure which came first.  I think it might have been the improvisation, which would make sense because all previous calls for help had been ignored.

It might make sense to assume that the system was broken and the calls for help weren't getting through.  Perhaps the cashier thought that.  Unfortunately that's not true.  They were, they just weren't being heeded.  But first, improv:

Abandoned by those who were supposed to help him when he was in over his head, and presented with a problem he had never been trained for (Walmart and the Walmart credit card not getting along) the cashier went outside of channels and simply got another cashier to try to help him out.  She was nice, but ultimately wrong in everything that she said.  Not her fault, she hadn't been trained for this either.

Finally the most recent of the calls for help (which as I said, I'm not sure if it went out before or after improv) was answered by a woman who couldn't speak a sentence without incorporating at least two lies.  After an extended period of this, person I was with gave up and went straight to customer service.

She'd tried to do this earlier, and the sale had hopefully been cancelled, but cashier really wanted to solve the problem and lying woman really didn't want much of anything to happen other than everyone to listen to her lies and accept them as gospel.

I have no idea why lying woman was lying, the truth (which, unlike any of the cashiers, she knew), when it eventually came out, would have worked better.

And at the customer service desk another lesson:

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If you cannot parse the words, "I would like to speak to a manager," in such a way as to realize that the person saying them would like to speak to someone who is a manager, you are qualified to work the customer service desk at Walmart.

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Person I was with didn't actually take the time to explain to the guy behind the customer service desk that she actually was familiar with the hierarchical structure of Walmart and was well aware that the person he was about to try to pass off as a manager in fact held no such rank.  She sidestepped that with two words and then guy behind the desk admitted that the managers had all gone into hiding.

All of them.  (For there were many.)  Could not be gotten out.  What followed was a scramble to find the closest thing to a manager that was not in hiding.

I'd like to phrase this as a lesson learned, but I have no idea how to do it so I'll just say my thought:

It does not matter how important your Thursday morning managerial meeting is, if you have a gaggle of managers inside the store, it should always be possible to get at least one of them to do the work of managing if there is a problem.

I guess the lesson is that Walmart doesn't think that way.

They had enough managers in the store to staff a small to medium store on their own, but it was impossible to locate one of them.  I find this interesting because one of the various reasons I know there were so many managers about was that shortly before they'd practically been underfoot.  You couldn't go from taking pictures of the boys underwear advertisements to taking pictures of the girls' underwear advertisements without tripping over half a dozen of them.

They were clogging the damn place up.

But now they were all in hiding and the search was on for a manager facsimile who could serve in the stead of one of the hiding ones.  Which brings us to the biggest lesson of all:

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Walmart employees need to lie better or tell the truth.

I could talk about how Walmart's relationship with the Walmart credit card company is seriously fucked up to the point that time travelers from Home Depot from ten years ago need to tell Walmart how it's done.  I could talk about the lies two-lie-per-sentence lady was telling, I could talk about any number of very frustrating things, but it was all overshadowed by this:

Walmart Employee: It is store policy to hold items until midnight.
Exact same person: We can't hold items.  It's against store policy.
Walmart Employee: It is store policy to hold items until midnight.
Exact same person: We can't hold items.  It's against store policy.
Walmart Employee: It is store policy to hold items until midnight.
My Companion: I get that, so I'd like you to hold these while I straighten-
Walmart Employee: We can't hold items!  It would be physically impossible and it's against store policy and our hands are tied and we can't hold items.
Exact same person: It is store policy to hold items until midnight.

And so on.  For precisely 15 minutes straight.  Started at 9:07, ended at 9:22, do the math.  Fifteen minutes of saying "We can hold items.  We can't hold items."

This was after saying, "We won't fix this problem that we have, you'll have to fix it for us on your own time," and my companion saying, "Ok, I'll do that, but can you hold these until I get back?"

And at the end of those fifteen minutes of telling us every other line that store policy is expressly written to allow the holding of items until midnight as a matter of standard procedure as opposed to anything special, exact same person from above said, "Ok, but just this once, and only till midnight, we'll bed the rules and hold these items for you."  Except that's not even close to an exact quote because if I put in all of the things she flavored the text with to make it sound like a super special exception just for my companion, I'd probably vomit.

You don't get to do that.  You don't get to spend 15 minutes repeating over and over again that store policy is X and then act like you're doing something extra special when you finally acquiesce to the customer's simple request that you do X already.

If you spend 15 minutes telling someone what the rule is until it's been seared into their brain like acid etching through an ear canal, you don't then get to pretend you're doing them a super special rule bending favor by following that rule to the letter.

If you want to pretend that you're helpfully defying authority by pushing the limits of what's allowed, you don't start off by telling them that what you're going to eventually do is exactly what is prescribed by the rules.

Essentially, if someone wants to lie to pretend they're being extra-special-nice by holding something until midnight, that same someone should not first spend fifteen minutes near shouting, "The rule is that we'll hold it till midnight."

If you're going to lie, you've got to do better than that.  Because this level of lying is just insulting.