Shopping carts, anyone?

If Wal-Mart wants to pay me to check out people's groceries, that's great. If the store wants me to work for the same pay to be a people greeter, sit at a table, clean bathrooms or push carts, that's fine too. Put it another way that a friend states it: doors or windows, makes no difference to me.

When the store has been busy all day and goes dead in the evenings, cashiers get farmed out. Fold and straighten clothes in softlines. "Zone" toys. (Yes, "zone" is a verb at Wal-Mart. It means clean up after lazy customers and bratty kids that leave things all over, out of place. Put them back into prescribed places so someone else can mess it up again 5 minutes later). Giving people greeters a break is stand-around-and-smile duty. And then, there's "go push carts."

No, not push abandoned carts around the store. No, not do a carry-out for a customer. What the managers mean is, clean up all the stray carts from around the parking lot and bring them back to the entrance areas. This involves making a train of carts on the front of the little cart pusher engine and using a remote control to drive them in. Because it involves machinery, people have to be 18 to do the job, and what 18-year-old wants to be a cart pusher at Wal-Mart? So 20-, 30- and 40-somethings in other departments have to fill in for this chronically-understaffed job (the proper title is "guest clerk"). Our managers never send 70-year-old cashiers outside to push carts, which is probably some weird reverse age-discrimination, but that's another story.

Depending on the weather, this can be a nice outdoor change of pace, or a tremendous pain. It's February. It snows here. I work evenings. You figure it out. But worse yet, you are usually teamed with another person. Sometimes that's fun. Other times -- you would have been better off alone.

A couple of nights ago, it was the control freak. She had to have the remote, she had to tell me what I was doing wrong, she had to tell us where to go next. I finally just went off on my own and started lining up carts in the nearly deserted lot so she could get her kicks driving the cart pusher into them.

Worse yet, two nights before that, I was paired with a partner that couldn't grasp simple natural laws: gravity and inertia. Two things you must realize -- one, the cart pusher will stop on a dime, but the carts will keep rolling (into cart racks, cars, people....) And when our parking lot is not flat, carts will roll faster and easier downhill. She would take her finger off the button, the cart pusher would stop, and carts would keep going. Then, I'd have to grab them, and we'd have to get the pusher lined up again.

I wish all of our customers would get into the "go for 10,000 steps" exercise habit, and spend just a few of them walking carts to the "corrals." Loose shopping carts are a hazard -- I'm sure no one likes their vehicles scratched and dented by carts that aren't secured. It's also a lot easier to pick up 10 carts from the corral than scattered across the lot.

Finally, my favorite is the RV'ers who live at Wal-Marts across the country and appropriate shopping carts as their trash receptacles. You know the ones -- park at the far end of the lot and keep one cart next to the RV -- piling bags of discards into it, and leaving it there when they drive off to the next Wal-Mart. Carts covered in gook and goo from whatever oil and residue was in the bag. I know I want that cart next, not! RV parks cost money, but can you imagine telling people at the end of your life "I spent the last 15 years driving from Wal-Mart to Wal-Mart?" Wal-Mart could be a little more proactive with some trash receptacles in the lot, but until that time, please pack in/pack out.