Great Managers Who Were Ground up and Spit Out

I cannot believe how many people used to work for Walmart. Quite a few of them were just looking for a stop gap measure, something to tide them over until they found a real job. Some of them however, were managers who had bought into the premise of Walmart and expected to work there until they retired. Have you ever heard the expression-if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. I imagine that God has had quite a chuckle at the thought of some of the people who believed that they were Walmart lifers when the company just ground them up and spit them out. Not all of them were salaried managers-some were just associates who had worked their way through the company and thought that they would be with Walmart forever. But since this post is about Walmart managers-I'll concentrate on them. Aloysius (if you want a better name, make one up yourself. If you ask me not to use your real name, I won't, but the name you get might not be pretty) was a night manager at a Walmart after working for a different company for over twenty three years. When he was abruptly discharged from that job, he needed something for a few years until he could retire. He came to the happiest spot in retail with a pretty good idea of what he was getting in to. He thought. Two years later and Aloysius was burned out. He had taken third shift because he felt that he could do more good with the warehouse experience that he had. If he wasn't bogged down in company policy, he may have been able to. He made it through two, almost three years, before being ground up with petty crap and taking an early retirement. He looks back on his Walmart career with a pretty hard eye. "I think I wasted almost three years of my life" he told me. "I could have been working at a convenience store and gotten the same result. At least at a convenience store, I wouldn't have been treated so badly." Another Walmart burnout was Thaddeus ( you guessed it, not a real name.) Thad ended up going back to his first love, construction, because he simply couldn't take the constant nagging and back biting that was working as salaried management. The 90 hour weeks made it impossible to see his children in any kind of meaningful way, and it destroyed his first(and second) marriage. Thad is a lot happier now, even with the house market crash. He told me that he has started concentrating on remodeling and things are coming along. He still has tight months, but he just thinks back to his time with Mr. Walton's company, and he knows that if he can survive that, he can survive anything. There are so many other stories of ex-managers and associates who are much happier now, perhaps I will revisit this topic. I'm happy for the ones who got out, and I cross my fingers for the ones who are still trying to find their way out. Good luck. And if reading this has inspired you to try working somewhere else, just thank me later.