Corruption in Wal-Mart

AP brings us the story of a federal grand jury investigating Wal-Mart for misusing money to root out pro-union activity within the company.

While in library school, I worked for three years in a Wal-Mart warehouse. For unskilled labor, the pay was good -- I left making $15.50 an hour. But it was a deeply corrupt organization. The essential problem was that every worker was held accountable to certain statistical standards, such as production and accuracy. Most critically, production -- the number of cases, pallets, or whatever, moved per hour. The problem was that the required quotas were so high that everyone cheated on production every day -- you simply couldn't hope to make production (and keep your job) if you were honest. There was one day that I did not cheat on production (this was long before I became a Christian), but that was under bizarre circumstances.

Anyway, it was possible to get caught turning in phony numbers, so workers came up with cunning methods of making their deceptions hard to detect and prove. In fact, because the quotas were so high, workers entered the warehouse every day with one thought on their minds: "How can I most effectively lie today?"

As you can imagine, once lying becomes the primary concern, it can become a rapidly unpleasant workplace. The internal numbers were all phony, and the management knew it. For one thing, it would seem odd that the truckers reported that, let's say, 10,000,000 cases entered the warehouse in a certain month, and 20,000,000 were processed internally, and 30,000,000 left the building on a certain month. For another, most of the managers had risen through the ranks, and were accomplished cheaters in their own right.

So I suspect that at some point in the future, Wal-Mart will implode in an Enron-like fashion, because many of the accounting numbers are fake -- at least in the distribution side of the company.