Exactly. I worked receiving at night in a Sears for a few months to help make ends meet. They treat their employees poorly, pay terribly, and have about as outdated a system as you can imagine when it comes to online orders (next time you pick an order up in store, see if the employee is stuck using a pen on one of those 20yr+ old touch screens).
All the internet orders just ping from store to store until someone accepts it. They pull it from the shelf, throw it in whatever box hasn't been thrown in the compactor and toss in any packing material laying around.
It's a **** job, nobody wants to be there and all the employees are just going day to day with that feeling of impending doom, waiting for Sears to finally shut down. Add pissy customers on top of it, and throwing your back out loading fridges and toolboxes for minimum wage. It's the classic "work just hard enough not to get fired" mentality.
It's no excuse for the bad packing job so many do, I made a point to do a good job since I sell and ship online regularly, but most just couldn't care less. I was only there for a few months, then made a point to get back into doing side work, since even that being occasional paid better. I'd rather be broke then spend my nights at a depressing job with unhappy people.
it's been that way for a while, when i was 18, i worked at a sears in town that was going dead (died a couple years after i left for another job), i was just graduating high school and had no idea what i wanted to do yet so it wasn't a travesty that i was making just above minimum wage working in their warehouse. the only job duties we had were to load orders into peoples cars and trucks, tie stuff down, unload the trucks, and assemble the tough to assemble displays inside. and we treated it like the job it was, we would drink and party on the weekends, come in hungover, and since our warehouse was detached from the store, we could always see when a supervisor was coming to check on things and could easily stop our game of shuffleboards/darts/ etc whatever we happened to feel like playing at the time so we could look like we were cleaning and whatnot.
cake job, cake work, and it paid enough to drink and pay for gas to get around, not much else you can ask for from a job like that. i will say though that it is still no excuse for treating someone else's property poorly. we never destroyed anything, we didn't mistreat someones box and package after it showe dup on our little screen that we had someone coming to a pickup, or had to box something up to get it sent out. it was 10 minutes out of our workday in between the nothing else we were doing so it wasn't like people went out of their way to be dicks.
if somebody is just plain packaging stuff wrong, then i'd blame it more on the person themselves or poor training for people who really have no clue, and less that they get paid next to nothing.... it's not a college education level job, it's a job that requires manual labor that someone could do after 2 days of training from the street. you get out what you put into it. and increasing the pay would only lure in more lazy people who want to get paid good for doing next to nothing.
it's also definitely not a job to stay in forever, it's exactly what it looked like. a job for a bunch of 17-24s to go to for 6-8 hours a day or less, make a few bucks while going to school or doing your thing. and find something better and move on and pass the torch to the next kid just graduating that needs to get started on his resume.
edit: it seems like a rant, and maybe it is, but i feel there are too many people who are getting started in this world who think that they are entitled to a cushy desk job with 9-5 hours because they spent 2-3 years in college, or even worse, the ones who don't put any time in anything and think that because they show up to work they should get 15 an hour for standing in one spot and not having any real responsibilities. work is what you put in, not what they tell you you need to do. only the extremely lucky make it in life putting in the bare minimum every day, and the hard working and dedicated people who care are the ones who end up where they want to be in 20 years.
. To no surprise only 4 wrenches were inside with the package list that had all checked off inside.
