I was dri­ving home from town today and hap­pened to hear on the news that Sam’s Club was ter­mi­nat­ing ten thou­sand jobs and would be out­sourc­ing them. I imme­di­ately called a friend I know who works part time there and when she picked up, asked how she was. Her response was “fine con­sid­er­ing we were ter­mi­nated this morning.”

Here’s how it went down. They were emailed and called yes­ter­day and told that there was a manda­tory meet­ing today at 8 AM. She and her co-workers showed up and they were taken to a back stor­age area and lead into a “room” made up of pal­lets of mer­chan­dise in which tables and chairs had been placed in the mid­dle leav­ing only one open­ing. The room was cold. They were told that all of them, from part-timers to full timers and man­agers of the demo crew were ter­mi­nated imme­di­ately. They were given a few min­utes to ask ques­tions. No they did not get sev­er­ance, no exten­sion of ben­e­fits. Nada. For sev­eral of the peo­ple this was their only job. They were given no noti­fi­ca­tion it was com­ing. They were escorted back to their lock­ers to get coats and per­sonal stuff. The man­ager was not even allowed to go in to where she’d been doing the sched­ules for next week to get her glasses or jacket. What.…did they think she’d steal some­thing? Then they were escorted out of the build­ing. Inter­est­ingly enough, although none of them are allowed to work any­more, they are not offi­cially ter­mi­nated until Feb­ru­ary 5th. If I had a way of find­ing out why that is, because I am pretty damn sure it has some ben­e­fit for Wal-Mart, I’d find out and plas­ter it in every news­pa­per in the coun­try. The meet­ings were held simul­ta­ne­ously across the coun­try at 8 this morn­ing. Ten thou­sand peo­ple ter­mi­nated in one swoop.  And this is a com­pany “for the peo­ple?” Are you jok­ing? What under­handed, mean, secre­tive behav­ior from a com­pany towards it’s “val­ued employees.”

I, for one, will never, ever, set foot in a Wal-Mart or Sam’s Club again. I don’t care how poor we may get. This is yet another in a long line of crappy employ­ment prac­tices by a mega com­pany and it sucks.  They take advan­tage of a poor econ­omy, and instead of help­ing they cre­ate unimag­in­able hard­ships for employ­ees whose only crime was to show up for every shift when they were sup­posed to, glad to have a job to go to.

Oh. And they ter­mi­nated there Sam Club cards effec­tive imme­di­ately. Nice touch jerks.