My Summer At Wal-Mart
Adventures in Bentonville!
Alison Nickum, '06
Issue date: 10/13/05 Section: GSB Life
"You mean you would actually consider moving to Arkansas?" I've been asked this a lot lately. And, surprisingly not only to those who ask me, but also to myself, my answer is easily "yes." Do I have family there? No. Had I lived there before? Nope, not that either. What on earth could possibly be such a draw for me there, then?
I'll start with this: I never thought I could possibly answer that I'd consider moving to a place like Arkansas after school. Having lived in Chicago for the last 9 years, I'd grown to love it here. I was thinking my next move would be to New York, though - I'd been dying to live there for at least a couple years sometime in my life. And what better time then right after b-school? Though New York was my first intention after b-school, my attitude has changed somewhat since entering the GSB. Could I actually be Arkansas-bound?
I arrived at the Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport (yes, the Bentonville area has an airport, and it even has direct flights to places you couldn't get to direct from the much-bigger Little Rock airport) the Saturday night before the Monday I was to start work. My roommate Hayden, another Wal-Mart MBA intern, sportingly offered to pick me up at the airport that night. The airport was small (we're talking one luggage carousel, here), but comfortable, up-to-date, and hospitable. After grabbing my golf clubs, which I had checked, and my roll-aboard, we were on our way through the rolling Arkansas hills.
The place all the MBA interns were staying at was a sweet arrangement. It was a brand-new apartment complex (we were the very first tenants!), and thanks to a subsidy from Wal-Mart, we were getting a great deal on fully-furnished corporate apartments overlooking an executive golf course on which we had full privileges throughout the summer. The clubhouse had a nice workout room overlooking the golf course, a room with billiard and ping-pong tables, and a swimming pool that was completed about 3 weeks into our stay. It was all included. Now, don't get me wrong, it wasn't decorated like some high-fashion multi-million dollar South Beach condo or anything, but it was completely new, big, fully-furnished, had really comfortable couches, a balcony overlooking the lake/golf course, and for $440/month, who wouldn't love it?!
My first week on the job consisted of going through orientation with the 50-some other new Wal-Mart home office employees for that day. (They set up that many people there *every day*. And that's just for the home office!) Orientation lasted most of the week. At the tail-end of the week, I got to meet my team, learn about my project, and get going!
I only had a couple of days to get started on my project, because all the MBA interns were scheduled to spend the beginning part of the following week working in stores! Wal-Mart called it "Retail Boot Camp," and we had one day of working in a Sam's Club, and one day of working in a Wal-Mart Supercenter (the ones with grocery). I was totally excited!
At the Sam's Club, one of the things I spent my time doing was working with one of the employees at the loading dock checking a shipment of books that had just been delivered. We called out book names/numbers to each other as fork lifts whirred in the background, stacking everything from toilet paper to beef jerky. It was a great time!
My next day of Retail Boot Camp was in a Supercenter. We spent our time in the new 200,000 square-foot Jane, Missouri store. Jane was just a 20-minute drive north of the home office, right across the Missouri-Arkansas border. We got to do some pretty cool things while we were there. One of the first things we did was to help the store correct some manual mis-entries of inventory numbers. So there's this fascinating little device called a Telxon (pronounced "tel-zon") that we used to scan items, check the mis-entered inventory numbers, and manually correct. As a kid who grew up loving to "scan" things, I was elated to be able to use one of these little handheld babies to scan 'til my heart's content. Beep! Libby's 64-oz Cherry Juicy Juice. I count 8 on the shelf, and enter the correct amount into the Telxon. After a few times of this process, in the true spirit of Wal-Mart efficiency, the other intern I was working with and I divided up the tasks to make our trip down the aisle faster. He would pull them off the shelf and count them, I would scan and enter the count. Next! Let me tell you, this definitely beat the heck out of sitting in front of a computer screen all day! It was a lot of fun. Later in the day, we got to help stock the liquor department, which was filled with everything from expensive wines and cognacs to Arbor Mist.
As if the Telxon wasn't fun enough already, one of the most interesting things about having one was that you could scan an item and it would tell you what Wal-Mart's gross margin on that item was. How cool is that? A few of the interns and I played "guess the margin" for a few minutes, trying to see who could best estimate how certain brands/products fared. Give you some examples, you ask? I could tell you, but I'd have to kill you...
Stay tuned for the continuation of my Wal-Mart Adventure in the next issue of ChiBus!
I'll start with this: I never thought I could possibly answer that I'd consider moving to a place like Arkansas after school. Having lived in Chicago for the last 9 years, I'd grown to love it here. I was thinking my next move would be to New York, though - I'd been dying to live there for at least a couple years sometime in my life. And what better time then right after b-school? Though New York was my first intention after b-school, my attitude has changed somewhat since entering the GSB. Could I actually be Arkansas-bound?
I arrived at the Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport (yes, the Bentonville area has an airport, and it even has direct flights to places you couldn't get to direct from the much-bigger Little Rock airport) the Saturday night before the Monday I was to start work. My roommate Hayden, another Wal-Mart MBA intern, sportingly offered to pick me up at the airport that night. The airport was small (we're talking one luggage carousel, here), but comfortable, up-to-date, and hospitable. After grabbing my golf clubs, which I had checked, and my roll-aboard, we were on our way through the rolling Arkansas hills.
The place all the MBA interns were staying at was a sweet arrangement. It was a brand-new apartment complex (we were the very first tenants!), and thanks to a subsidy from Wal-Mart, we were getting a great deal on fully-furnished corporate apartments overlooking an executive golf course on which we had full privileges throughout the summer. The clubhouse had a nice workout room overlooking the golf course, a room with billiard and ping-pong tables, and a swimming pool that was completed about 3 weeks into our stay. It was all included. Now, don't get me wrong, it wasn't decorated like some high-fashion multi-million dollar South Beach condo or anything, but it was completely new, big, fully-furnished, had really comfortable couches, a balcony overlooking the lake/golf course, and for $440/month, who wouldn't love it?!
My first week on the job consisted of going through orientation with the 50-some other new Wal-Mart home office employees for that day. (They set up that many people there *every day*. And that's just for the home office!) Orientation lasted most of the week. At the tail-end of the week, I got to meet my team, learn about my project, and get going!
I only had a couple of days to get started on my project, because all the MBA interns were scheduled to spend the beginning part of the following week working in stores! Wal-Mart called it "Retail Boot Camp," and we had one day of working in a Sam's Club, and one day of working in a Wal-Mart Supercenter (the ones with grocery). I was totally excited!
At the Sam's Club, one of the things I spent my time doing was working with one of the employees at the loading dock checking a shipment of books that had just been delivered. We called out book names/numbers to each other as fork lifts whirred in the background, stacking everything from toilet paper to beef jerky. It was a great time!
My next day of Retail Boot Camp was in a Supercenter. We spent our time in the new 200,000 square-foot Jane, Missouri store. Jane was just a 20-minute drive north of the home office, right across the Missouri-Arkansas border. We got to do some pretty cool things while we were there. One of the first things we did was to help the store correct some manual mis-entries of inventory numbers. So there's this fascinating little device called a Telxon (pronounced "tel-zon") that we used to scan items, check the mis-entered inventory numbers, and manually correct. As a kid who grew up loving to "scan" things, I was elated to be able to use one of these little handheld babies to scan 'til my heart's content. Beep! Libby's 64-oz Cherry Juicy Juice. I count 8 on the shelf, and enter the correct amount into the Telxon. After a few times of this process, in the true spirit of Wal-Mart efficiency, the other intern I was working with and I divided up the tasks to make our trip down the aisle faster. He would pull them off the shelf and count them, I would scan and enter the count. Next! Let me tell you, this definitely beat the heck out of sitting in front of a computer screen all day! It was a lot of fun. Later in the day, we got to help stock the liquor department, which was filled with everything from expensive wines and cognacs to Arbor Mist.
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As if the Telxon wasn't fun enough already, one of the most interesting things about having one was that you could scan an item and it would tell you what Wal-Mart's gross margin on that item was. How cool is that? A few of the interns and I played "guess the margin" for a few minutes, trying to see who could best estimate how certain brands/products fared. Give you some examples, you ask? I could tell you, but I'd have to kill you...
Stay tuned for the continuation of my Wal-Mart Adventure in the next issue of ChiBus!