Walter and I spent the 12th through the 14th on a little road trip down South. Corporate sent us on an all expense paid trip to the 12th annual Wal-Mart Greeter Convention, held this year in Jacksonville, FL, and boy, was it ever hot! Three paid days to travel, lodge, take in the sights, and swap Greeting techniques (and maybe if you’re lucky a little spit), with other fellow Wal-Mart Greeters.
The first night of the convention, things got so hot for yours truly and a fellow female Greeter out of Gastonia, NC, who shall remain nameless, that I made Walter leave the room. Let’s just say we made a little Wal-Mart Convention news working on our night moves. I wasn’t a totally bad friend though, as I gave him a sleeping bag and a pillow and set him up next to the ice machine for the night. Hey, he would have done the same to me if the fortunes were reversed. When I got up the next morning still pitching a tent, I realized my new greeter friend’s blue vest was glued to her back somehow. I asked her about it and she said she’d been greeting so long that she just had the vest sewn into her skin. Creeped out at what I had wrought, I quickly distanced myself from her for the rest of the convention, which caused an awkwardness for the rest of the trip. But let’s be real, ol’ Jonathan isn’t about to be tied down by a 62-year-old Wal-Mart Greeting Grandmother!
The first day, our guest speaker, Sam Walton IV, spoke at length about how to handle all the trash in, and around, your neighborhood Wal-Mart. He was so informative, so I spent a lot of my time picking up any new information I could. He really liked my hosing technique I’d used on a frisky couple a few months back, and he taught me a new trick which was to ask each “rough” looking customer had they seen the giveaways going on over at the Huddle House. Sam boasted of a 75% success rate, so I’ll have to see how that works, fingers crossed.
Another topic brought up was the heavy amount of weed floating about the convention. Weed is a plant that typically grows in Newsoms, and apparently according to Sam, is used by over half of our greeter-mates, and pretty much all of our customer base. Sam acknowledged that many in our group were taking it medicinally, but cautioned us that his employees have a reputation for being top-flight, energetic individuals and he was concerned the weed would affect our performance. He then suggested we actually say hello to everyone that comes in Wal-Mart. I don’t know who this Sam IV thinks he is, but he’s obviously never greeted before. You avoid eye contact with the weird ones, look the other way when inappropriate body parts are hanging out, and only acknowledge the ones you’re pretty certain don’t want to be there anymore than you do, so you speak to make them cringe and want to get out even faster.
What was not fun was the terrible training videos we had to endure. I was under the influence of some kind of old person medication I’d mistakenly took for Tylenol in a fellow greeter’s palm, and spent the event “trippin’ balls”, and I’ll have to admit I was pretty scared. I got really worried when, in one video, a couple that was paddling in a pontoon boat on the soda aisle got eaten by a customer who resembled an evil cookie monster because they had taken the last bag of Funyuns. I did not come back down for hours, and was later told that that really didn’t happen in the video. Luckily we don’t drug test, as Corporate said it had something to do with the fact that we’d never be able to keep a work force if we did. Bullet dodged.
We finally returned from our trip wishing we’d never gone. I’d been drugged, coerced into training, seduced by a 62-year-old, and forced to sit through more suggestions than I can remember. What I thought would be hanging out by the pool, getting into shenanigans, and an overall blast, clearly wasn’t. Hopefully they don’t send me next year. Now I have to go talk to my boss quickly before he approves that transfer from Gastonia!