Have you ever been in a warehouse? Warehouses are, by necessity, huge, impersonal, stifling, poorly lit buildings. When I was working at the Wal-Mart home office, I worked in a former warehouse. Wal-Mart converted it to offices and, instead of goods, used it to store people.When I last saw it, the outside of the building was covered in a gray/blue aluminum siding. In describing it, the color doesn’t sound terrible. Wal-Mart managed to pick a siding color, though, that combines the two colors unnaturally and depressingly.
The building’s interior, where the unnatural theme continued, was even more depressing. The floor was covered in industrial carpet tiles that were a mix of red, blue, orange and black up close. When viewed as a whole, across a room, the colors mixed to produce a color that we all called baby-crap brown. The interior walls, covered in sheet rock, were painted a color I always described as battleship gray.
For the most part, though, the walls weren’t visible because they were obstructed by the most prevalent feature of the interior, the maze of cubicles. The floor area, covering roughly the same area as a football field, was divided in the middle by structural walls that supported the building. On both sides of the division, three main arteries, where no cubicles were built, radiated directly to the exterior walls. The arteries were given names like David Glass Way. In between the arteries, rows and rows of cubicles were built in aggregations of 9 cubicles that we called pods. The sides of the arteries were formed by the 5 foot high, outside walls of the pods. The arteries opened at regular intervals to allow access to the pods. I gave many Wal-Mart associates, visiting our building from another part of the company, directions to a particular person’s cubicle by using the names of the arteries. For example, I might have pointed down an artery and said, “Go that way on David Glass Way to the first intersection. Take a left on Smiley Face Lane and walk to the second intersection, and then take a right on Moon Pie Road. Turn right into the second pod on Moon Pie Road and John Doe’s cubicle is the middle one on the right side of the pod.” Depressing and exhausting, isn’t it?
Each cubicle, or cube as we often referred to them, was approximately 9 feet long by 8 feet wide. On one side, a desk lined a wall and the opposite wall was lined with a work surface. The work surface was basically a desk top attached directly to the wall so that no legs or other support was necessary. It was intended for a computer monitor. In between the desk and work surface, was a fairly narrow portion of floor with no furnishings. This is where each person’s chair was kept. Above the desk and the work surface, a shelf ran the length of the cube. Attached to the shelf on both sides were fluorescent lights intended to provide reading light for work. The arrangement was utterly depressing and devoid of style, but was very utilitarian.
Even with the utilitarian arrangement, the building was difficult to work in because the pods filtered little sound. I could always hear the conversations of people adjacent to my cube. Even when other people were relatively quiet, the low hum of computers and the sharper report of fax machines and printers was constant. The total lack of nature was the worst part for me. Sometimes, in the middle of the afternoon, I would get up and walk outside just to verify that the sun was still shining.
I’ve heard members of Wal-Mart management say that the associates are the company’s most important asset. I don’t think that is born out in the work conditions of the home office associates. It is an exercise of cost saving run amuck.
