Straight shooting?

How the hell does a company like Target stay afloat? I don't like the store in the first place because it doesn't have useful things (like hunting knives, propane, or PVC piping) but prefers to stock lots of "trendy" cheap clothes and "hip" furniture bordering on studio apartment kitsch. Oh, and they carry wine but no beer. That tells you something about their target demographic.

But what baffles me is their approach to their staff. My brother worked there, hired basically as an assistant manager for the consumables section. They told him it was a full-time position but it turns out it only worked about 25 hours a week, because they like to hire more people than they need in order to keep from paying benefits to full-time workers.

Yet knowing all this I applied anyway to work there, mainly out of desparation. Big box stores make me sympathize at least in part with people gone postal, but I was willing to bite my tongue just to get some positive cash flow. I put in my application and applied for every open position they had. After nearly three weeks, I went back over to talk to them and ask why they hadn't called me back. They had a "system crash" the woman said and would contact me once they got my application pulled up. My brother said this was bullshit, that nevers happens to them. I went in the next day to talk to the HR rep in person, just to inquire what the status of my application was. She wouldn't even come up front to talk to me; the peon at the "Guest Services" desk said that she was "reviewing" applications and would call me by the end of the week to set up an interview.

I left the store, not really believing them, and on a whim, went to a store next door. I applied to be a cashier. They called me a 24 hours later and asked me to interview the next day. I went in, completed two surveys and three interviews, and the next day got my job offer and a drug test. I never heard back from Target.

Why the hell would Target basically ignore someone who wanted to work there doing anything, came in dressed nicely and asked on several different occasions to meet with HR reps? You have to have staff to run a store; if you can't even handle that properly, how much worse can the rest of your operations be?

This problem can't be endemic to corporations in general. Clearly the company which just hired me has their act together. But I do wonder how these organizations run themselves and still manage to make millions of dollars in profit.

But Martin, if there's one thing that pisses me off more than Target, it's The Home Depot. I will not put up with their shameless pandering to ethnic groups. Slavishly trying to lure in the Dutch ex-patriate community with a profligate use of orange is just unethical. I mean, really, what's that all about?