Others have talked about how it is a very young culture and that’s true, but that’s not what makes it bad. You can’t just chalk it up to young people. It’s the nepotistic biases of the managers that collapsed this place.
The Sr. Director and above levels are predominantly white people, and about 50/50 male female, that’s pretty representative of Walmart leadership in Bentonville. The problem is this-There are very qualified people that are not white and are in the middle ranks but cannot advance because of the cultural biases. There are big pay and level differences that continue to result from that. They only seem to care about pay differences in gender, which actually benefits some at the cost of others. It’s not based on performance or experience. Despite all the unconscious bias training, there is a legacy from the Jet days of heavily favoring certain groups because it’s just more comfortable to hire those you are familiar with. This affects how work is assigned and how people are evaluated.
This is why there are so many younger hires from the “top 20” schools, it so heavily biases privileged people. Many don’t have a strong sense of work ethic, but they have become the junior managers. This is breeding a classic collegiate sorority culture (not a fraternity otherwise i would have said so). Petty clicks and alliances have formed and that’s has become what dominates the experience. It has spread like a cancer and involves much of the management at various levels. Fairness, accountability, and hard work are no longer the real factors that determine how well you do. It’s NOT the difficulty of the job NOR the fact that Walmart is company that has made things bad here.
