... while I didn't sell my soul to the Beast of Bentonville and become an actual WalMartian, I rented it out on contract...
After my husband and separated and I moved back to Arkansas, I needed work. A friend who lived in Fayetteville told me about a "rollout" coming up for Wally World, and that I could probably get hired to run and terminate CAT-5 cable. I had experience in IT, but only once did I ever participate in doing that for a Dillard's store in Oklahoma as part of my training for them, so I applied, passed the phone interview, bought all my tools and practiced to get my groove back, and got there to find myself the only woman out of 100 people (50 teams, 1 electrician and one cable tech each).
But I completed the rollout successfully, even being only five feet tall and few stores having scissor lifts or tall ladders. They gave me and the guy I was partnered with $20 more a day per-diem, so in Southern California it meant we still had to share a room. (My later on the road project, in their distribution centers upgrading workstations, I managed to negotiate a little higher so I really could have privacy... never found a female partner).
So if you go to a Sams in SoCal and see some really messy wires through the bar grid leading to a hiring kiosk... they only had a forklift safety cage, and we used extremely creative measures.
After that the same company put me running their overnight help line for techs for a smaller series of rollouts, 12 hours, six days a week. Yay money! Because all rollouts and related contract jobs were halted for Blitz. I learned to squirrel away every penny but made a name for myself, and after a few years was hired on full-time by a major IT vendor.
The company was VERY different when Sam ran it, and when I came into the environment a decade later, people were really regretting the changes in the company's philosophy, politics, wages, benefts, especially for store workers. The Distribution Centers, being less affected by the home office and usually not underpaid because they had heavy equipment certs if nothing else, are the only place I could have recommended someone work, but even then I heard the employees talk about that it really had changed.
I became disabled in 2012, and moved back home to the river valley.
Edit to add, 2007 article interviewing people...
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/us/politics/20walmart.html?_r=0
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