It sucks to work at Wal-Mart. It probably sucks to manage Wal-Mart too. The store is caught between two desires. One is economic ... to have the lowest possible labor costs while meeting customer demands. So you want to schedule workers to be there when you need them, but not have them around when you don't. So you do a lot of part time fiddling and split-shift moves. (That used to be done by a human, but today's news is that Wal-Mart has found a software program to do it). But then you run up against another desire ... to treat workers decently (which I'm assuming Wal-Mart wants to ultimately do). That's hard with this type of scheduling. People have lives and lives need some predictably ... like having Tuesdays off, regular hours, etc. Where to come down? One thing to make the equation a little more equitable might be to have an economic cost for keeping employees "on call," which is a central part of a flexible scheduling system.
Wal-Mart computerizes shifts