Originally published at: Tik Tok video shows what it's like to work at Lowe's | Boing Boing
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We used these sort of “pickers” at the factory where I worked. If the worker had a problem, they could call for the fork lift. We also put larger, heavier items on lower racks. Safety is number one as they say, and an injury will cost you a lot more than what ever money you save by being stupid.
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That is horrible and posting it online like a joke too? I hope the employee sues I guess? Glad he didn’t end up dead or mortally wounded?
Yeesh… That’s terrifying.
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not the companies. on their own, they neither bother to do the training nor setup the warehouses in a safe way. take a look at amazon: arguably the most successful goods company, and they yet they have an outsized injury rate ( i think, the highest rates even )
the company can replace untrained workers quickly, and people always need the work. without collective bargaining, individual workers have no power in the situation. injuries are just a fact of employment for them
( eta: amazon’s are twice as bad as most: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/12/study-amazon-workers-suffer-serious-injuries-at-twice-rate-of-rivals.html )
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“Amazon has pledged to become “Earth’s Safest Place to Work,” with the aim of cutting worker injuries by 50%.”
Pretty sure that if you have twice as many as the average and you cut that in half that does not make you the safest place by any math. They will have to cut it a lot more than that to even come close to the extremely low injury and death rate in the policing business, as a randomly chosen example
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Yeah, I clicked that totally expecting it to be a humorous video, only to find my heart racing for the poor guy’s safety. Guess I’ve just been conditioned from certain headline styles. 
That was scary!
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This brings back some stuff.
The summer after finishing high school my aunt got me a job working in a warehouse of a company that made trophies.
The old guy who ran the warehouse and drove the forklift was a dead ringer for Pauli Walnuts (from The Sopranos). He would tell me to stand on a pile of boxes on a pallet with the forklift lift me up to transfer them to a high shelf. It was a bit terrifying (and, yes, and unsafe as hell…a lot of things about this place were…).
One time there was a column of boxes teetering and one fell off and landed about 3 feet from the driver standing down below. After getting me down, he walked straight to the bosses office and quit.
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That was awful. The honest fear in that guy’s voice brought back some very bad memories.
That manager on the ground or who the hell he was needs to be fired and that worker needs a good lawyer.
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I used to work at Lowe’s - this lift is called a Ballymore and it’s NOT supposed to be used for something that big. There’s another lift called an Order Picker that has a pallet on it that the operator is harnessed into to protect them in case they fall. That’s the piece of equipment that should have been used here, but it requires blocking off the next aisle over which clearly these idiots were too lazy to do.
The problem I had working at Lowe’s was the high turnover and nepotism that went up to management levels which led to a terrible work environment where you simply had very few fellow employees you could rely on to have your back and put in an honest day’s work helping customers.
I’m so happy not to work at Lowe’s as are most ex-employees of the place. It’s terrible and I hope Home Depot eventually puts them out of business.
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When I worked at Bed, Bath & Beyond (back when the company was salient), they stored all the inventory high above the displays so that the store always looked fully stocked. One item of note was the infamous Emeril Lagasse 360 Power Air Fryer, a beast of an appliance that weighed close to 40 lbs and was contained in an awkwardly square box. We had to climb our ladder, hoist this beast onto our shoulders and carry it down the ladder, backwards. Fun times…
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