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Fired Delray Cancer Patient Wins $8.1 Million from Michael’s
By Norm on September 2nd, 2010Posted In: Blog
A fan sent me a link to this story covered on The Sun Sentinel’s website:
A federal jury on Wednesday awarded a 47-year-old Delray Beachwoman $8.1 million in a lawsuit in which she claimed Michaels Stores, Inc. violated federal employment law for repeatedly criticizing her work performance, then firing her while she was suffering from cancer and undergoing chemotherapy .
…
She claimed in the lawsuit that she was pressured to return to work early during a six-week medical leave because she was expected to fix the high-volume store’s failing operations. Within days after her mastectomy, according to the lawsuit, District Manager Skip Sand began calling Jorud asking her when she was coming back to work. She returned to work on Sept. 15 because she feared for her job.
Sand also visited the store two to three times a week after Jorud came back to criticize her performance, the suit states, adding that she asked for help from the corporate office, but was told to try not to take medical leave again.
Sand, who was named in the lawsuit, also criticized Jorud for bringing in her fiance and his son on Oct. 13 to help her while she was weak from chemo and had to shift old inventory to help make room for a pending delivery of new inventory. She was fired three days later, a day before her next scheduled chemotherapy treatment.
“They accused her of theft,” McPherson said. “And [Sand] harassed her because she missed so much work. He claimed he saw her theft on video and claimed she violated company policies that didn’t even exist.”
Jorud later disproved the theft charge, which the district manager later admitted was false, McPherson said.
The saddest thing about this story is that none of it surprises me at all, nor do I imagine it surprises most retail employees. It’s pretty typical of the attitude most retailers have towards their store-level employees. Good for her, for standing up for her rights.
You can read the rest of the story HERE.
In my book, “Pretending You Care: The Retail Employee Handbook,” there’s a whole section dedicated to the kind of customers one is likely to encounter as a retail drone. Each customer “archetype” is named after the very specific kind of chronic and annoying behavior they exhibit, and most of the descriptions have an appropriate Retail comic accompanying them. To get myself back in the habit of blogging somewhat regularly, I thought it would be fun to do a quick humorous sketch of the different customer types in the book and post them here occasionally. I’ll start out with the “Pack Rat”. Enjoy!
Pack Rat
(Gatherum Redundare)
“Pack Rats” fill their shopping carts with items that they don’t necessarily intend to purchase. A typical pack rat will wait until they get to the counter before they decide which of their items they want to keep, with total disregard for the line that inevitably forms behind them. The pack rat will then leisurely contemplate each of the many items in their carriage and unload all the unwanted merchandise on you.
More efficient pack rats will make their decision before they get to the register and hand you their voted down items right away, or ditch them among the impulse merchandise displayed near the counter.
Most retailers will supply each register with a plastic bin to accommodate the steady stream of pack rats the cashiers will get throughout the day. Ideally, the merchandise in these bins would be periodically returned to its proper location, but realistically it just gets dumped into larger bins behind the customer service desk until the end of the night. Then all the employees spend hours whittling away at the giant pile of random merchandise after the store closes.
Curiously, pack rats seem to think their methods are normal. Often a pack rat will start unloading items onto the counter without a word, then act genuinely surprised when you start ringing them in. Astonished, they’ll say, “Whoa! I’m not buying that!” As if it were presumptuous of you to think they planned on purchasing all the items they took off the shelf, put in their cart, brought to the register and placed on the counter.
Like “displacers,” there’s nothing you can do to dissuade pack rats. Just try to appreciate the instant karma those same customers get stuck with when they can’t get any help on the sales floor because the entire staff is constantly busy re-shelving merchandise.
I made some slight modifications to the header and ad space recently. If things look awry on your browser, you might need to do a forced refresh. Safari users might have to empty their cache as well.
Sorry for any inconvenience.
-Norm
The big news last week in the world of cartooning was that Cathy Guisewite, creator of the comic strip Cathy, is retiring her strip in October 2010 after 34 years … and since Cathy appears in over 1,400 newspapers, its departure offers a rare opportunity for up and coming strips like Retail.
So, if your local newspaper carries Cathy, now would be a great time to write to them and suggest Retail as a replacement. I’d like to think my strip does a good job depicting women in the workplace in its own right … hmm, maybe this would be a good time to rename the strip “Marla.”
Thanks in advance for any help you can give me in this regard, and congratulations to Cathy Guisewite on an impressive and successful run.
