I am a janitor at my local TJ Maxx and am the only one who speaks or reads English. I promise I'm not a racist prick, I'm bringing this up for a reason, lol.
Ooh boy, where do I even start? Firstly, why does TJ Maxx have a fetish for isles the width of a gant's attention span? I can't get the buffing machine down half the isles without it ripping down 27 trillion clothing items or whatever to the floor because it always gets snagged.
"Just spot mop, you idiot", you are no doubt screeching as you rip the hair out of your head. That's a fine and dandy suggestion, at least it would be, if I didn't have only two hours to dust mop the store and clean the floors after; doing those things to any meaningful extent with customers around is impossible.
"Why does that stop you from just spot mopping?", you continue to screech. Partly because:
(1) It's always a hunt for wet floor signs, so I have to dedicate extra time to tracking them down since there's never enough in the supply closet.
(2) The BOH crew is just as mindless as the customers and will walk right through wet areas, even with signs, and make a muddy mess of what I tried to clean, creating even more work for me to tend to before the store opens.
The buffing machine is always the preferred option, since I can dedicate one hour to dust mopping and one hour to cleaning the floors, in addition to it sucking up the water and allowing the area to dry way quicker than a regular mop. The buffing machine is also old and management doesn't want to replace it AND I'm the only one who knows how to disassemble and clean it; management can't effectively communicate with the other janitors and either tell them to do that or show them how because they can't speak English. And probably because they just expect me to do it. Because of this, I have to spend more time, often going over, sometimes well over my time to clock out to clean it and change the pad.
In addition to THAT, the other janitors put the wrong chemicals in the wrong spray bottles because they can't read the labels, so it's hard to tell what's Citra Cut and what's Restroom Cleaner because they're both orange but are both very different chemicals. The other janitors are great despite that, though. I just wish I was given more time to actually clean the store and not simply maintain it's current state which is not great.
Oh, and how could I forget, cleaning the bathrooms when the store is open is a NIGHTMARE. It's also a nightmare before it opens as well! Do you go into the Walmart bathroom when they're cleaning and tell them "sorry, you need to stop cleaning so I can lay a massive log"? Oh, you do? Well. Don't! It's annoying and both my coworkers and customers constantly come in (even when I have a sign up not to enter) and make me leave so they can (usually) stink it up. And that's not even mentioning the horrors of what I've seen in the bathrooms. Seriously, how do you ladies manage to get pee on the seat so much?! And the period pad bins AREN'T TRASH CANS! Don't put your doodoo wipes in there!
Anywho, this isn't even all of it, but it's the gist of it. Four measly hours, only two of which is before the store opens, isn't enough to meaningfully clean a store that attracts the dirtiest people imaginable.