An inside look with a Tulsa manager of Walmart, Oklahoma's largest private employer (2024)

When Traci Clark was age 18 in the mid-1980s, she got an hourly job working as a pharmacy technician at the Walmart store in Owasso.

“Walmart was my job to get me through college,” she said. “I was going to school to be a pharmacist. And then when I applied to pharmacy school twice and didn’t get in, I decided I needed to get out of my mom’s house and get a career. So that’s what happened.”

Today, she is the manager of store No. 894 at 6625 S. Memorial Drive, just north of Woodland Hills Mall. It’s one of 13 Walmart “Supercenters” in the Tulsa metro area.

In a world of workforce challenges, Walmart — the largest private employer in America, as well as in Oklahoma — is providing its 4,700 U.S. store managers higher pay, bonuses and stock options in efforts to keep them and bring more on to the payroll. Leaders like Clark are harder to find in today’s job market with so many other retailers competing for talented managers.

Recently, Walmart provided the Tulsa World unlimited access to the store with Clark, shadowing her as she did her daily morning inspection of the store, spoke with associates and customers on the floor, and met with members of her leadership team.

7,000 transactions a day

Over 18 years, the 39-year-old Clark moved up from entry-level associate to assistant store manager to manager.

She supervises about 380 employees and leads a team of 11 assistant managers and a “store lead,” someone who assists her in nearly every aspect in operating the 200,000-square-foot store.

The store has about 7,000 transactions a day, meaning at least that many customers shop there on a daily basis. That number increases by about 5,000 additional transactions during the Christmas holiday shopping season, beginning with Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving.

The hours of the store Clark manages in Tulsa are 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily.

She typically arrives around 6:30 a.m. or earlier after her 30-minute commute from her home in Owasso.

She is on salary and typically works five to six days a week, including Saturdays, and typically leaves work about 5 p.m.

After checking in with her overnight assistant — who is in charge of stocking shelves and making sure the store is presentable in the mornings — her normal routine is to walk a familiar pattern throughout the massive store.

It takes 30 minutes to an hour, at least, and on many days, before the sun is fully shining.

She checks everything — from which shelves are not stocked or are not full — to the plastic strips, or “fast tracks,” with price tags marked underneath them at the bottom of store shelves.

Clark walks the store and communicates — via a microphone with a wire attached to the collar of her shirt and a walkie-talkie attached to her jeans — to her assistants and overnight manager.

“We need more fast tracks over here,” she said, regarding one aisle, where the plastic covers over the price tags are falling off the shelves.

She also notes areas — like the toy and bicycle section on this day — that are too messy and not organized as she would like.

Walmart, she explained, has a computer system in which items that are sold — or food items that have expired and need to be replaced with fresh offerings — are entered.

That information is then passed on to distribution centers, where needed items are loaded onto trucks. For Tulsa-area stores, those trucks usually arrive from the nearest distribution center, near Ochelata in Washington County, about 35 miles north of downtown Tulsa.

Two trucks arrive at the store daily — a truck carrying food for the grocery wing of the Supercenter, usually very early every morning — and a second semi, carrying “GM” or general merchandise, that can arrive any time of the day.

Pallets carrying items are left in the rear stocking area of the store not open to the public before the trucks move on to the next store, she said.

“I don’t know how we could function without the technology and the system we have,” Clark said.

‘You can’t hide around here’

She is on her feet virtually all of the time she is managing the Memorial Drive store, with about a 15-minute break after a daily 9 a.m. meeting with her assistant managers for the day.

She has a small, modest office space with a computer.

“For about 10, 15, 20 minutes, after I dismiss the management team, they all go their way and I try to address emails for them or anyone else,” she said. “You can’t hide around here, not with 380 people. They track you down.”

She does this with her door open.

“I like for people to be able to come in, and if they have questions I want them to be able to stop me right then and there and say, ‘Here’s what I need. Can you help me do this?’ she said. “I want to be available to answer any questions all the time.”

Walmart is based in Bentonville, Arkansas, about about 114 miles east of Tulsa. The company has about 1.6 million employees in the U.S. and about 38,000 in Oklahoma. The first Walmart store was opened in Rogers, Arkansas, in 1962. Its first store in Oklahoma was established in Tahlequah in 1968. The first Tulsa-area store opened in Wagoner in 1973.

Clark said the average Walmart manager makes $110,000 to $170,000 per year. The Wall Street Journal reported recently that some managers can make up to $400,000 thanks to six-figure bonuses and stock options.

Earnings like that don’t stop Clark, a mom of a 7-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son, from shopping in her own store.

“Walmart’s fashion is amazing,” she said. “I online shop because Walmart doesn’t offer the same fashion in every store, and there’s a specific brand that Walmart carries that I shop for, so I go to walmart.com as much as I’m in the store.

“And people say that all the time. They’re like, ‘Oh, you dress so cute.’ It’s almost every day. It’s why I shop at Walmart and my kids, too. I dress my kids head to toe in Walmart.”

Like any job, Clark said there are good and bad days.

“Some days are little more challenging. A couple of days ago we just had a scuffle, with customers arguing ... (about) other things, nothing to do with here ... they came in arguing that way,” she said. “We see an increasing number of shoplifting and stuff like that around here.”

But there are also what she calls “praises.”

“There are customers who shop the store weekly, some who even shop daily,” she said. “We have a gentlemen who’s in here every day, and every day he speaks to me, and says ‘hello.’ They come in here for exercise or whatever they need early in the morning. But he almost compliments us every week on something. He’s here as much as we are, and a lot of the customers are.”

“We’re a big family. We know who are customers are and I think that every store is that way. They see some of the same faces and that feels good — to have people to keep coming back and coming back.”

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