A Target worker went on a rant against the “corporate mumbo jumbo” employed by the chain when it comes to the titles of its workers in a trending TikTok video.
Jennifer (@jennay4399) criticized a series of grandiloquent-sounding job names Target rebranded for positions that she says are oftentimes fancy-sounding for nothing, inaccurate, or plain nonsensical.
She shared her Target experience in response to a TikTok posted by the Corporate Dropout social media account in which she highlights several “signs your company’s culture is off,” and the particular point that Jennifer harps on are constant re organizational initiatives and restructures. The example that Corporate Dropout gives is a company stating that they’re going to be “known as the Customer Success department now.”
Jennifer had a lot to say about this point and how she believes it pertains to particular practices at Target when it comes to particular verbiage: “The way this immediately made me think of Target. So back when I started in 2017 there was like this whole thing about how we can’t call them customers because they’re guests and that’s like warm and inviting and like we’re inviting them into our home like it’s just so friendly and how we weren’t called employees we were called team members because Target is a team,” she says, gesticulating her arm in a pantomime of a “go-getter” at work.
She continued and went off of the titles that were being attributed to employees at various hierarchies in Target stores, highlighting that there was a disconnect between the nomenclature of employees and the individuals coming up with their names.
Jennifer speculates that the folks coming up with titles for Target employees at corporate probably were basing their ideas off of business school ideas, and that the monikers weren’t rooted in actual retail floor experience: “And they’re not managers because that’s like too icky and like and too like sterile sounding they’re team leaders and then there’s executive team leads and store team leads and then like randomly three years ago they decided to change the STL title to SD for Store Director which is kind of stupid because they’re not directing anything, they’re a f*cking retail manager like they just sit and delegate all day like why are we calling them a director and then for people that are like the main person in their department you might think that doesn’t have a name or it’s called like specialist or something cause I know Menards calls them specialists, but at Target, they were called DBOs. Which stands for, Designated Brand Owner. Which is the stupid, stupidest most, like, somebody, somebody sitting at a desk that like has some like business degree thought of that OK? Like nobody that actually worked in a store thought of that because that’s so stupid.”
She continued to rant against the inaccuracy of the job title: “I didn’t own anything I was the DBO of beauty for a year and a half I didn’t get any. I didn’t own any part of the company, I didn’t get any commission based on sales and I didn’t get any raises when the department performed well. So it’s just some stupid title that they make to sound, make things sound better. And they also changed, they’re not cashiers, they’re guest advocates. What the f*ck you’re, like, what are they advocating for? They check people out they’re not advocating for anything. They’re not, or like another one is like a closing team member or like you would just call like it a closing team member. Or like, the closers. They’re called closing experts. They’re not experts they’re f*cking 19-year-olds that do the pulls at the end of the day they’re not experts in anything. They just zone, like it’s so stupid. Just such stupid like, like corporate mumbo jumbo.”
Commenters who saw Jennifer’s video responded with some ridiculous-sounding job titles of their own, like what Subway calls its fast food workers: “Its giving sandwich artist.”
Another penned, “Just like Starbucks baristas being partners.”
There was one another former Target employee who appeared to agree with Jennifer’s assessment of the “expert” title attached to some of the store’s rolls: “Lmao when I worked at Target my title was fulfillment team expert. Like that was my first job, I was definitely not an expert at anything lol.”
One TikTok user said that Target wasn’t the only massive retailer that does this, but Walmart partakes as well: “Walmart, too. Now we don’t have managers, we have ‘coaches’ and ‘team leaders’.. like, really?”
The Corporate Rebels blog penned a scathing criticism of “hyper-inflated job titles” stating that folks who willingly carry them make themselves “look like an idiot.”
The piece went further, writing that oftentimes complicated job titles tend to give the perception that people don’t want others to know what they do for a living and that they’re ultimately promoting the image of worth, rather than demonstrating it in actuality: “Once upon a time, job titles used to tell us what people did for a living. They were bakers or doctors or lawyers or plumbers. But in recent years, it seems we don’t want people to know what we do, so we fancy-pants the title.”
The Daily Dot has reached out to Target and Jennifer via email for further comment.
