In the last year alone I’ve heard about somebody who worked at several of our stores dying from a heart attack either while on the clock or as he was leaving from work. I’m not 100% sure on the particulars surrounding the event. Everyone in the store who knew about it kept talking about that. It was our greatest fear – to die wearing a shirt with a nametag on it. A few of us even joked about how we would rip our shirts off if we ever felt a heart attack coming while on the job. We didn’t want the last minutes of our lives to be with our job’s invisible collar around our neck.
Then just recently, our own store had a near scare. One of our own employees suffered a heart attack outside of work. Thankfully, the guy is doing okay so far. Tough bastard. But to think that this guy had a family and suffered a heart attack during the holidays really gives you the willies. This is somebody I’ve seen on a near daily basis and have spent countless hours shooting the shit and griping about the stresses of work with. I couldn’t comprehend it. My brain could not wrap itself around the idea of somebody around my own age lying in a hospital bed from a heart attack. I don’t believe in Christmas miracles but I’m damn glad he’s recovering because not everyone is as lucky.
This all seems like a running theme in the world of retail. I know that’s just life and everyone dies – don’t get me wrong, but it just seems like something about working in retail is conducive to heart attacks. Stress is a natural part of the retail world and everyone feels it. From the customers complaining just for the sake of complaining to the customers who are too lazy to read the print on the tags so they come to interrupt your work so you can read it for them. Maybe it’s the irregular schedules for most of the hourly employees, who are thus unable to plan anything else in their lives. Or the schedules that change at the last minute without any notification – plans be damned. Perhaps, it’s the long and demanding hours during the holidays that simultaneously put even more stress on employees who have to miss out on family time. The seemingly increasing amount of work placed on a smaller and smaller workforce as companies try to squeak by without having to increase their payroll. Or how about having the smarter employees having to pick up the slack from the idiot employees that the management deemed worthy of hiring? That one is my personal favorite.
This doesn’t even take into account the poor eating and drinking habits most of the workforce partakes in. Energy drink companies should give each employee a free case of their products at the holidays for all the business we generate for their companies. How else are most employees supposed to stay awake on Thanksgiving night when they have to work from ten o’clock to six o’clock the next morning, only to return at noon to start another eight hour shift? Then there are the late night inventory shifts that end at two in the morning but see some employees return seven hours later to open the store. The needle full of adrenaline to the heart in Pulp Fiction likely got its inspiration from retail workers.
Then there are the endless amounts of fast food joints conveniently located around my job that almost everyone goes to for lunch breaks. I feel like I’m one of the few who brings their own food from home as much as I can. I see what all that fast food is doing to the bodies of many coworkers and I want to avoid health issues as much as possible. But convenience is typically the way most people lean and when you only get a half hour lunch break – if you’re lucky – then fast food it is! All that fatty food clogging your arteries while the stresses of your job slowly build and build and build cannot be good for the body.
Sure, I know we don’t perform brain surgery at our jobs, but when you’re getting paid the amount of money we get while doing all the work expected of you by no fewer than five different people on a daily basis, it can feel like it. Okay, I’m still being a bit hyperbolic, but you catch my drift.
So, in my ever-constant attempt to come up with solutions to my daily rants, where do we go from here? I doubt companies are going to hire enough staff to do the work that they think we can accomplish. I doubt our pay will all magically increase and I doubt the hours will change. I also highly doubt customers will start thinking for themselves and solve their easy questions on their own or keep their petty complaints to themselves without raising a ruckus.
So, I ask again, where do we go from here?
No, seriously, where do we go from here? Because I’m actually at a loss for ideas. I just hope we can all make it out of here alive and not in a box. Hopefully I’ll be able to come up with something by the next post. If you’ll excuse me, I have to go make a cup of coffee before work.
More soon from the frontlines...