What’s A Little Hypothermia If I Can Save Eight Dollars?

Today, a mini-story that shows the mindset I have about retail employment and how I want to save you the same erroneous train-of-thought.
I’ve been employed at my current job for over five years now and each winter, it is almost assured that the store will only be about ten degrees warmer than what it is outside.  Since I live in an area where winters can get pretty damn cold, that is not a good thing.
There are a number of reasons why this might occur, but the simplest one is because of the giant sliding doors that never seem to remain shut.  With each customer that comes stumbling through our front doors – braving howling winds, torrential downpours, or blinding snowfalls for a TV on sale for 10% – allows all the accumulated heat to be zapped from the air.
Another common reason why the temperatures indoors are so wacky is the fact that the thermostat isn’t accurately adjusted from day-to-day.  If there’s an unusually cold spring day, the A/C might still be on, and there’s not much the store workers can do about it.  By the time anything is fixed and you notice the difference, most of the day is already done with.  The reverse is true in the winter.  A working A/C and heating unit is almost useless in a large retail building that is as open as most electronics stores.
This, finally, gets to my mini-story.  Each year, most employees, knowing how cold the store can be during winter, start to wear long-sleeved undershirts below their work uniforms.  Smart, huh?  Yeah, I thought so, too.
However, the first year I worked at my job, I had only short-sleeved shirts.  Outside of work I never really needed long-sleeved undershirts.  I mean, if I was cold outside of work, I always had hoodies or jackets or I just wrapped myself up in blankets.  The first time I experienced how cold it could get in my store during the winter, I suppose I should’ve gone right out and purchased a pack of undershirts.  Ah, but that’s when my superior intellect kicked in.

I started thinking to myself, “Hey, you don’t plan on working here for more than a year.  Why waste your money on shirts you’ll never wear again?  Just tough it out!  It’s not that bad, after all.”

That’s how I spent my first winter there.

Then there was a second.

Then a third.

Then a fourth.

And so on and so on.

You would think that by the second year, I would have just decided to say, “fuck it!” and by myself a pack of long-sleeved shirts.  Well, let me tell you, my friend, you are completely mistaken.

Each year I kept thinking, “Well, this is my last year here.  I’m definitely not working here for another year.  I made it this far, after all, I might as well just stick it out until warm weather returns.”

So, yes, super genius that I am, I have been freezing myself out on an annual basis on the misguided and self-delusional belief that I’ll finally be out of my job.  I guess the moral of this story is, if keeping yourself warm or dry or safe is ever a matter of a few dollars – even if you think you’re not going to be there for very long – just spend the damn money.  Or risk being as foolish as a man who decides to freeze himself to death for a one-year-only job that turns into a 5-year-plus job.  Just a little piece of free advice.

More soon from the frontlines...

Cloudy With A Chance Of Pointless Meandering

     Retail sunshine.  For those of you not in the know, that’s what people in retail say the weather’s like if there is no actual sunshine outside.  If it’s just bad enough to not be able to go outside and do fun things but not bad enough where they’re boarding up the windows, it’s weather that usually will drive people into stores.  Personally, it’s not very sunny for me whenever people, who drive through rainstorms or thunderstorms, enter the building by choice when I have to be there by necessity.

     “Boy, it’s raining outside.  I wish I could have spent my time outside riding my bike but instead I’m stuck inside.  I guess I have nothing better to do than to putz around the local electronics store for an hour or two for no reason before leaving without purchasing anything.”

     Which is what often happens at my store.  People will go into a store and just meander around looking at the same stuff they saw the last time they were in and wandering around (which probably occurred less than a week prior to their current visit).  If they do end up buying anything, it’s a CD or a DVD, and it’s probably one they only bought because they wanted to justify their trip out to the store.

     “Well, I didn’t really like Rambo 3 but I did just waste forty-five minutes of my day off here, soooooo… I better make it worth it.”

     God forbid you should’ve spent the time you wasted by doing something productive at home.  People seem to have a real desire to not be at home as much as possible.  They’d rather waste time at a store for no real reason other than not be at home.  Me, I wish I had the time to waste just petering around a store for endless amounts of time.  If it was my day off and the weather was crappy, I’d spend most of my day in bed reading, or writing, or, at the very least, watching DVDs or shows I recorded on my DVR.

     “Man, I have a hundred DVDs and I’ve only watched twenty of them, but none of the rest seem to be appealing to me at this moment.  Guess I should go buy another DVD!”

     But people in this day and age can’t seem to be bothered with reading a book it seems.

     You would think that I’d prefer it to be busy on the rainy days because it might mean less people on sunny days, but that is not the case, friends.  I want it to be busy enough on the sunny days so time goes by faster and I don’t feel so bad for missing out on the beautiful weather.  On the crappy days, people in my store tend to be more laidback and have a better time.  They might be stuck indoors at work but at least they’re not missing much outside.

     The concept of ‘retail sunshine’ is just part of retailing-by-weather-report that take place each day at my store.

     “Oh, it’s sunny and warm outside – it’s going to be a busy day, today!”

     “Hey, it’s raining outside – looks like we’re going to get some good traffic in!”

     Why don’t you just say, “Hey, there’s a 50/50 chance we’ll be busy today,” instead?  There will be those who prefer to shop when it’s raining and those who prefer to shop when it’s sunny outside.  You can’t predict what type of day it’ll be at your retail store based on the weather.  People are INSANE and will shop whenever they want to because they would rather waste their lives away inside a store, looking at products they will probably never buy, than to explore their neighborhoods, read books, etc., etc.

     Or just stay home and keep reading this blog.  See, this is even better than going out to get some DVD you’ll never end up watching more than once.  Just sit back and laugh at the others that I meet.  Besides, look at all that retail sunshine outside.  Do you really want to go out in that?

     More soon from the frontlines…