The Only Way Out Of Retail

That line, “The only way out of here is in a box,” – or some variation of it – is used in movies all the time but I think that it could easily be placed at the top of every application for every retail job.  And that’s because, for an alarming amount of people, that seems to be the only way out of retail.  I know that sounds like a joke but I don’t mean it to be.
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...

Black Thursday, A.K.A. Thanksgiving

It has been way too long since my last update but I’ve no excuse other than my own lack of motivation to write.  So, after cleaning up the place, let’s begin, shall we?

One thing I’ve come to notice about holiday shoppers is the fact that they always think a better sale is somewhere off in the distance.  It’s like they’re Dorothy wishing upon a rainbow for some giant tornado to come and take them to Oz.  Oz, obviously, is the local electronics store.  Hey, sometimes you have to take what you can get.  This last Black Friday – which, thanks to greedy corporations, was more like Black Thursday – saw some really good deals.  Deals on nothing I really would care about but deals, nonetheless.  So that was a few weeks ago.  Yet, I still get customers coming in who are confused about why the prices have gone back up since then.  As if everything is supposed to remain constant through the passage of time.  That’s why I’m still a young 20-year-old whippersnapper instead of the old, dilapidated age that I am.
Me: “Well… they were on sale for Black Friday.  Those were really good prices.”
Super Genius Customer: “Oh… so they’re no longer on sale?”
Me: ”No, they are, but Black Friday had some REALLY good sales.  Better than what they are now.”
I tend to repeat myself when I’m talking to customers because most customers are like five-year-olds with ADHD.  They never pay attention.
Then the inevitable question follows:
“Do you see them going back down that low?”
“Uh…”
Some times I’m not a hundred percent sure they’re not joking.  I mean, people spent the previous two to three months just waiting to buy that big purchase because of the possibility of a Black Friday deal.  Not even the guarantee – just the possibility!  Then, when Black Friday comes and goes, but while the customer is still under the impression that Black Friday means every day until New Year’s Day, they finally decide to stroll in and check things out.  When they see the prices have changed, they want to know when the next Black Friday-type sale will be.
Uh, next Black Friday would be my guess, but what do I know?  I just work here.
They then ask when the next holiday sale might take place.
When I shrug my shoulders and shake my head in dumbfounded confusion, they throw out possible options.
Labor Day?  President’s Day?  Martin Luther King Jr. Day?  Christmas?
MLK Jr. Day threw me for another loop because I usually associate it with solemn reflection, but I suppose we should thank corporations for ruining that for us.  Christmas, however, knocked me back out of my haze.
“Black Friday kind of was our Christmas,” is finally my response.
The sad look of disappointment when they hear that is then followed by, “Well, I guess I’ll just wait and hope for the best!”
Ah, there’s that American spirit!  That can-do I-can-wait-for-better attitude!  HOO-RAH!
Wait for another holiday to roll around just in the nick of time as your fridge finally gives up the ghost and dies?  That’s Russian Roulette that I wouldn’t want to play.  Yikes!  Those are the same people who come in and are upset that they can’t get next-day delivery because all their food is spoiling because they waited until the last minute to buy something.
But, I suppose that is the American spirit.  You just keep waiting and hoping for a better tomorrow that may or may not come in the hopes of saving an extra ten dollars.  Never lose out hope, shoppers!  There’s always 300 odd days left until next Black Friday!  Perhaps that 25-year-old stove that won’t heat on two of the four burners will make it.  Or you could just suck it up and buy something and be done with it.
…Nah!
More soon from the frontlines...

"Training - HUH! What Is It Good For? Absolutely NOTHING, Say It Again!"

My apologies to Edwin Starr for that terrible rip-off of ‘War’ in the subject line.  Now that that’s out of the way, onto the entry!
It is always nice when your job can manage to surprise you.  It’s very easy to become skeptical when you’ve been with the same company for several years or so, and sometimes this leads you to think that you’ve seen and heard it all when it comes to your company or, at the very least, your position within the company.  This is especially true for me when it comes to all the trainings I have been apart of with my current job.
Let me begin by saying that I appreciate a job that’ll train their employees so they know what they’re talking about.  There are places where you go in and you feel like you might as well just look up the info on your smartphone instead of ask the employees for help.  That’s not the fault of the employees, but the employers.  So, it is cool that my job decides to actually try to train us in the stuff we’re selling.
However, there’s a fine line between being well trained and training harder than a surgeon would be trained.  Sometimes my job goes a bit overboard with all the trainings.  Between the computer-based training, the one-on-one trainings with managers, the department trainings every other month, the larger corporate trainings we get sent to, and the one-on-one vendor trainings, it’s all a bit much and it often feels like everyone’s tripping over each other’s feet.  You get all the information drilled into your head again and again and it’s hard to resist the urge to just tell the trainer, “I GOT IT THE FIRST TEN TIMES I WAS TAUGHT THIS!”
I mean, really, it’s not like we’re training to go deep undercover to infiltrate the mafia.
Everything becomes very repetitive and it’s amazing how certain trainings might change ever so slightly, but the managers – who must be used to working with some truly dumb as hell people – feel the need to go over the same things again and again in excruciating detail.  They always have this worried look on their face like, “Oh, dear lord, I hope this is sinking in for him.  He looks so lost as I’m explaining this to him!”  When, in reality, I’m not lost – just amused at their ridiculous repetition.  I’m not the world’s smartest guy but I can grasp simple facts and instructions.  If I don’t have a sarcastic smile on my face when somebody tries to ‘train’ me on something, then in my mind I’m going into autopilot and I only hear a “wah-wah-wah-wah” sound.
That’s why, when I get sent to a training and I’m not bored and the trainer is cool, funny, and laidback, I’m genuinely pleasantly surprised.  This was the case earlier in the year when I was sent to one such training for a week.  I’ve been to one or two similar trainings and it’s always torture.  The only bright spot is that I get away from customers for a few days.  This training, however, was fast-paced and totally laidback.  The trainer still seemed to spout the company line and praised everything our company did, which I somehow refrained from rolling my eyes, but she was easy-going and funny.  Sure, I didn’t learn anything new, per say, during the entire week that I hadn’t already known, but it was still enjoyable.
Not since when I was first hired was I as impressed with anything this company had to show me in the way of training.  I just hope we don’t go backward and revert to the old style of training within a year.
So, nameless trainer, thank you!  You’ll never know how much you alleviated my apprehension about that week.  If I had to be stuck relearning everything I already knew, I’m glad it was with your class.
More soon from the frontlines...

Time Off For Good Behavior

There’s nothing quite like having two days off in a row from your job, is there?  Sure, most normal jobs might always give you two days off in a row, especially if you’re working a Monday to Friday job, but in retail, finding yourself with two days off in a row is an exciting event.
So you can imagine my surprise when I found myself with three days off in a row.  It was almost as good as hitting the lottery.  It’s an amazing feeling to walk out of your job’s front doors and know that you won’t have to be back until the fourth days.  At that moment, you have the greatest amount of free time you’ll ever have for the next three days before you have to walk back through those same doors.  The possibilities for your future are wide open!  You could do anything you want!  The sky is the limit (or at least, so you tell yourself)!
Need to clean the entire house (or, if you are a lowly hourly drone, an apartment)?
Have to finish editing all seven hundred pictures from that vacation you took a year ago - the one that everyone is still hounding you about putting up pictures for?
Have to make several shopping trips to buy things you hate wasting your time shopping for?
Want to go to the movies and watch six new releases??
Want to finally do a real nice detailing of your car?
Well, now you can!  And if you can’t get to something the first day, YOU STILL HAVE TWO DAYS LEFT!
That’s how the thinking goes when you first leave the office, or the store, or whatever jail happens to be your workspace.  You’re going to work on that story you’ve wanted to do justice in those three days instead of churn out one mediocre blog entry.  Hell YEAH, you are!
But, oh, how quickly that feeling of invincibility fades!
That first day might feel pretty damn good, no doubt about it!  You’re still getting lots done.  You’re relaxing, not even thinking about work.  And hey, the weather is perfect!  It was as if Mother Nature was giving you this perfect day to go out and get things done.  It’s okay if you haven’t started that story.  You still have two days left!!!
That second day is still enjoyable because you still have that last day off.  This is still a day where anything can happen!  Perhaps you’ll mix some real housework during the day with a quiet stroll around the neighborhood with your spouse and dog(s).  Besides, it’s still okay if you haven’t started that story.  You still have that last day to stay up all night working on!  You don’t need sleep that first day back.  It’s a short shift, anyway!
Then that last day hits.  You wake up, and despite not drinking the previous night, you have a heavy feeling in your gut.  It’s that, “Oh, god, why did I do what I did last night?” feeling.  That feeling of completely wasting your previous two days and realizing you don’t have enough time to do all the things you wanted to do in the remaining time you have left.  That dread of having to deal with customers whose life stories you have long stopped caring about.  That dread of having to fix issues your superiors hand to you because shit rolls downhill and they put it all off for three days.  Soon, it becomes all you can think about and now, instead of enjoying that beautiful day Mother Nature is giving you on your last day off, you silently curse her because it’s as if Mother Nature’s mocking you.
“Have to go back to work?  What a bummer!  I plan on giving everyone else sunshine and 75 degrees for another day.  And then when you have your next day off, I’m planning on unleashing a typhoon all day long, SUCKER!!”
So, instead of writing that story and getting something done (and feeling pretty good about it until you start to question the writing quality of it), you just churn out that mediocre blog entry.
I hope this has been more than mediocre for you all.  I really need to focus and push myself to write.  I’ve been slacking way too long on this shit.
I seriously don’t know where the three days went.  I just know that it doesn’t make going back to work any easier knowing I had three days away.  Here’s hoping my next day off arrives quickly!
More soon from the frontlines...

Take This Survey And Win A Supermodel Wife And Ten Million Dollars!! PLEASE!!

Recently, my job has been focusing heavily on trying to get customers to take the survey on the bottom of the receipts they get from us.  You see them all the time – it’s that thing located way at the bottom of the receipt you don’t even think twice about.  But really, who could blame you?
Past the list of products, the money you spent, and the information about how long you can return something, who cares about a survey?  Our time is already filled to the brim with other time-wasters as it is.  We can’t afford to sit in front of our computer to rate how we enjoyed our visit into Flo’s House Of Doilies for our three dollar purchase!  We have to get home so we can see the newest American Idol!  It’s trials week and everybody knows how those are the best part!  Then after that, it’s Facebook time to look at all the links our coworkers post and to creep every single photograph that someone special we’ve had our eye on for some time.  SURVEY? Pfft!!
And it doesn’t matter if the person who helped you out at the store – even if all they did was ring out your three dollar purchase – was the most amazing person in the world.  I’m not just talking about somebody who smiled as he or she thanked you for coming in today.  I’m talking about somebody who somehow resisted the urge to spit in your face despite the maniacal ranting you did when you couldn’t find that doily you were looking for (he/she found it five feet from where you were looking).  We just forget to take it or we just don’t want to fill out a ten minute survey about every tiny detail about your trip into Flo’s store.  Forget the fact that it’d probably take closer to three minutes to complete and not ten.
I can’t tell you how many people have told me that they’d fill out the survey because I was, “so helpful, and not like any other salesperson I’ve talked to at other places,” or some similar platitude.  Then, days or weeks later when I decide to look at our store’s comments that people leave on those surveys, I don’t see anything with my name in it or even the department I work in.
I’m guilty of it, too.  I even tell the person who mentions the survey to me that I’ll take the survey because they were so nice.  But I never do.  I feel bad – it’s certainly not something I mean to lie about, but it just happens.  So, I guess I can’t get too mad at my customers that do the exact same thing.
The fact that so many companies try to entice you with hopes of winning gift cards or other cash prizes if you would just take their surveys seems to not even matter.  You could promise them a chance at winning a million dollars (and since the odds are better of winning that than winning a million dollars if you played the Lotto, those odds are pretty favorable) and you still won’t get people to fill out a ten question survey.  It makes me wonder who exactly wins these prizes.  I’ve certainly never heard of anyone winning these amazing shopping sprees or gift cards at any store other than one time.  When I was first hired by my company, I saw a video proving somebody supposedly won, but other than that ONE time, nada.  Zip.  Zilch.  What’s up with that?
Well, how about the two of us – you and me – change all of that?  From here on out, I promise to try really hard to fill out every single goddamn survey I get on every single goddamn receipt, no matter how small my purchase was.  How about you all do the same?  Up for the challenge?
Let’s leave a little positive feedback for people who are in the shittiest of shitty jobs, because maybe something nice will happen for them.  Maybe they’ll see the comments and it’ll cheer them up from an otherwise dismal day at work.  Perhaps they’ll win something nice for impacting their customers’ experiences.  Perhaps karma will even be kind to us and we’ll get something nice for our troubles like, say, a shopping spree for hundreds of dollars???
What say you?  Let’s put out the challenge to everyone we know.  Let’s go forth and do something wonderfully small acts of kindness for the sake of our fellow man or woman.
Right after I catch up on my Facebooking.
More soon from the frontlines...

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...

Black Friday Deals... On Thursday!

It’s that time of year again!  The time where you spend a day of thanks to remember all that you have and all you should be happy about… just a month before you receive things you desired and probably didn’t even need.  I’ve experienced way too many holiday seasons working in retail.  Far more than I ever intended to experience.
This will be a quick post since I’ve mentioned before how pointless I find people lining up as early as Wednesday for some piece of crappy technology that’ll be obsolete within the year.  However, I did want to point out something I heard at my job recently.
One of my coworkers, trying to look on the bright side of only opening at midnight on Thanksgiving, said something along the lines like, “At least we don’t have to open at 10pm or 8pm like [some of our competitors].”
To which I say, “Buuuuulllllshiiiiiiit.”
You see, do customers think the store just magically looks the way it does when they walk into the stores?  Do you see those displays set-up around the store?  Do you see how there are stacks of flyers or ads or pamphlets laid about in certain parts of the stores?  Well, the places you shop don’t magically look like that because a jolly fat man in a red suit makes it look that way.  We’re not elves selling toys made in Santa’s workshop.  There’s no fairy dust that magically turns stores into winter wonderlands.
Since the stores are “closed” on Thanksgiving, everyone has to run around after our store closes for the day on Wednesday like their heads are chopped off trying to set everything up for Friday.  Of the 2-3 times I’ve done this, I’ve stayed to at least 1am.  Then what do you do when you get home?  If you’re me, you have to eat something & then you’re too awake to fall asleep right away.  So, typically, I’m not asleep until around 3am.
Then, since the store now opens at midnight, if one has an opening shift, we’re scheduled an hour or two before the store actually opens.  I’ve started as early as 10pm.  So from midnight on Wednesday to – let’s say – 2am on Thursday, and then again from 10pm to midnight, I’m most definitely working on Thanksgiving.
It’s that kind of thinking that retail companies want you to have.  At first it was, “I’m working 4am but at least I’m not working at midnight.”  Then, when everyone started to open at midnight, we all thought, “I’m working at midnight but at least it’s not ON Thanksgiving.”  To which stores like Target have decided to start opening their doors at 9pm or so ON Thanksgiving.  It’s time we all got together & realized that sales aren’t worth it.  EVERYONE deserves a day – 24 FULL hours – off from work to see the people we don’t get to see very often.  This is something customers AND employees should agree on and need to work together to fix.
Customers need to refuse to shop at stores that open at midnight (or earlier).  Employees, well, I guess the only thing we can do is to keep getting the word out to people we know and tell them to hold off on sales.  My parents never stood in line at 4am for a toy and if I was ever upset that I didn’t get something for Christmas, I quickly got over it because I always got more than I probably deserved.  And so will your kids, relatives, friends, and whoever else you’re in line for.
Incase I don’t get the chance to update before it arrives I wanted to wish everyone a very happy Thanksgiving.  I thank you all for taking time out to read my rants and ramblings.  This is just a little project I decided to do as an outlet but it means a lot that you all are reading it.  If you’re living outside the States… Count yourself lucky you’re not apart of the crazy bull that is associated with the Christmas season here in the States.
Moor soon from the frontlines...