Scenes from retail purgatory…
When I took the seasonal retail job, I expected lots of good fiction-fodder. There have, however, been only a few standout moments. Still, if I take the top half dozen incidents from the past two months and combine them into a single day in a comic story about a retail worker, I might get some mileage out of them. I’m recording them here in some detail, mostly so I remember them.
The children:
The award for Worst Behavior goes to a brother/sister tag-team of about 7 and 5 years old who proceeded to rampage through the toy aisle while I was working there, pulling a series of items off the shelves, shaking them in the direction of their parents, and shouting “I WANT this! You HAVE to buy this for me!” before dropping each toy in succession on the floor and moving on to something else. This culminated in the boy pounding his fist repeatedly on a box containing a radio-controlled miniature car and screaming, “You really, really have to buy me this! It’s the most important thing in the whole, entire universe!” When his parents, who were conversing about car repairs and seemed either not to notice or not to care about their children’s behavior, said nothing, the boy’s shoulders slumped and he wandered off huffing loudly, “I hate this store. I can’t find anything here I want.” “Yeah,” his sister concurred, “me neither,” as she followed him into the next aisle still clutching a plush elephant, a coloring book, and a Disney princess costume in her none-too-clean little hands. It was abundantly clear that the parents were not going to clean up their kids’ mess, let alone ask the kids to do so, so I began picking up and reshelving toys, thinking Holy crap! Do you let them act like this at home, or is this a special treat just for the public? And I glanced at the parents just long enough to see the mother decide she didn’t want a pair of gloves she was carrying and toss them towards a bin of merchandise (not, the bin they came from, btw), miss the bin so that the gloves landed on the floor, shrug and turn away, leaving them there. Meanwhile, papa bear finished the fast-food soda he’d been slurping and set the drippy, condensation-streaked cup down. On a stack of books. When I scurried over to pick up the cup and wipe up the water with the hem of my apron, he gave me a bored and slightly perplexed look, as if he couldn’t imagine what I was doing or why. I tried to imagine what their family home is like, but it rather scares me to do so.
The runners-up for Ill-Mannered Monsters Children (emphasis on runners) were two boys and a girl, all about 4-6 years old, who decided to amuse themselves in a very crowded and bustling shop--with their exhausted-looking parents just watching them and shaking their heads in an “Oh, well, what can one do?” sort of way--by holding a series of races up and down the long back aisle of the store, shouting at full volume and careening into at least one elderly patron. Both the screams of the kiddies and the muttered conversation of the parents were in German, and I was not sure whether to feel pleased or disappointed that modern European children are apparently as monstrous as their U.S. counterparts, and parents as unwilling to even attempt to control them.
The funniest kid yet was a boy of about four who pointed to an inexpensive toy and nearly hyperventilated as he repeated in a voice dripping with hope, “Oh, I want that, I want that, I want that.” His father, smiling the smile of a parent knowing he had found a surefire pleaser of a gift for under ten bucks, said, “Well, if you put it on your Christmas list and you’re good until then, maybe Santa will bring it to you.” At that, the little tyke began to wail in a voice pitched with hysteria, “He won’t bring it! I’ll never get it. Never, NEVER! I haven’t been good enough!”
Yeah, but we might expect such things from small children. I like to think, though, that by the time one reaches adulthood one has learned how to behave in public. Ha!
The so-called grownups:
The Oh, Grow Up! award goes to a fellow who came in yesterday just as the shop was opening and provided my most protracted strange encounter yet. He had a yuppie-ish look to him--Starbuck’s cup in hand, old-but-still-expensive-looking sweater, stylish eyeglasses--but was disheveled in an it’s the weekend and I can’t be bothered to shave sort of way. He asked me in a laconic, depressive voice if we sold gift baskets filled with goodies. I told him no, but we have a whole aisle (towards which I gestured) with a large selection of baskets and lots of goodies to fill them with, so he could make his own custom gift. He looked towards the aisle and stood for a long moment as if thinking this prospect over before turning back to me and saying, “I’d rather you did it for me.” He stood and gazed at me, half-expectant. (Where do you think you are, Buddy? Nieman Marcus? Look around you. This is a bottom-dollar purveyor of plastic Chinese imports and preservative-laden foodstuffs, and you’re expecting a personal shopper service?) I smiled as if this was quite an amusing little joke we were sharing and said, “I’m afraid we don’t do that.” He stood a moment longer, perhaps hoping that I would relent, but finally gave up and made his way towards the basket aisle. When I passed a few moments later, he was saying into his cell phone, “They have Nantucket-style baskets and lots of cookies and chocolates and jams and things. What should I do?” (What should you do? This ain’t rocket science, Mister.) I bit my tongue. When I next saw him, perhaps five minutes later, he had managed to pick out a largish basket and place inside it one smallish box of biscotti. “Look,” he said to me in a voice reminiscent of Eeyore (if Eeyore had a Massachusetts accent). “I’m doing what you told me to.” I smiled and nodded (Good for you, Boy-o!), returning to my conversation with a fellow stocker about what we could move where in order to make room for some new merchandise. “Hey,” my fellow-worker said to me when I hit upon a workable plan, “you’re smart.” “Yup,” I said. “That’s why I make the big bucks.” Eeyore overheard and said, “Do you? Do you really make big bucks for telling me to make my own basket.” I’d had it. “Sir,” I said in the most pleasant voice I could muster, “I’m a seasonal retail worker. I make minimum wage. The big bucks thing was a joke.” “Oh,” he said, sounding mildly surprised and, if possible, even sadder than before, and, letting out a momentous sigh, off he wandered with his latte and his nearly-empty basket. I wonder if the poor fellow ever did manage the daunting and complex task of putting treats in a basket all by himself.
The I Don’t Want to See the Inside of Your Brain award goes to a woman who came through my line while I was cashiering and began to sort her basketful of merchandise into two roughly-equal piles: things she did and didn’t want to buy. All the while, she kept up a running commentary, half to me and half to herself, in a quiet, pleasant voice, about why each item was going into which pile. “This is for my sister Grace; she loves the color blue...I don’t need both wrapping paper and gift bags...I don’t remember why I picked up this scarf...” Eventually she smiled weakly at me and said, “I have ADD. It makes shopping very hard.” When we finally finished ringing up her order, she wandered out with only two of the three bags I slid across the counter to her. About an hour later she returned to claim the bag, which I had put aside for her, and she said to me in her quiet, addled voice, “This happens to me all the time.” (If there is a god, I ask him or her not to ever let me or anyone I love be on the road while this woman is behind the wheel of a car.)
Still, perhaps the just-plain-weirdest encounter I've had was with a woman who got snippy--very nearly shouting at me--because the shop doesn’t sell sock monkeys. Um, okaaaay…you’re a well-dressed, middle-aged woman getting angry with a shop employee (who, by the way, clearly isn’t responsible for what merchandise is on the shelves) about the absence of sock monkeys? Does the phrase “get a life” mean anything to you? (And on top of that, one of the things she half-yelled was, “They’re not that uncommon. Lots of shops carry them!” “Great,” I wanted to say but didn’t. “Go to one of those shops and buy one.”)
Oy.
The children:
The award for Worst Behavior goes to a brother/sister tag-team of about 7 and 5 years old who proceeded to rampage through the toy aisle while I was working there, pulling a series of items off the shelves, shaking them in the direction of their parents, and shouting “I WANT this! You HAVE to buy this for me!” before dropping each toy in succession on the floor and moving on to something else. This culminated in the boy pounding his fist repeatedly on a box containing a radio-controlled miniature car and screaming, “You really, really have to buy me this! It’s the most important thing in the whole, entire universe!” When his parents, who were conversing about car repairs and seemed either not to notice or not to care about their children’s behavior, said nothing, the boy’s shoulders slumped and he wandered off huffing loudly, “I hate this store. I can’t find anything here I want.” “Yeah,” his sister concurred, “me neither,” as she followed him into the next aisle still clutching a plush elephant, a coloring book, and a Disney princess costume in her none-too-clean little hands. It was abundantly clear that the parents were not going to clean up their kids’ mess, let alone ask the kids to do so, so I began picking up and reshelving toys, thinking Holy crap! Do you let them act like this at home, or is this a special treat just for the public? And I glanced at the parents just long enough to see the mother decide she didn’t want a pair of gloves she was carrying and toss them towards a bin of merchandise (not, the bin they came from, btw), miss the bin so that the gloves landed on the floor, shrug and turn away, leaving them there. Meanwhile, papa bear finished the fast-food soda he’d been slurping and set the drippy, condensation-streaked cup down. On a stack of books. When I scurried over to pick up the cup and wipe up the water with the hem of my apron, he gave me a bored and slightly perplexed look, as if he couldn’t imagine what I was doing or why. I tried to imagine what their family home is like, but it rather scares me to do so.
The runners-up for Ill-Mannered Monsters Children (emphasis on runners) were two boys and a girl, all about 4-6 years old, who decided to amuse themselves in a very crowded and bustling shop--with their exhausted-looking parents just watching them and shaking their heads in an “Oh, well, what can one do?” sort of way--by holding a series of races up and down the long back aisle of the store, shouting at full volume and careening into at least one elderly patron. Both the screams of the kiddies and the muttered conversation of the parents were in German, and I was not sure whether to feel pleased or disappointed that modern European children are apparently as monstrous as their U.S. counterparts, and parents as unwilling to even attempt to control them.
The funniest kid yet was a boy of about four who pointed to an inexpensive toy and nearly hyperventilated as he repeated in a voice dripping with hope, “Oh, I want that, I want that, I want that.” His father, smiling the smile of a parent knowing he had found a surefire pleaser of a gift for under ten bucks, said, “Well, if you put it on your Christmas list and you’re good until then, maybe Santa will bring it to you.” At that, the little tyke began to wail in a voice pitched with hysteria, “He won’t bring it! I’ll never get it. Never, NEVER! I haven’t been good enough!”
Yeah, but we might expect such things from small children. I like to think, though, that by the time one reaches adulthood one has learned how to behave in public. Ha!
The so-called grownups:
The Oh, Grow Up! award goes to a fellow who came in yesterday just as the shop was opening and provided my most protracted strange encounter yet. He had a yuppie-ish look to him--Starbuck’s cup in hand, old-but-still-expensive-looking sweater, stylish eyeglasses--but was disheveled in an it’s the weekend and I can’t be bothered to shave sort of way. He asked me in a laconic, depressive voice if we sold gift baskets filled with goodies. I told him no, but we have a whole aisle (towards which I gestured) with a large selection of baskets and lots of goodies to fill them with, so he could make his own custom gift. He looked towards the aisle and stood for a long moment as if thinking this prospect over before turning back to me and saying, “I’d rather you did it for me.” He stood and gazed at me, half-expectant. (Where do you think you are, Buddy? Nieman Marcus? Look around you. This is a bottom-dollar purveyor of plastic Chinese imports and preservative-laden foodstuffs, and you’re expecting a personal shopper service?) I smiled as if this was quite an amusing little joke we were sharing and said, “I’m afraid we don’t do that.” He stood a moment longer, perhaps hoping that I would relent, but finally gave up and made his way towards the basket aisle. When I passed a few moments later, he was saying into his cell phone, “They have Nantucket-style baskets and lots of cookies and chocolates and jams and things. What should I do?” (What should you do? This ain’t rocket science, Mister.) I bit my tongue. When I next saw him, perhaps five minutes later, he had managed to pick out a largish basket and place inside it one smallish box of biscotti. “Look,” he said to me in a voice reminiscent of Eeyore (if Eeyore had a Massachusetts accent). “I’m doing what you told me to.” I smiled and nodded (Good for you, Boy-o!), returning to my conversation with a fellow stocker about what we could move where in order to make room for some new merchandise. “Hey,” my fellow-worker said to me when I hit upon a workable plan, “you’re smart.” “Yup,” I said. “That’s why I make the big bucks.” Eeyore overheard and said, “Do you? Do you really make big bucks for telling me to make my own basket.” I’d had it. “Sir,” I said in the most pleasant voice I could muster, “I’m a seasonal retail worker. I make minimum wage. The big bucks thing was a joke.” “Oh,” he said, sounding mildly surprised and, if possible, even sadder than before, and, letting out a momentous sigh, off he wandered with his latte and his nearly-empty basket. I wonder if the poor fellow ever did manage the daunting and complex task of putting treats in a basket all by himself.
The I Don’t Want to See the Inside of Your Brain award goes to a woman who came through my line while I was cashiering and began to sort her basketful of merchandise into two roughly-equal piles: things she did and didn’t want to buy. All the while, she kept up a running commentary, half to me and half to herself, in a quiet, pleasant voice, about why each item was going into which pile. “This is for my sister Grace; she loves the color blue...I don’t need both wrapping paper and gift bags...I don’t remember why I picked up this scarf...” Eventually she smiled weakly at me and said, “I have ADD. It makes shopping very hard.” When we finally finished ringing up her order, she wandered out with only two of the three bags I slid across the counter to her. About an hour later she returned to claim the bag, which I had put aside for her, and she said to me in her quiet, addled voice, “This happens to me all the time.” (If there is a god, I ask him or her not to ever let me or anyone I love be on the road while this woman is behind the wheel of a car.)
Still, perhaps the just-plain-weirdest encounter I've had was with a woman who got snippy--very nearly shouting at me--because the shop doesn’t sell sock monkeys. Um, okaaaay…you’re a well-dressed, middle-aged woman getting angry with a shop employee (who, by the way, clearly isn’t responsible for what merchandise is on the shelves) about the absence of sock monkeys? Does the phrase “get a life” mean anything to you? (And on top of that, one of the things she half-yelled was, “They’re not that uncommon. Lots of shops carry them!” “Great,” I wanted to say but didn’t. “Go to one of those shops and buy one.”)
Oy.