A Retail Rant and Insight.
Before I forget or have been out of the retail world long enough to lose any credibility on the subject, I have to write up another essay on how my retail job changed my view on life for the better and why customers suck (these are related, trust me!).
I've talked before about how my retail job saved my life. I want to expand on it a little more in a specific way.
Dealing with horrible customers is a great way to learn to take life less seriously. To explain this, let me tell you about two large categories of horrible customers. These are the awful people who often made the job painful or unpleasant, and after a while of working in retail, it's easy to spot these types.
Type 1: You just drowned all my puppies.
There are people for whom every disappointment is the most painful thing ever. It's just the worst, they didn't know life could be this bad, and they may just never recover.
For some of these people, it is a near life-ended tragedy to learn that the taupe curtains are out of stock and they'll either have to go to another store to get them or fill out a back order card and wait. Maybe they'll even have to buy spruce instead. They'd put so much effort into planning this, they'd thought so much about it all, they couldn't possible wait or go somewhere else. The curtains were supposed to be here and they just don't understand why they aren't.
These people walk around all the time looking confused and sad and wounded. They thought life was going to be flowers and bunnies and sunshine all the time, and when you, as a salesperson, fail to provide said flowers and bunnies and sunshine, it's because you hate them, and it's entirely possible that they suspect, in their sad little hearts, that they deserve it. Life is bad and if they can't get their rug to match their drapes*, life will be meaningless and empty forever and they just had hoped that they could get the ivory instead of the woodash and was it going to match and were they doing this wrong and would it work? They look so concerned and so sad and it takes them a moment to understand anything contrary to their expectations (if they are traveling in a pack of people who are likewise suffering from drowned puppy syndrome, they may have to consult with each other for several minutes before the concepts of No penetrates the collective consciousness). This is so hard for them, so very very very hard.
On one hand, you want to put a blanket over their shoulders and give them a hug and a tell them it really will be okay. Then, when you've been there more than a week and dealt with more than three of them, you kinda want to kill them a little.
Because really, we're talking about drapes here. It isn't worth looking like life might no longer be worth living because you have to wait or do something other than what you wanted to do, and I swear, none of the sales staff is trying to deny the products to you individually. We do not drown puppies. Well, not during working hours.
Type 2: Suspicious, Cheap, and Stupid
Disclaimer: I was married to one of these.
Okay, there isn't a cute term for these people, merely a descriptive one. They have the deadly combination of three traits: Suspicious, Cheap, and Stupid. Any one of these traits by themselves are bad, but add them together and you'll have a customer that will have you longing for the right to do inappropriate things to them with the tape gun in under five minutes. You'll be fondling letter opener and eying their nostrils with longing in ten.
They're suspicious. They're convinced there's some secret methods or hidden procedures that the general public isn't aware of. Come on, there's some kind of alternate way to go about all of this, isn't there? Also, you, as the salesperson, are plotting against them, trying to trick them, trying to con them, if you deny them access to these magic sales methods.
They're cheap. There's no way the price on the item is the real price! That's too much. Likewise, the shipping fees are outrageous, no one whould pay that! This stuff isn't worth that much money. The thing that costs more isn't really any better than the less expensive things, so why should they pay the higher price rather than the lower one?
Finally, they're stupid. Stupid is pretty much self-explanatory.
The first two together are bad enough, because it gives you a customer who wants to have everything explained in detail (to make sure you aren't hiding anything and to give them a chance to spot the loopholes), and will try to argue down the price, argue around the fees, bully you into giving them a special deal... but if they're reasonably intelligent, they might eventually concede that they have to do the same stuff as everyone else. Suspicious and cheap alone are just annoying. It means you just have to be firm (and sometimes mention that you don't work on commission and therefore really don't give a damn what they buy, because you're getting the same hourly salary regardless).
But stupid, suspicious, and cheap is a deadly combination. If they're stupid, they're more likely to be confused about how things like delivery fees or special order work. If they're also suspicious and cheap, they'll be convinced that you are trying to trick them. Because they're suspicious, they're convinced that everything that doesn't make inherent sense to them is a plot against them, meant to deceive them, whereas in truth, the reason things don't make sense is because they're fucking troglodytes who have to be restrained from gnawing on the hardwood to keep their incisors down. If they're cheap, they don't want to pay money for stuff, and because they're also suspicious and stupid, they regard the salestaff as the enemy what is out to trick them out of their shiny shiny money. Efforts on your part to explain standards and procedures are taken as further evidence that you are trying to deceive them and they must be on their toes at every moment to counter your efforts.
They are exhausting. They will latch onto you and suck the life out of you, getting more and more belligerent as you, quite possibly one of Them or working for The Man or something like that, continue to fail at bowing to their wishes, acknowledging their superior bartering skills, incontrovertible logic, or petulant whiny-assed demands. You are stopping them from their great triumph, and you are out to get them and have probably been trained at ways to fool the customer or quite possibly taken the job just because you don't like people. They will continue to try to countermand your tricks and deceptions, and this will be a triumph and victory that makes them feel manly (or womanly) and victorious. They will show you that they aren't going to be fooled and they aren't going to pay a lot** and you'd better not try anything smart with them. They are suspicious of smart, because it is so unfamiliar.
You get the idea.
Conclusions:
So, having now bitched about the walking wounded and the growling gollums, let me tell you why I count my years working with them as an overall positive experience.
It's very simple: Working with these people convinced me that spending life walking around unhappy was a fucking waste.
Seriously, why would you want to spend all your life with the belief that not getting what you want is either a tragedy or an attack on you? If you get everything you want in life, your life is boring. Most of life is about what you do when it didn't go as planned. Life is a series of successive approximations. You try something, you see what happens, you try again with more knowledge. The journey is all we have. You try to enjoy it, learn as you go, and have compassion on other folks who are making the journey.
Can you imagine how much work it must be, spending all day defending yourself against losses, convinced that everyone is out to get you, that this is some kind of contest to see who gets things most perfect and just right and at the best price?
Here's the bad news: even if you get it ALL, you still die at the end. There's no prize for best performance, for getting one over on the authority (and let me tell you, getting one over on a salesgirl at a store in the mall? Not getting you a golden crown and oral sex any time soon). The people who are unable to provide you with everything you want, when you want it are not doing it out of malicious glee. The simple fact is that life sometimes sucks and you do not get what you want.
That is no reason to mourn existence.
And if you fight against life, life will win. You're mortal, the rest of the universe always wins in the end.
And yes, you know what, sometimes it IS unfair and it DOES suck and things aren't going the way you want despite all your learning and plans and hopes.
But you know what? That doesn't make it okay to make it worse for other people. Life stinks for ALL of us at some point. Suffering is not a finite commodity; you will not have less for making someone else have more. There's an infinite supply to go around. It breeds the more you feed it.
There are circumstances under which no reasonable person could be expected to be happy. If you are actively on fire, there's reason to complain. If your house was washed away in a flood, or their are parasites attacking your intestines, or someone really DID drown all your puppies, then you have reason to be unhappy. No one would expect you to be patient and see things from the other person's point of view in those situations.
And there are times when the store folk aren't being helpful. If the sales staff put a plastic bag over your head and taped off the oxygen supply, then chances are that their behavior can fairly be judged as a wee bit malicious***.
Likewise, there are people whose personal biochemistry makes it difficult for them to be happy under normal circumstances. I have enough friends who have struggled with various mood disorders enough to know that sometimes it's a struggle to function, let alone be something so abstract as happy. This makes everything harder, including, sometimes, having patience and perspective when things do not go as they'd hoped.
That said, the vast majority of walking wounded and the suspicious, cheap & stupid people had none of these problems. They were looking for reasons to be unhappy and they see life as a contest in which they fear losing.
Don't be like them. Don't. It's a waste and life is so much better than that. You can't make life perfect, but at least you can make an effort not to make it worse for others. You can love it in its broken beauty.
And if there's someone in your life who IS trying to share their misery with you, you don't have to accept it. One thing I learned about even the worst customers: eventually they WILL leave the store. You don't have to be unhappy about them after that. They leave, you move on. The faster you can get the first part to occur, the sooner you can get to the second. More importantly, while you should do your best to fulfill your duties while they're there, you are not ultimately responsible for their state of being. They came in that way, you do your best, and if you're really lucky, they'll leave happier. Regardless, they'll leave. There's no reason to offer to walk them to their car so they can continue to make your life difficult.
So that's my last big insight from years in retail. A lot of people are unhappy over things that really don't matter and they want to share it. There's no reason to take it personally, and there's no reason to encourage them.
Be happy.
Seriously. Whenever you can, every moment that you can cram a little more joy in life, every little bright glimmer you can find hiding somewhere, fallen into a crack while everything else was falling apart, take it. Enjoy it. If you have to cling to happiness like it's the thin ledge over a sharp drop (and you know, it often is), dig in with your fingertips and cling. Damn it, laugh. Don't make right now a reason to be unhappy if it doesn't have to be.
You can strive for things to get better and you can look for the best and you can guard yourself without rejecting right now as not being enough. This is all we have. This moment. Enjoy it. Don't mourn life or treat it like an enemy to defeat. Enjoy as much of it as you can, and try to help others do the same when you have the chance.
*juvenile snicker
**for this muffler!
*** unless you asked where to find the catalog/internet only merchandise, in which case you totally deserved it.
I've talked before about how my retail job saved my life. I want to expand on it a little more in a specific way.
Dealing with horrible customers is a great way to learn to take life less seriously. To explain this, let me tell you about two large categories of horrible customers. These are the awful people who often made the job painful or unpleasant, and after a while of working in retail, it's easy to spot these types.
Type 1: You just drowned all my puppies.
There are people for whom every disappointment is the most painful thing ever. It's just the worst, they didn't know life could be this bad, and they may just never recover.
For some of these people, it is a near life-ended tragedy to learn that the taupe curtains are out of stock and they'll either have to go to another store to get them or fill out a back order card and wait. Maybe they'll even have to buy spruce instead. They'd put so much effort into planning this, they'd thought so much about it all, they couldn't possible wait or go somewhere else. The curtains were supposed to be here and they just don't understand why they aren't.
These people walk around all the time looking confused and sad and wounded. They thought life was going to be flowers and bunnies and sunshine all the time, and when you, as a salesperson, fail to provide said flowers and bunnies and sunshine, it's because you hate them, and it's entirely possible that they suspect, in their sad little hearts, that they deserve it. Life is bad and if they can't get their rug to match their drapes*, life will be meaningless and empty forever and they just had hoped that they could get the ivory instead of the woodash and was it going to match and were they doing this wrong and would it work? They look so concerned and so sad and it takes them a moment to understand anything contrary to their expectations (if they are traveling in a pack of people who are likewise suffering from drowned puppy syndrome, they may have to consult with each other for several minutes before the concepts of No penetrates the collective consciousness). This is so hard for them, so very very very hard.
On one hand, you want to put a blanket over their shoulders and give them a hug and a tell them it really will be okay. Then, when you've been there more than a week and dealt with more than three of them, you kinda want to kill them a little.
Because really, we're talking about drapes here. It isn't worth looking like life might no longer be worth living because you have to wait or do something other than what you wanted to do, and I swear, none of the sales staff is trying to deny the products to you individually. We do not drown puppies. Well, not during working hours.
Type 2: Suspicious, Cheap, and Stupid
Disclaimer: I was married to one of these.
Okay, there isn't a cute term for these people, merely a descriptive one. They have the deadly combination of three traits: Suspicious, Cheap, and Stupid. Any one of these traits by themselves are bad, but add them together and you'll have a customer that will have you longing for the right to do inappropriate things to them with the tape gun in under five minutes. You'll be fondling letter opener and eying their nostrils with longing in ten.
They're suspicious. They're convinced there's some secret methods or hidden procedures that the general public isn't aware of. Come on, there's some kind of alternate way to go about all of this, isn't there? Also, you, as the salesperson, are plotting against them, trying to trick them, trying to con them, if you deny them access to these magic sales methods.
They're cheap. There's no way the price on the item is the real price! That's too much. Likewise, the shipping fees are outrageous, no one whould pay that! This stuff isn't worth that much money. The thing that costs more isn't really any better than the less expensive things, so why should they pay the higher price rather than the lower one?
Finally, they're stupid. Stupid is pretty much self-explanatory.
The first two together are bad enough, because it gives you a customer who wants to have everything explained in detail (to make sure you aren't hiding anything and to give them a chance to spot the loopholes), and will try to argue down the price, argue around the fees, bully you into giving them a special deal... but if they're reasonably intelligent, they might eventually concede that they have to do the same stuff as everyone else. Suspicious and cheap alone are just annoying. It means you just have to be firm (and sometimes mention that you don't work on commission and therefore really don't give a damn what they buy, because you're getting the same hourly salary regardless).
But stupid, suspicious, and cheap is a deadly combination. If they're stupid, they're more likely to be confused about how things like delivery fees or special order work. If they're also suspicious and cheap, they'll be convinced that you are trying to trick them. Because they're suspicious, they're convinced that everything that doesn't make inherent sense to them is a plot against them, meant to deceive them, whereas in truth, the reason things don't make sense is because they're fucking troglodytes who have to be restrained from gnawing on the hardwood to keep their incisors down. If they're cheap, they don't want to pay money for stuff, and because they're also suspicious and stupid, they regard the salestaff as the enemy what is out to trick them out of their shiny shiny money. Efforts on your part to explain standards and procedures are taken as further evidence that you are trying to deceive them and they must be on their toes at every moment to counter your efforts.
They are exhausting. They will latch onto you and suck the life out of you, getting more and more belligerent as you, quite possibly one of Them or working for The Man or something like that, continue to fail at bowing to their wishes, acknowledging their superior bartering skills, incontrovertible logic, or petulant whiny-assed demands. You are stopping them from their great triumph, and you are out to get them and have probably been trained at ways to fool the customer or quite possibly taken the job just because you don't like people. They will continue to try to countermand your tricks and deceptions, and this will be a triumph and victory that makes them feel manly (or womanly) and victorious. They will show you that they aren't going to be fooled and they aren't going to pay a lot** and you'd better not try anything smart with them. They are suspicious of smart, because it is so unfamiliar.
You get the idea.
Conclusions:
So, having now bitched about the walking wounded and the growling gollums, let me tell you why I count my years working with them as an overall positive experience.
It's very simple: Working with these people convinced me that spending life walking around unhappy was a fucking waste.
Seriously, why would you want to spend all your life with the belief that not getting what you want is either a tragedy or an attack on you? If you get everything you want in life, your life is boring. Most of life is about what you do when it didn't go as planned. Life is a series of successive approximations. You try something, you see what happens, you try again with more knowledge. The journey is all we have. You try to enjoy it, learn as you go, and have compassion on other folks who are making the journey.
Can you imagine how much work it must be, spending all day defending yourself against losses, convinced that everyone is out to get you, that this is some kind of contest to see who gets things most perfect and just right and at the best price?
Here's the bad news: even if you get it ALL, you still die at the end. There's no prize for best performance, for getting one over on the authority (and let me tell you, getting one over on a salesgirl at a store in the mall? Not getting you a golden crown and oral sex any time soon). The people who are unable to provide you with everything you want, when you want it are not doing it out of malicious glee. The simple fact is that life sometimes sucks and you do not get what you want.
That is no reason to mourn existence.
And if you fight against life, life will win. You're mortal, the rest of the universe always wins in the end.
And yes, you know what, sometimes it IS unfair and it DOES suck and things aren't going the way you want despite all your learning and plans and hopes.
But you know what? That doesn't make it okay to make it worse for other people. Life stinks for ALL of us at some point. Suffering is not a finite commodity; you will not have less for making someone else have more. There's an infinite supply to go around. It breeds the more you feed it.
There are circumstances under which no reasonable person could be expected to be happy. If you are actively on fire, there's reason to complain. If your house was washed away in a flood, or their are parasites attacking your intestines, or someone really DID drown all your puppies, then you have reason to be unhappy. No one would expect you to be patient and see things from the other person's point of view in those situations.
And there are times when the store folk aren't being helpful. If the sales staff put a plastic bag over your head and taped off the oxygen supply, then chances are that their behavior can fairly be judged as a wee bit malicious***.
Likewise, there are people whose personal biochemistry makes it difficult for them to be happy under normal circumstances. I have enough friends who have struggled with various mood disorders enough to know that sometimes it's a struggle to function, let alone be something so abstract as happy. This makes everything harder, including, sometimes, having patience and perspective when things do not go as they'd hoped.
That said, the vast majority of walking wounded and the suspicious, cheap & stupid people had none of these problems. They were looking for reasons to be unhappy and they see life as a contest in which they fear losing.
Don't be like them. Don't. It's a waste and life is so much better than that. You can't make life perfect, but at least you can make an effort not to make it worse for others. You can love it in its broken beauty.
And if there's someone in your life who IS trying to share their misery with you, you don't have to accept it. One thing I learned about even the worst customers: eventually they WILL leave the store. You don't have to be unhappy about them after that. They leave, you move on. The faster you can get the first part to occur, the sooner you can get to the second. More importantly, while you should do your best to fulfill your duties while they're there, you are not ultimately responsible for their state of being. They came in that way, you do your best, and if you're really lucky, they'll leave happier. Regardless, they'll leave. There's no reason to offer to walk them to their car so they can continue to make your life difficult.
So that's my last big insight from years in retail. A lot of people are unhappy over things that really don't matter and they want to share it. There's no reason to take it personally, and there's no reason to encourage them.
Be happy.
Seriously. Whenever you can, every moment that you can cram a little more joy in life, every little bright glimmer you can find hiding somewhere, fallen into a crack while everything else was falling apart, take it. Enjoy it. If you have to cling to happiness like it's the thin ledge over a sharp drop (and you know, it often is), dig in with your fingertips and cling. Damn it, laugh. Don't make right now a reason to be unhappy if it doesn't have to be.
You can strive for things to get better and you can look for the best and you can guard yourself without rejecting right now as not being enough. This is all we have. This moment. Enjoy it. Don't mourn life or treat it like an enemy to defeat. Enjoy as much of it as you can, and try to help others do the same when you have the chance.
*juvenile snicker
**for this muffler!
*** unless you asked where to find the catalog/internet only merchandise, in which case you totally deserved it.