Introduction to Retail Therapy
I've been out of retail for five years now, so let's look back at the crazy things I've witnessed along the way.
Before we get into the stuff that I wanted to talk about last week, I think it’s important to share some vital news that really doesn’t make that much of a difference, but is something of a milestone.
I took my first COVID-19 test this week—yesterday, actually—and it turned out negative.
This is a relief for a whole host of reasons, chief among that COVID-19 is still fucking dangerous, but also because it means we didn’t have to pull Benji out of daycare as a precaution. Benji started developing a head cold last Tuesday, which meant it was pretty much a given that either I or Erin would develop cold-like symptoms shortly thereafter.
True to form, I got a raging sore throat last Wednesday night. It got worse on Friday before abating somewhat on Saturday, only to be replaced by a super snotty nose and burning sensations every time I felt like sneezing—so, uh, every five minutes or so.
I was fine with this until yesterday, when whatever the hell kind of cold it was started giving me some weird tightness in my chest. That, combined with regular stress from not getting shit done last week at my job, gave me more anxiety. So I ended up going over to a rapid testing lab just down the road yesterday afternoon, getting swabbed, and I knew my results within the hour. Pretty nifty, I guess.
The test itself was pretty painless, aside from the fact that my left nostril straight-up burned for a half hour after it was swabbed. I asked the lady doing the test if she was about to ruin my day and she laughed. I’d imagine she probably deals with a lot of very nervous people, so I tried to lighten the mood a little bit despite the fact that she shoved what appeared to be a very long pipe cleaner up my nose.
Anyway, my stuffy nose is pretty much almost gone this evening, so I guess the whole test thing was an unnecessary—if not soothing—endeavor.
Even though I was relieved I don’t have COVID-19, I’m still really stressed out because I have a ton of things on my plate and also because I’m worried about, you know, the collapse of the American democratic republic.
All the news that’s been coming out since Wednesday has done nothing to really alleviate those fears, and I’ve been pin-balling around trying to find the right kind of music to keep me focused and zoned in. I’ll try anything at this rate, which is how I ended up with this YouTube tab open almost all day:
I don’t really like having YouTube open to listen to music because I use Safari for my personal browsing just to keep histories separate and having two browsers open is really tempting for me to constantly get distracted, but in this case it worked out.
Anyway, you’re not here to read about me getting sick or to delve into the benefits of mainlining music from video games that are at least 30 years old. You’re here to read the introduction to my stories about life in retail. Let’s get to it.
The funny thing about working in retail is how much it can feel like both a dead end and an opportunity.
Before I got my start in digital marketing, I spent a decade in retail for a variety of companies and industries, from video stores to fast fashion to accessories and office supplies. It was a relatively decent career for a while, until it wasn’t. And after ten years of sales, merchandising, and customer service, I was ready for something else.
I first started working in retail in 2005. As a fresh-faced high school senior in love with movies and with designs on attending film school, I picked up a part time job at a local video store near my hometown. It paid minimum wage ($5.15 at the time), but it afforded me the opportunity to do homework and take home free movies at the end of my shift. I knew it wouldn’t be a forever-type thing, nor did I plan on working at the store during summers home from college. At the time, however, it was a dream come true.
Dreams, however, can often be weird as hell. No job exists in a vacuum. Retail jobs are centered around encounters with the general public, and if there’s one truth about retail, it’s that interactions with the general public can be bizarre. Working in video stores—as I discovered at Movie Madness and later on in my second tenure as a video store clerk for now defunct video store chain Family Video—puts you in front of a lot of really strange people.
Everyone has their quirks, whether it’s an unhealthy obsession with Michael Myers of Halloween fame or a penchant for never, ever returning movies and then demanding that their late fees are canceled. There’s a whole host of tales and anecdotes that come from my time slinging VHS tapes and DVDs. Some of them are hilarious, some are horrifying, and still others are a combination of both horror and hilarity.
From after-hours drinking to late night unpaid cleaning sessions to a customer who once opened the door and yelled, “You got my movies!?”, I don’t think I’d really change much*.
*That is a lie. I would change a lot.
Fashion retail’s got its own set of issues, from low pay to backbreaking work, and that doesn’t even factor in the ethics of production. If you’ve never spent hours folding a table full of sweaters only to have one shopper completely destroy a display while ignoring your efforts to help pull the size they need, you are...not missing out on much, actually. But it’s an experience everyone should have at least once.
The other thing about working at the mall is that it’s really easy to move up, especially in a place like Kansas City where some stores can have up to four or five locations across the metro and turnover is absurdly high. People get burnt out on missing the holidays every single year and not having set schedules, so if you’re willing to forego the niceties of consistency and a good work life balance, you can really kiss the right asses and make yourself indispensable.
At least that’s what I did, working for fast fashion chain Express in 2010 right out of college. By the time the following summer rolled around, I’d been promoted three times. The year after that, I’d been promoted one more time and was more or less running my own store (into the ground) at nearby Independence Center, a mall where—just months earlier—someone had been shot. By the time another opportunity came my way, my 45-minute daily one-way commute and six-day-workweeks had worn me down into an unlikeable mess. That job—with fashion accessory brand Fossil—lasted three years before total burnout hit and I ended up walking away at the behest of my district manager (I was fired for failing to improve performance, which is honestly probably one of the best things that’s ever happened to me).
There is no ethical consumption in capitalism, and more often than not there’s no ethical behavior in sales. Every store has its own unique lingua franca, a dialect of terms and considerations tailored to crafting a customer experience unlike what you’d find in any other store—except that it is precisely like the experience you’d get at the place next door or down the hall. What’s more, every retail company operates within the same parameters, seeking out the same metrics and KPIs—that’s key performance indicators—with a different emphasis depending on the store’s clientele or priorities.
All of that is to say: working in retail—whether it’s at a video store, clothing store, selling watches, printers, or mundane office supplies—does not differ all that much from one place to the next. Product is product. Management is management. And people are, of course, people. Whether it’s dealing with deal-hungry Black Friday shoppers at 3 a.m. or dealing with the unsubtle racism of referring to shoplifters by a specific term, these events need retelling if only for the sheer absurdity of it all.
So what do we do with all this? This collection of experiences dealing with the general public, selling suits and dresses and getting cussed at over late fees and missing movies?
In my case, it’s time to share some of those experiences; to explore what it means to have lived a life in retail sales and to examine what it means, not just as someone who cratered a promising, successful retail career at the age of 29 but as a person who parlayed those experiences and learned from the failures of it all and now develops content strategy for multi-million dollar companies.
It’s also an opportunity to share some really funny shit, which—let’s be honest—is probably the most important reason to relive this period in my life.
Stay tuned for future installments.
Required Reading
I came up with this list of recommendations before everything went to shit last Wednesday but I still want to share them because I think it’s really important to look at things that aren’t a constant reminder that sometimes your family members are fascist apologists who just shrug when their husbands call President Obama a “sand coon,” and then say they don’t teach their kids to hate, but I’m not bitter or anything.
I read this piece by Hanna Brooks Olsen a few days ago titled Doing the Right Thing Feels Awful and it’s a perfect summation of how I feel when I see photos on Instagram of people having parties or going to happy hours or on vacations or literally doing any of the things that public health officials have asked us not to do during the viral pandemic.
Owing to the recalibration of accounts I follow on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, I’ve been getting a lot of different stuff in my feeds lately. If there’s one thing to say about their algorithms, it’s that if you show the slightest interest in a concept, person, or idea, they will absolutely hammer your ass to death with examples of it. I know this to be true because I followed one account specifically because I like to see how people have their desks and workspaces laid out, and these days that’s a good 35% of what makes its way into my recommendations. That and professional wrestlers, anyway.
But one of the best accounts I’ve started following this week is poetryisnotaluxury on Instagram. One of the things I’d really like to work on in 2021 is to increase my diet of poems, mainly because it’s not a form of writing that I’m all that familiar with or, truth be told, interested in practicing. I dabbled in it in college, and a lot of my poems are bad in the same way that Thomas Hardy’s are bad.
But even if I’m not great at it and sometimes don’t necessarily spend too much time digesting a poem, this account provides a pretty good selection of poetry to read both in their regular posts and their stories. One that stuck with me as recently as a few days ago:
This, in combination with the hefty volume of poems by Louise Glück that sits on my nightstand, is doing wonders for my consumption of poetry. If you haven’t read anything of hers, look into it. You’ll quickly discover why she won the Nobel Prize in Literature last year. But don’t take my word for it. Listen to MEL Magazine’s Miles Klee:
It’s my belief that many who won’t pick up a book of poetry assume the medium doesn’t belong to them. It’s for someone else, a different kind of mind. I just don’t get it —this is a common refrain. But I dispute that there is anything to “get.” A poem isn’t a puzzle unless you approach it as one; the best poems resist synopsis because they preserve a feeling in its highest state, above ordinary language. It’s a thoughtform that can’t be put into words, so the words bend around it. Glück, for one, moves from Greek mythology to the specific flowers of a garden, and I can’t necessarily keep up with her allusions, yet I’m carried by the mood, the flow, the shape of her lyric. When you let go of the drive to understand, you’re free to drift in consciousness.
If you’re not following Klee on Twitter, I also recommend doing that. He’s hilarious, vulgar, and—best of all—really goddamn insightful.
Final Thought(s)
Given that tonight, as I’m writing this, I’m reading reports that the Capitol Police are just shitting and pissing the bed repeatedly and letting GOP members of Congress just walk around metal detectors ostensibly set up for the safety of everyone in the chamber, I’m not feeling really that confident that we’ll get through next week’s inauguration without some kind of catastrophe.
I worry daily about the safety and security of our nation and also what kind of world my kid will grow up in, especially given the outright apocalyptic outlook that so many people have about trying to hasten the end of the world.
Anyway, that’s all I’ve got. Happy Wednesday!
Enjoy the rest of your week. Subscribe and share, yeah?