When people complain about my recent (joyful) breakup with yet another retail employer, I don’t argue with them. But I try to explain. Everyone is understaffed and over-worked. They expect Mensa level application, Atlas force effort, and Roman fealty. And at the bargain basement price you thing they are passing on to you.
I don’t make excuses for bad workers, for people who don’t care to learn their job, or general apathy that is at best negligent and at worst prosecutable.
I blame the culture we’ve instilled into the concept of Retail.
Not just the “customer is always right” bullshit, or even “buyer beware.” Somehow, the business mentality of 80/20 has made Retail life insufferable.
For those not familiar with the 80/20, it’s called the Pareto Principle, or the Law of the Vital Few, which states approximately 80% of effects come from 20% of the causes. Business…gurus, I can’t think of a better word for how they treat business, like a new-age religion, actually call the 80/20 Rule a way of life, a belief. Not the statistic that it is. Applied on the ground level, from a Retail Grunt’s position, it translates into “Give This Screaming Bitch Whatever She Wants.” This is done for many reasons. To stop the screaming, much like a little child. To make the customer happy, if it’s possible (please keep in mind that some people enter a retail establishment to buy unhappiness the same way people like to haggle for cars). There is the concept of over-compensation. Which has a jingle type word, a buzz word, that reeks of paperback shyster psychology. Whatever it is called, it is the idea that giving a customer too much will make them feel like they owe the business their patronage. So, 80% of the business’ problems are created by 20% of the customers, and making them over happy is the only way to avoid any trouble whatsoever.
And customers know this. Instead of getting a problem fixed, or a right wronged, most retail interactions have become a used car lot sales haggle to keep the customer from trying to get over and get more than you, an employee, are allowed to give.
This obviously is not everyone. But I’ve got something to say about the 80% soon enough.
Now, this 20% will say and do anything. I haven’t decided if they don’t think about employees as humans out of conditioning, or if it’s some sort of subconscious let-go that they know it’s basically an adult Showbiz ball-pit and they can get what they want, quite literally.
The 80% are comprised of people who just like to look down on you. Throw their money on the counter like you’re a fucking whore. Tell you “I can tell how much you hate your job, it’s quite apparent.” Let their kids piss on the floor. The theft alone is staggering. And of all the more examples I could go into, this part lead to this: you have to take it.
In a retail job, you are at the bottom of the food chain. One “you’re fired” away from homelessness, maybe two steps away from hanging out with Homeless Jesus on the street corner. The customer may wield this knowledge like a child with a hammer.
But it’s your bosses that know they hold your marionette strings.
While all that bullshit, bullying, pandering, bowing and scraping, ass-sucking, and general fur smoothing happens on the public side of the counter, no one thinks about what happens on the business side of the counter.
I’ve recently been liberated from a company that doesn’t hire security, even though it’s standard in their certain sector of Retail. Product is allowed to expire, because there simply isn’t enough hands to rotate product. If you get a good boss, you are damned lucky. Because a bad boss will ruin the business, put you in a foul mood, and generally be a hardass about what they will or won’t let you do to get the interaction completed.
Here’s something that’s actually happened. A District Manager came in. I thought we sprayed for those, but we must have skipped the Orkin Man’s appointment.
I was going through a lot of personal shit. My best friend was going through a lot of personal shit that necessitated my desire to send flowers to a minor’s funeral. Relation were in town, and I was too ashamed for them to see how tiny my apartment is. So, not a year and a half after shit I have to still deal with, I had to dodge family, buy funeral flowers, and then I got to go to work to be yelled at by addicts, dodge physical assault of vagrants, hope this is the day we don’t get robbed. And the District Manager said to me, “you need to smile more.”
She had a trainee with her. Or someone, I don’t know who. I’m looking at this fucking manager, thinking about all this shit that is none of her business that’s going on in my life. Her roadie got it. The look on my face made a very concerned look on hers. I have a feeling if she had her say, the conversation would have gone differently. But it wasn’t a conversation. This manager spent the whole time talking. It was a one-sided speechifying event.
Not once did anyone ask why I wasn’t smiling, if unhappiness like reads on the face like that, it has a good reason to be there. No one cared.
We work with an epileptic. I didn’t know it for the longest time. One day, out of the corner of my eye, I saw her doing what I could only describe as an amateur pirouette. My honest first thought was, “wow, I’ve never seen her that joyful before.” And went about my business. Not five seconds later, the gossip train rolled right into my station. Watching, no one said anything to her. Just talked about her. After she left for the day, I said as loud as I could, “You know, if I happen to come to work with no pants and tell you my father is Sergeant Pepper, PLEASE ask me if I’m okay. You have my permission.”
Oh, yeah, this happened in a pharmacy. Where a Doctorate holder, two to four kids in school to be nurses, and people who have worked pharmacy for years decided to gossip instead of ask if their comrade with a medical condition is okay. The whole thing made me fucking sick. If I had known she had a small (rather elegant looking, I’ll give her that) episode, I would have just said, “you okay?” and she could have decided to take a break or communicate she was fine. But at least someone would have fucking cared.
So Retail allows you no personal identity. The demands corporations make are increasingly dehumanizing, and it effects the attitudes of those in minor positions of authority, and that’s how you get that poor, miserable, broken and unfeeling person behind that counter that could care less if you got your Vess soda on sale or not.
Food for Thought.
