Dec
28

Things you shouldnt say to a retail worker

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Things you shouldn’t say to a retail worker

With Christmas upon us, it’s important to remember to be charitable and to think about those less fortunate. I’m speaking of course about retail workers. As a retail worker myself, I can describe first-hand the swath of destruction that shoppers can leave in their wake. I can tell you of the wreckage that can only be found in the stalls of a dressing room after closing on a busy December night. I can testify to the chaos left behind on the toy shelves in a mall store after business on a Saturday ‘coupon’ day.
Many people have seen this carnage but few recognize the workers trying to rebuild after the barrage of customers have ravaged the store. With a look of desperation and a forced smile just barely hanging to their faces as they try to remember their training and corporate mission statement. It’s tragic. Sure we clean the store but what we really want to do is run through the store screaming ‘Clean up after yourselves!!!!’ So this year, please be kind to retail workers by remembering that there are some things you should never say to a retail worker. Really you shouldn’t say anything, I mean we all want to pet the panda bears in the zoo but we also want to keep both of our hands too. Hear are more typical phrases to avoid specifically though.

‘You’re really good at your job!’ What you’re saying might be very nice but what we’re hearing is ‘You will be in retail forever and ever and ever and ever. There is no escape.’
‘Have a nice day.’ There are no nice days in retail in December. Only moderately less crappy ones
‘Are you sure you don’t have any of those?’ Pandas look so nice eating their bamboo stalks. Why would you want to take the bamboo away and poke them with it? 99% of the time, when a clerk says that they’re out of something, it’s because they’ve been asked a dozen times already and the 1% remainder is us being too lazy to look. You pleading about little Timmy not getting his super cool toy won’t change that. In fact, it will make us start to hope little Timmy never gets it and eats so many candy canes on Christmas morning that he vomits on his sister.
‘Why can’t I use this coupon with this one?’ If you ask this question enough times to the same cashier and look closely at his/her eyes, you can see a tiny flicker. This is a little pinprick window into hell as it tries to escape through the portal that only exists inside retail workers.
‘You don’t carry those? You used to carry those!’ We did? Well you’re in luck because we do sell time machines so you can go back to when we DID carry those!
‘Merry Christmas!’ If you’re being sincere in wishing that our Christmas is a joyous one, fine but if this is your way of declaring your side in the ‘War on Christmas’ then we really don’t want to hear it. We don’t care if our corporation has a policy of saying ‘Happy Holidays’, we just want to earn our $8 an hour and take our shoes off of our throbbing feet.
‘Smile!’ Go to hell.

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Dec
21

By IHWIR Admin

Well, black Friday turned into an even blacker Saturday

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So, for those of us that worked yesterday, I think you will agree it officially peaked for Christmas 2013 The queues were constant, the fills were ringing, and every other customer wanted to complain about how busy it was and how little staff we had in store. It ended with a 10pm finish, closely followed by bed. As it was the final payday for a lot of people yesterday, I thought Friday would be the one day we would see total mayhem followed by a gradual decline into Christmas eve. Oh my god was i wrong! Saturday was the busiest shift I have ever done in my retail career!!!!! It was pure, unadulterated, apocalyptic madness. Not looking forward to sunday one bit. Christmas has come late this year in the retail world, but he it came with a bump. Anyone agree?

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Dec
19

By IHWIR Admin

Black Friday

Category: Retail Stories Tags: black friday, retail at christmas Leave a Comment

It is upon us!!! Are we all looking forward to it???

Brown Friday: Why do people poop in retail stores?

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Unless you’ve worked in retail, you’ve probably never heard of it. If you have worked in retail, then you know that sometimes, if you will, shit gets real. For some unfathomable reason, people poop in retail clothing stores, particularly in fitting rooms and inside the circular clothing racks called “rounders,” but other times they’ll just do it in a corner or, perversely, on the floor right next to the toilet.

As a former employee of Gap, Inc. and Borders Books, this reporter can confirm that the phenomenon exists. With depressing frequency, often during the busiest and most hectic times of the year — Black Friday weekend and the weeks before Christmas — sales employees or managers will open a fitting room door, or brush aside a pile of clothes to find that some shopper, large or small, has defecated and left the results behind.

Amanda Atkinson of Athens, Georgia worked in retail for nine holiday seasons as an Old Navy sales associate. She found messes in fitting rooms and in the store’s public restrooms, some of which were truly staggering.

“Obviously you had the ones in the bathroom,” she said, where people would miss the toilet entirely, clog the toilets and walk away, “or they would go out of their way to smear their poop on the walls.”

The worst thing she said she encountered was on the Saturday night of one Black Friday weekend. “There were clothes on the ground everywhere” in one of the store’s “Clearance” areas. Hundreds, if not thousands of shoppers had come through, many trying on items right in the section and then just flinging them to the floor.

“There was a pile of clothes that, like, three people could have slept on, it was so big,” she said. As she dug deeper into the pile, the first thing that hit her was the smell.

“Somebody had gone out of their way to stuff into the very center of the pile, not the bottom, mind you, but the dead center of the pile, a shitty diaper,” she said. “To the point that we couldn’t do anything with the clothes, we had to throw it all out. We couldn’t even go through the clothes and see what we were throwing out because it was just too much of a biohazard. We just threw it all in trash bags and took it outside.”

Alison, who works at an independent bookstore in Lexington, Kentucky, declined to give her last name, but told of an event that occurred in her store, recently, in which an older gentleman “who bought no fewer than ten copies of Shit My Dad Says — and not at the same time,” disappeared into the store bathroom, then departed without her knowing.

“So about ten minutes later, I go back there to check things out,” she said, “Bathroom’s empty, but there’s an odor, for sure. I walk in and I look in the toilet, and it’s completely clean.”

Then, she looked down.

“And all of a sudden I realized there was shit all over the floor. Not only did the guy shit on the floor, but he stepped in it and tracked it through as he left,” she said.

She and her manager tackled the mess. They haven’t seen the customer since.

Raw Story contacted psychologist Jeanne Dugas to find out if perhaps this phenomenon is among the panoply of recognized human fetishes, if maybe the desire to shit undetected in a public place is akin to the thrill that some people get from having sex in a location where they might get caught. In fact, it was the first time she had ever heard of the practice.

“They do what?” she asked. “Really?”

When asked if there might be a particular psychological motivation involved, Dugas replied, “I tell you, I’m at a loss. A, I’ve never heard of that before and B, Holy cow!”

She said that the most charitable explanation she could offer would be that they were unable to make it to the rest room in time to get back for a particular sale item, or maybe they just weren’t up to the fight through the throng of holiday shoppers. To her, however, the acts sound more like aggression.

“I mean, it is, literally, ‘dumping’ on the store,” she said.

“Really, though?” she asked, still grappling with the notion. “People really do that? It’s, like, a thing?”

Indeed it is, and for thousands of retail workers across the country and perhaps around the world, it’s just one more element of the abiding joy that is the holiday sales season. If it’s not the top of the list, then it’s certainly there at Number 2.

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