Nov
19

9 Facts About Retail Workers You Should Know Before You Shop On Black Friday

Category: Chistmas time, Life as a Cashier, Retail Stories Tags: black friday, cashier life, CASHIER PROBLEMS Leave a Comment

Employee Of The Month

1. If you’re shopping, people are working. In order for the store to be open and you to be able to shop, the store has to be staffed. This means that when you choose to shop on “black Thursday” you are choosing for people to work on Thanksgiving instead of spending the day with their families. Stores set their hours to be competitive based on demand. If there’s no demand, there’s no hours that day.

2. The cashier is not in charge of store policy. You can give us as much feedback as you want to, but even if we turn around and tell our manager, it’s extremely unlikely that your advice is making it all the way up to corporate. The best thing you can do if you want to be heard is to go online and find the company’s “contact us” section on the website and leave your feedback there. I get it, cashiers and all the other retail workers are your contacts, they are the ones you interact with so it makes sense to talk to them, but they are generally powerless to really help you with a big issue.

3. We actually like people. It’s absolutely miserable to work in customer service if you actually hate people, so misanthropes don’t last long. Depending on where you’re shopping, most of the staff probably really likes helping people and being cheery and customer-service-y. This is especially true of smaller and speciality stores. When I worked at a makeup counter, for instance, everyone I worked with loved working there for the most part. Don’t be intimidated to ask these kinds of people for lots of help, I loved sharing my wisdom and experience with the brand, giving little tips, and genuinely helping people find products they would love.
4. No one is more angry about a misleading coupon than than a retail worker. It’s very frustrating to get to a store, ready to make your purchase, and to be told that for some reason, you can’t. Trust me, your cashier is just as frustrated as you are because you are probably the hundredth person this coupon has frustrated and they have had to talk off the ledge. We’re in solidarity with you, we had these kinds of situations, and believe me that behind the scenes we’re giving as much feedback as possible about how unhelpful it is when you can’t get the deal you think you can get.

5. We aren’t paid well enough to deal with customers screaming at us. No one is, except maybe a therapist. Yell at her if you must.

6. If you’re at a store that offers free gift-wrapping, the workers are probably happy to gift-wrap for you, but if there are other customers in line, please be patient. We need to get those customers on their way before we take a break to wrap for you. This is a big time (and money) saver for you, so relax and browse while the line gets taken care of.

7. If we say “happy holidays” instead of “merry Christmas” please don’t make it into a big political thing. It’s not political, we’re just trying to be nice. In order to be nice you probably shouldn’t run the risk of offending people. Happy holidays is more inclusive than “merry Christmas”, that’s all it is.

8. Please don’t tell us how much you love the holiday music we’re playing. Holiday retail is where Christmas music loving people go to die. No matter how much we once enjoyed it, we no longer do through overexposure, and remembering how much other people love it hurts our hearts.

9. People respond to the moods and social cues of others. If you are consistently complaining about your “crappy retail experiences” the common denominator in all those situations is you. Perhaps it’s your own bad attitude that’s facilitating these experiences. Try being nice, even if you don’t mean it, and see how your service changes.

Sourced from thoughtcatalog.com

Nov
14

By IHWIR Admin

Black Friday In Canada Means 1 Million People Calling In Sick

Category: Chistmas time, Retail Articles Tags: black friday, canada, sick, working in retail during the holidays Leave a Comment

BLACK FRIDAY

Black Friday and Cyber Monday may be new shopping traditions in Canada, but shoppers are taking to it fast.

So fast, in fact, that some 1 million Canadians will call in sick on either Black Friday or Cyber Monday in order to go shopping, according to a new survey from IPG Mediabrands.

Canadians are also planning to take a total of 4.1 million vacation days around the weekend that coincides with U.S. Thanksgiving. In all, 2.8 million people will be off work on Black Friday, and 1.3 million people will be off work on Cyber Monday, the survey estimates.

That’s bad news for most employers but good news for retailers, who can expect to see $13.4 billion in sales on the two days ($6.8 billion on Black Friday and $6.6 billion on Cyber Monday).

That could actually more than offset the cost of the lost work days. A Conference Board of Canada report looking at 2012 found absenteeism costs Canada’s economy about $16.6 billion, and that’s for an entire year.

Nearly half — 49 per cent — of respondents said they planned to shop on either Black Friday or Cyber Monday.

“Black Friday and Cyber Monday are making Boxing Day less relevant,” Chris Herlihey, vice-president of research at IPG, said in a statement. “And it may feel more like ‘Slack Friday’ to many employers year after year.”

Seventy-five per cent of respondents in the survey agreed Boxing Day is becoming a less relevant holiday shopping event.

Among other things, the survey found 48 per cent of shoppers plan to avoid retailers who have had publicized data breaches (take note, Target and Home Depot) and more than a third of Canadians had already started some part of their holiday shopping by the end of October.

Despite a sinking loonie, cross-border shopping will continue to be a problem for Canadian retailers, the survey found, with 24 per cent of Black Friday shoppers planning to look for deals south of the border.

Canadians are expected to spend $1.6 billion at U.S. retailers on Black Friday, but Cyber Monday, with its online deals, could be the bigger haul. The survey estimates Canadians could spend up to $3.4 billion at U.S. websites that day.

“Canadian retailers must also improve their online shopping platforms or more and more money will be sucked out of the Canadian economy,” said Joseph McConellogue, managing director at Reprise, in a statement.

Sourced from thehuffingtonpost.com

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.