Retail Brushes With Greatness:Sandra Day O'Connor

A lot of semi-famous people wade their way through my toy store while I worked there. I say semi, because with my interest in politics and music, they were more famous to me than anyone else I worked with other than my boss.

The person I was most (silently) star struck with on the political side of things was Sandra Day ‘O Connor, a genuine historical figure as the first female Supreme Court Justice. She came in a couple times where I helped her as her sales person and she was always nice- like most famous people at the toy store. She always went out of her way to tell me how nice I was and how it made shopping there such a pleasant experience

But my favorite Justice O’Connor story happened one time she was shopping there my first holiday season on my day off, but my boss told me about this exchange between her and Lynn, our personable seasonal wrapper, who could have a conversation with a lamp post. It began as Lynn-who had no idea who she was talking to- asked her some questions as she wrapped for her.
“So, are you from around here?”
“No, I’m from Arizona.”
“Are you here visiting grand kids, family?”
“No, for work.”
“Really? What kind of work?”
“I’m a judge.”
“Cool, are you a district court judge, a trial judge?”
“No, I’m a little higher up.”

What's In A Check?

This is a story reprinted from one that had been printed at retailsucks.com

I used to work behind the counter at a convenience store in Delmar, Maryland. Regardless of where I've worked, people put a lot of their ego in a check, forgetting that checks are a relic of a more trusting time. This was especially true there; if I literally hesitated a split second taking someone's check, they'd go nuts.
"It's good!" because people are SO honest when they give you a bad check.
One guy asked me if I would cash his bedridden sister’s child support check. I said that she would have to come in. He wasn’t having it. “She can’t get out of bed!”



I apologized, explaining that we weren’t a bank when I noticed that what he had was a check stub that was endorsed like it was a check.
“Is that the check?”, I asked, pointing at the stub.
“Yeah!”
“That’s a check stub.”
“No, that’s a check . It’s got her name and the amount.”
“So does a check stub, that’s not signed.”
He huffed his way out of the store. The next customer was shaking his head during this whole exchange. I thought it was because of the stupidity of the situation, but it turns out he knew him. He told me he was crackhead that recently tried to sell him a wornout carburator as new.
I said, “He was trying to cash his sister’s child support check stub.”
He said, “He doesn’t even have a sister."

The Bad Vibe Bomb

This is from my gadget store days.

There was a body fat analyzer that we sold that was really more of a bad vibe bomb. I would demonstrate by inputting in the person’s vital statistics that the machine would balance with the body mass information gained by the electrodes they’d grab with both hand straight out in front of them. I press start and walk quickly in a safe direction because I knew it was about to blow. Women especially were never satisfied with what the machine told them, the number was literally never low enough. Older ladies would want to use it and I tried to warn them that it may register much higher than it is- I didn't tell them that it was because the machine often confuses post-menopausal softer bones with body fat- and they'd practically faint when it came up 75 per cent body fat. One young woman freaked because the machine told her she had 8 percent body fat.
I tried to put it in perspective for her,”You know, that’s 4 percent lower than the lowest normal range of body fat.”
This helped nothing, “But my boyfriend is six percent.”
I continued my futile attempt at the facts, ” But, women naturally have more body fat, anyway.”
She asked,“Why, because of our tits and hips and ass?,” listing them just like these were bad things.
“You're damn right.”

Once again the petty truth was helpless against the powerful feminine self doubt. This would hardly be the last time I would try and fail to fight this.

When ever a certain technology was developed by the company, they tended to put it in every possible configuration. They came up with a voice based lie detector that make it’s way to desk sculptures and phones that, theoretically, could sense vocal stress and displayed it in a series of LED lights that went from green to yellow to red. If it spent more than a couple milliseconds in the red a couple of the red LEDs would blink saying that what was said could be a lie. This, obviously, met with a lot of skepticism from everyone from customers to employees alike.

I was trying to explain the concept to a couple one evening.
The boyfriend gave it a try, “I’m a dog, I have two heads. You see, it’s not blinking red.”
“Well, actually, it measures stress,” I explained, doing my best impression of someone who knows what he’s talking about, ” It doesn’t cause stress to lie to a machine, it’s stressful to lie to a person.” It was about then that I realized I may have said too much.
His girlfriend smirked at him and asked, “Have you ever cheated on me?” Oh shit, I set up an unexpected new Bad Vibe Bomb. By this time I was walking away in the hopes of avoiding the fall out. I didn’t actually hear his answer, but I couldn’t miss her "OH MY GOD!"

Chi Ho and The Bad Joke

As I scan the pages of my book to come up with excerpts, I fear that it's getting harder to find stuff that I haven't already posted- in fact I've double posted a couple of time. I'm currently in the process of writing my Surviving Retail one-man show. This is from my time at the gadget store, my first REAL managerial job.

Chi Ho was one of my favorite sales people; he was a church going inactive Marine. He was such a straight arrow, I had the feeling he was the kind of guy that had the haircut and the posture long before he actually became a Marine.

He was a very honorable man and took his word as bond in a way nobody does anymore. His entire day was ruined once when a lady said she couldn’t trust him because he was Korean and she was Chinese.

Making conversation as he gave me a ride home, he told me he was doing on this Saturday night, “My church is having a pot luck. I am in the mood for some good home-cooked food.” I was ambiguous about my plans to him because, well, they did make a drug store run on the way home a necessity. Chi Ho was more than happy to make the stop and I rushed in to make my illicit purchase but my attempted slyness evaporated when I ran into in line, “I decided to come in to get some chocolates, it was my pastor’s birthday yesterday and he loves this type of candy.” Man, this guy was always on.

Once he was a few minutes late and I remarked that Chi Ho was oddly late to my boss.
“Oh I forgot to tell you, he called, his back went out.”
Without thinking, I said, “What did the stick up his ass break?”
Even though it got a laugh, I immediately was hit by an unexpected feeling of guilt. Chi Ho did literally NOTHING to me that deserved such a comment. This, plus a desire to hear it directly from me instead from a third person motivated me to tell him about my joke. He took it pretty well, even commenting, “You know, that’s exactly what it sounded like.”

The Deli Dames of Delmar

At a deli/convenience store in Delmar, Maryland where I was a cashier in the mid-nineties, I worked with three generations of women in the deli; the youngest one was said to be an ace at skinning deer. Then there was Jane.
She was a women who fit comfortably with in the realm of “morbidly obese”. I found out after I stopped working there that she thought I was gay. Maybe that was because I didn’t have the slightest desire to fish in the Delmar gene pool, or because I would tend to slink away when ever she’d make one of her many trips across the “too much information” line.

When I’d have to use the bathroom while working the register by myself, I’d get Jane or one of the other deli ladies to watch to make sure nobody ran off with anything. For my convenience, she left me a large food container marked “Pete’s piss pot” with a little bit of “Urine” in it, fruit punch. Mountain Dew would have been a little more pee-like, plus that beverage was usually the source of my urinary urgency, but it is the thought is what counts.

She had a son that would occasionally run afoul of the law. During a prison visit she met Buzz, a stocky man with a blond receding mullet incarcerated for theft. Just because it was plexiglass between them doesn’t mean it wasn’t still love at first sight.

When he got released he and Jane got married almost instantly. It was a short honeymoon,though. She complained that her new husband wouldn’t have sex with her. “I wear sexy undies and everything for him,” painting a vivid picture upon my mind’s eye that would take a gallon of vodka and a brillo pad to scrub away.

To recap: a convicted felon husband who just got out of prison and won’t sleep with with his wife. Can you figure out how this story is going to end? Well, she didn’t. She came home one night to find all of her stuff gone. He successfully eluded the police, but Jane, who didn’t drink, started buying quarts of the brand of malt liqueur that- coincidentally-was Buck’s brand.

My boss confronted her that she should turn him in, but she didn’t. “I love him!” she explained. I had thought she was stupid, but she was just lonely. But as all of us has learned at one time or another, it is sometimes the same thing.

Do You Have ID?

As anyone who has ever had to check ID’s for a living will tell you, people really hate being asked for identification when they don’t have any and the fact that you’re risking both your job and the store’s business by not checking does nothing to assuage them.

The scene: My job as a cashier as a beer and wine store in Delmar, Maryland, circa 1995.

One afternoon, I traded stories with a woman who had to check ID about our close encounters with the twitchy and ID-less. She had a guy angrily leave, then bring in someone he knew to testify to his being of age. She said, “But I didn’t know either one of them.”
I told her about a guy who thought that shouting “2/17/73, huh! I’m 22!” would allow him sanctioned passage with a six pack. I zinged back, “5/22/60,” (10 years before my actually birthday)”that doesn’t make me 35!”
She had taken a “beverage control” course where the instructor betrayed his lack of field experience by saying that a woman whose really of age would never get angry if you ask her for ID, because she’d be too flattered. We both had a hardy guffaw over this. Even if they had it, they'd still feel put out trying to find it and wasn't shy about telling you.

One form of identification one guy had given me had written across the top “not for the purchase of alcoholic beverages”.
I said,“Sorry, I need a driver’ s license”
He balked,” this is good enough for the store up the street.”
“I guess a know where you're going next.”
Me and my new friend agreed that if someone had to check IDs for a living, they never bitch when somebody asks them for proof of age, even if you don’t have it. But the funny thing was after long conversation about ID checking, the girl then tried to buy beer with a bogus looking ID saying “Maryland Department of beverage control”. I’d never seen one before (or since) or heard of it’s existence, so this simply wasn’t good enough for me to let her buy beer. It was then that she gave me the most shit I’ve ever received checking age credentials.
“What are you talking about?, That’s official!” She provided some not-so-subtle criticism peppered with obscenities that I could only answer with shrugging smirks; she drove here and she didn't have her license? She left the store screaming,”This is such bullshit!”

Perhaps, but it was also ironic.

More Pawn Shop Memories

I'm in L.A. right now visiting a friend, so I'm limited in what I can post to things I worked on in Google Docs.
I'd like to take this time to thank the Retail India blog for linking to Surviving Retail and welcome the Retail Soldiers of India.

One of the most basic rules of thumb retail is “Don’t promise anything over the phone or sight unseen.” This happens a lot when people want to return gift when they're not sure where they got it, "I got this widget that I don't need, can I return it there?"
"If it's one we sell, yes."
"I don't want to drive out there if you're not going to do it for me!" I understand wanting to avoid this, but I (and the customers) have been burned too many times to take the chance.

At the pawn shop it was more of a commandment written on a stone tablet from God himself. To break it is to run the risk of being strung up figuratively by your words.

We were talking to a customer one slow Saturday who asked us about the pawn business seemingly out of his own curiosity when he asked a question, “I just bought a CD player, brand new, would you give me 50 bucks for it?”
“We’d have to see it.”
"But, it's brand new!"
"We're going to have to see it first."
"I don't want to go all the way out to my house to get it if your not going to do it."
"O.K., then forget it." It would have to be brand new in the box and pretty high end for us to give someone a fifty for that kind of thing anyway, so why would someone want to sell it right after they bought it?

He huffed and went out to get it and what he brought back was truly awe-inspiring for it's sheer chutzpah. Far from being brand new, it was a lot closer to being the first CD player ever made. It was a brand often favored by the strictest audiophiles, Sears. It was a model made pre-digital display, so to show what song was playing there were 10 LEDs in a line with its corresponding track number printed over it. Other than finding out what happen when you got a CD with more than 10 tracks (you know, about 90 percent of them) and you got to the fateful track 11, we had no interest in it. Maybe if we were archaeologists instead of pawn brokers.