The Toy Store "Hot Zone"

It was bound to happen. It was as inevitable. I was going to get sick. As I write this, I am not sure of my own status, I seem to be successfully fighting things with Dayquil cough and lots of water. But a couple of weeks ago, I was not so lucky.

I got felled with a short cold that I got over the good old fashioned way, if your old fashioned way meant Nyquil with fluids and rest. Maybe my ego did me in again, I was a bit cocky after some of my co-workers got sick twice while I stayed healthy. My immune system has been built up from working at the toy store, I got sick a lot my first couple of years, parents were constantly bringing in their kids after visits to the doctor. Kids in our neighborhood get rewarded for EVERYTHING, and God bless them for the business, but I got sick time and again. Being the retail soldier I am, I've tried to "gut it out" as we've said, but people's disease paranoia don't allow that anymore.

At the toy store, the fact is we have kids, and people who have traveled all over the world. Add to that my own duty of handling money, which can hide many ills amongst it's linen-paper blend. My immunities has stood up to these and other harbingers of disease.

On my day off a few weeks ago, a dad brought an obviously sick child to the toy store post-doctor visit and had him play at the popular communal wooden train set. The father got a call confirming that his son had tested positive for H1N1. Nice.

Needless to say, my co-workers disinfected with the quickness after they left.

The Mcjob Dilemma (Reprint)

This is a reprint of an Underachiever's Progress post from March 2007. Please excuse me for my laziness, my half dozen regular UP readers who also read this blog.

As you my have heard, the McDonald's Corporation has taken umbrage at a definition in the Oxford English Dictionary of the noun "McJob" as "an unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, esp. one created by the expansion of the service sector." The mighty Wikipedia adds to that a bit: "but is used to describe any low-status job - regardless of who the employer is - where little training is required, staff turnover is high, and where workers' activities are tightly regulated by managers." I can understand how this would not be the most flattering was to be come part of the modern lexicon, but saying it's inaccurate does NOT make it so.

I am writing this post using the my own experiences, but I have eaten at McDonalds countless times and working at Mickey D's was my first ever job when I was 16.

An article written by someone who obviously had never worked there, reads like he's an unpaid apologist of the McDonalds corporation, mentioning that such illuminaries as champion runner Carl Lewis and Jay Leno used to work there, but without saying how long or how fondly they remember coming home smelling like a french fry.

I stole one of the little standees that they had in the center of the table trying to get new employees and made a little joke for each side.
Mother with 2 young kids:"A job with flexible hours"
In other words:" Yes, I will flip burgers to get away from these brats."
Elderly Gentleman:"A chance to share my experience with new people."
In other words: "I get to bore a new group of people with my stories!"
Young woman: "It gives me experience for the future."
In other words:"for my dream job at Applebee's!"
Young Man:"A employer whose helpful, supportive."
In other words:"Don't ask, don't tell"

I never had the feeling that I was being served by a future world leader or captain of industry on my many, many visits to the Golden Arches. I usually get served by people who seem to have had their soul sucked out of their eyes from being treated with the lack of respect that's reserved for the earners of the most minimum of wages.

A place mat that I saw on a tray on a recent visit was calling for employees said(I paraphrase), "From here, you can go anywhere!" Because there's nowhere to go but up.

"Don't you care?!"

She needed giraffes, little stuffed giraffes. We were doing what we could to help her. She needed them by next Tuesday at the absolute latest. I was ringing her up for the ones that we had in the store. One co-worker was on the phone calling our other stores to get the other ones that she needed that we didn't have in stock and another person was upstairs in our back stock just in case a giraffe was hiding in our deepest recesses of the legendary "Back!". In short, she had three store personnel working to get her desired amount of five-dollar stuffies. This is, of course, our job. She didn't seem to think we were giving her demands the proper emotional investment, though.
"You people are so funny, I tell you what I want you to do and you do it without asking me why I need it."
Keep in mind that I am giving her no attitude whatsoever, I'm just ringing her up. A cardinal rule of retail is once someone wants to pay, they want the fuck out. This is why I try to be as efficient as possible; you might not be in a hurry, but you are in the minority. She was in that minority.

"Don't you care why I need all these giraffes?" Honestly I cared more about the two people that were patiently behind her to get rung up. She was what I called "crowding the plate", positioning her self so it was impossible for anyone else to get through, even though our transaction was completed.

"Sure," I bit,"what do you need them for?" Are they going to orphans in war zones to remind them to keep their heads up? What greater purpose are they going to serve that you feel you deserve some recognition for?
"For centerpieces at a sorority dinner."

"Oh good," One of my co-workers said drolly,"I thought she might have needed them for something pointless."

Lovvers- Popagenda Fail (reprint)

This is a reprint of a regular blog post I did a couple of weeks ago. I had a name-droppingly cool update and since it's about a toy store customer, I figure, fuck it.

I went to see a band tonight, Lovvers, that play great songs and put on a great show. But I will never see them again and will never buy any of their music. Why? You may ask, since those are the very traits that send my heart a-flutter? Because the asshole lead singer violated the Popagenda. I went to Comet Ping Pong to catch them; I did the last time they played, but they went on too late for me to stay too long.

I should have been able to pick them out of a line-up:

Ironic T-shirts: Check

Ironic haircuts: Check

So skinny they run the risk of falling through their ass and hanging themselves (and the girl jeans aren't helping): Check

Ironic glasses that were last seen as "spare glasses" that kids used to dread wearing: Check


They have the markings of the North American Hipster Doofus, but they came from England. They might have tried to grow beards too, but I'd be surprised if they were able to grow pubic hair. The drummer carried a canvas tote bag that said in big letters "Fuck Your Blog".

I heard the lead singer grouse that playing was "Pointless" because only 8 people showed up. Then when they played, he complained that one one was getting right up front. But when he said before one song that he was playing in front of "Nobody", I lost it.
"We are not nobody!" I yelled, motioning to the other seven people, WHO WERE REALLY INTO THEM.
"Well, why are you hiding?" He replied to me.
"Who the fuck is hiding?" Comet is slightly larger than a classroom, there is no place to hide.
So I get the next song dedicated to me, accompanied by an middle finger. Clever boy, aping our obscene gestures along with our easy-to-mock affectations.

I was just going to leave, but I thought, fuck it. I stood in front, not aggressively,just trying to enjoy their music. Then I had to dodge, lest I be impaled by the singer's bony hips being thrown at me. Great, asshole, I do what you say and you start shit with me?

After the last song, people wanted to hear more and the lead douche snidely said,"We learned something from Fugazi about encores," and disappeared backstage.

I had a rant boiling up inside me, but the rantee wasn't available, so I took it out on my poor bartender. "Look you hipster piece of shit, I know it sucks to play in front of 8 people, but don't fucking insult the people that bothered to show up, someday it might be nobody at all! I played for YEARS those kinds of shows and had to work my ass off to get even that kind of crowd, but I played my heart out anyway because it's a lot more fun to do that than piss off people that like you!"

I have a personal manifesto called "The Popagenda" and the second tenet is: honor every audience regardless of their size or interest. They could always be doing something better than watching your lame ass.

One of my most favorite memories playing with my old band the Milk-O-Matics was one show where we didn't think we were playing in front of ANYBODY, but still rocked out to the best of our abilities. After the show we were unloading and a couple of people came out of the club with one of our posters.
We were surprised, I didn't know where they were hiding.
"Thanks for showing up!" I called out to them.
"No, thank you, THANK YOU!" they replied. We may have only seen a hundred faces, but we rocked most of them.

The Ramones changed the world with 8 people in the audience, to name merely one example. Talk about Fugazi: If they were in your position they would have still delivered the goods without moping and insulting the crowd. Then they would have eight people telling their friends for years how amazing Fugazi was in front of eight people. That's the lesson you should have learned.

Signed, a guy that could have been a loyal fan.

P.S. The blog says, "Fuck you, too."

UPDATE:11/5/09 I actually ran into Fugazi Drummer Brendan Canty- he's a customer at the store and one of the nicest people you'll meet- told him this story and asked him about my guess about how his band would have handled that situation. He sheepishly admitted that he's never played that small a show but said if they had they would have most assuredly kicked out the jams (I paraphrase).
"That's what you're there for," he said. Exactly.
"And if those people wanted to hear more, we would have played more. We DID encores."

Encores aren't encores if they are on your setlist, kids.

When to say "No" to a customer

When I worked at The Drafthouse, one of the bartenders told me, "You should never tell a customer 'no'", never mind the fact that he often broke this rule himself, this is just stupid. Sometimes it's in the customer's best interest for me to tell them the word they hate to hear most.

It happens all the time at the toy store in the usual chaos of Saturday afternoon. It becomes necessary to be the short term memory of my customers if they get stuff gift-wrapped. The wrapper will call out when they've wrapped, "Lego!" And I will have to look at the person grabbing it and remember that that was the person that actually bought it.
"No, I'm sorry that's not your gift," I'll say, and hopefully the person waiting for a wrapped Lego will be paying attention, but I wouldn't bet money on it. I've actually had to snatch bags out of people's hands when I ask the customer hovering behind me, "Did you have the art kit?"(for example)
"No," they say and they still grab the bag with the wrapped art kit. Sorry, but *snatch*.
Customers often have often said, jokingly,"You can't expect US to pay attention." It's funny to them for the same reason it was sad to me, it was true.

One lady got pissed at me when I wouldn't let her use our store phone to activate her credit card when it clearly said on it "CALL FROM YOUR HOME PHONE!" This is an example of two of the truest truths I've learned in retail: the lack of attention that people pay will always find ways to surprise me and the truth rarely gets in the way of a good argument.

At the Drafthouse, a scheduling snafu made a showing of Saw V overlap into Beverly Hills Chihuahua. The doorman, God bless 'um, was not that bright and sent a mother and her two children back to the theater before Saw V had ended.

I stopped her at the door, "I'm sorry, Ma'am. You really shouldn't go in there right now."
"But the man up front told me it was OK," she protested.
"The last movie isn't done yet and you don't want your kids to see it."
She tried to walk by me and I had to physically stop her, "You DO NOT want to go in there."
If I had let her 3 and 5 year old go in there, they would have seen a man get crushed to death and the blood rain down on a man in a glass box, a memory that would be decidedly less that misty and water colored, and she was fighting me.

Sometimes I said "no" for selfish reasons. One white trash regular to my old convenience store job came in late one night.
"Let me use your pisser!" she said.
"Sorry, we don't have a public bathroom," which, as far as she was concerned, was true.
"Then give me a napkin so I can go out back!"
"NO!" we said as we involuntarily shivered out the heebiest of jeebies.

Sometimes it was to save lives. One guy at the convenience store COULD NOT understand why I wouldn't let him fill up an empty bleach bottle with gasoline. The fact that it may EXPLODE somehow wasn't good enough.

At my old pawn shop job, I'd have to say,"No" when someone asked if we sold handguns. At least a couple of times the customers replied, "I know a motherfucker that would be dead if you did."

The "Me Era"

The 70s was the “Me Decade”, the 80s was the “You know, THIS is really the Me decade”, by the 90s, “Fuck it, it’s the ‘Me Era’.”

This has really crystallized in the Internet and cellphone age, where we constantly have new ways to express ourselves. The idea behind all these wonderful gadgets is to improve communication, but communication is a two-way street. With e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, texting, not to mention the ubiquitous cellphones able to do all of that, is trying to get in touch with people THAT much easier? You are guaranteed a way to talk, but there is no guarantee anyone is going to listen, or at least listen correctly. That’s because we’re all too busy talking to listen.

You stir into this the circle of selfishness and trickle-down bullshit and you get quite a stew. You have people saying “Why not?” and doing things without actually trying to answer that question. We’re facing the fallout from a lot of this on the back half of this decade, in everything from the economy collapsing to Creed getting back together.

It doesn’t matter who is right anymore, just who’s louder. And if you ask what that has to do with retail, you haven’t been reading this blog.

Trickle-Down Bullshit: Retail sociology part 2

During the days of Reaganomics, the cutting of the highest tax rate percentage was known as "trickle-down economics". The idea was the rich would pass the money they were now not getting taxed down to the lower classes. This did not really happen. Understandably, people wanted to hold on to their money. But the thing that people are more than willing to part with is their bullshit.

This works on two levels. People who feel no power in their lives tend to take power from what they have ANY control over. From this standpoint, the retail worker is the perfect person to trickle your bullshit on, since we often are on the bottom of the courtesy ladder. Make no mistake, we are far from the only ones to regularly receive this wonderful gift; Children, spouses, (non-retail) co-workers, whoever.

For the retail worker, this doesn't always come from customers. Managers and owners are just as likely to trickle down to their underlings.

The second level is a bit more insidious. One of the hallmarks of the past few years are politicians and celebrities getting caught doing something wrong or hypocritical and weaseling away with it with a lame excuse. As I keep saying, if people don't face consequences for their actions, they have no reason to believe they've done anything wrong.

There was a time when I thought that people were too smart to take cues for living from famous people. But over this same time period, the amount of personal responsibility the average person is willing to take has seemed to drop dramatically. The mindset seems to be: they can get away with it, why can't I?

So for the retail soldier, that much more "SPLAT" to deal with. This is why I have two part-time jobs, one where I don't talk to anyone.

Tomorrow: The "Me" Era and why we're all screwed.