Jobs I’ve Had: More Retail Minioning
After the debacle of working at the Gap, I think I didn’t work at all until after graduation. I’m not entirely sure about that, but pretty sure. Anyway, this girl that I would not even classify as a friend, for some reason got me a job at the store where she was working, Petite Sophisticate. I came in as an hourly, part-time work person.
Now, the thing about Petite was that it was the third store in a line of related stores – Casual Corner, Casual Corner Woman, and Petite. My manager when I started was Ginger, and Ginger was an idiot. I remember that about her, and that on one of my first few days working there, she was lying on the floor behind the counter because she was sick with a UTI and could basically not move. The Assistant Manager there was Cynthia, and I loved working with her. She was fantastic. So, I was not totally shocked or concerned when our district manager came in, summarily fired Ginger, promoted Cynthia to Manager and, for reasons that I still can’t fathom, promoted me to third key (which is like, not a manager, but not a minion).
That promotion was the most super-awesome thing that ever happened to me in my retail career. In the first little while there, Cynthia and I were both working 12 hour days, but hey – OVERTIME! Cynthia taught me about merchandising, I was allowed to manage other part time workers, and all in all it ended up with me having a ton of responsibility. At the end of the day, I basically earned myself a pass to come back and be re-hired the next summer when I was done with college for the year.
Retail is always full of awesome stuff. Petite was a *small* store, so it was not that hard to keep it up, which was nice. However, it also meant that if the store was crowded, it was PACKED. One day, probably Memorial Day or 4th of July, we were having this huge sale, and the entire mall was having a “sidewalk sale.” Okay, first of all, sidewalk sales fucking suck. Someone has to be out there at all times watching your stuff. Secondly, sales make people ridiculous. If you’ve ever worked retail, it’s probable that your employer had a credit card policy. Ours was that if it was not signed, we had to ask for your ID. So I’m at the register, and there is a line of what seems like a million people. This woman had $300 or so of merchandise, and she goes to pay with her American Express. It was unsigned. I asked to see her ID. “Oh, my husband is at Black & Decker and he has my purse.” Um, okay, well, I’m sorry, but I have to see your ID. She went from zero to completely insane in 2.3 seconds. I didn’t run her card, because I had no interest in being fired, and I was calm the whole time she was losing her shit. I have never had so many people tell me, “you were right, thank you for checking ID’s.” This was also when ID theft was really heating up, so a lot of people really were flabbergasted that this lady was such a nut. She never came back for her stuff.
The other thing that happened, and I wasn’t there for it, was that some woman let her kid shit in the store.
Yes, read that again. A woman let her kid shit in the floor of our store. I was out for my dinner break, and I came back, and the other woman I was working with told me, this couple just left, and they totally let their kid crap in our floor.
I’m sure I will think of tons of other things that happened while I was there – I worked there on summers and holidays for at least two years, and really, for a retail gig, it was pretty damn sweet. My boss was awesome, she loved me, I got to work the hours I wanted to work. She’s still out there at the outlets; sometimes I find her when I’m home and chat her up. She still remembers me (clearly) and it’s nice to have that kind of work memory, especially from a retail job that could have easily been really crappy.
May 23rd, 2009 at 1:42 pm
It does sound awful but whenever I read somethign like that, I can’t help but wonder.
I remember a story from a few years back about a girl who was 12 or 13 years old and had Crohn’s Disease. She had one of those medical ID tags and it said something like “I can’t wait for a bathroom.” She and her mom were in an Old Navy and they asked to please use the restroom. The manager said it was for employees only. The mom showed him the girl’s ID and said this was not just a “oh I’m to lazy to walk to a public restroom” situation – but the manager wouldn’t budge. He said he was making a “managerial decision.” Even though the girl was visibly in distress and pain and had started to cry. No surprise, she had an accident in the store. Needless to say, the mother was livid, and contact her congressperson to work for better legislation for access to restrooms for those for whom “just holding it a little longer” is not a luxury they have.
I guess I’m also more sensitive to this sort of issue because my ex had ulcerative colitis and it’s no walk in the park. And our society is so weird about bathroom issues and just ends up making things the responsibility of the person with the disability or medical condition that should NOT be their responsibilty.
May 24th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
I wasn’t there for this, but in the store I worked in, if you were *in distress* we would have let you use our bathroom. I mean, we would have had to escort you into the back and hang out back there til you were done, but we would have let you. From my memory, this was a very little kid, maybe just out of diapers, and the parents were very involved in trying on clothes, and just weren’t really watching their kid.
Of course, in retail, this kind of distraction is often used to set up a theft, so you can’t get sucked into watching this one kid if you are alone in the store – so the lady who was there for the 30m I was on break did not chase this kid around the store, but was basically just making sure s/he didn’t escape via any doors. At some point the kid decided that s/he needed to GO and just dropped trou and WENT. Basically without warning, mostly because s/he was totally unsupervised, and then the parents were just . . .unconcerned.
May 26th, 2009 at 6:57 am
[...] give proper link credit. Here’s the Google cache version.Nikki has more on her retail days here and [...]