Everyone should work in retail, at some point in their lives

About ten years ago, I had a good paying, 9-5 job that I … didn’t like all that much.  So I moved back home to help my parents around the house and farm and to have time writing.  Which is great, but it did burn through my savings.  So a couple of years ago I got a crappy retail job to pay the bills.  Was it my dream to return to retail?  Fuck no.  But there aren’t that many good paying jobs where you only work a couple days a week because you also need time to help you dad bale hay or pick green beans for your mom to can or write.  And over the years I’ve come to the conclusion that everyone should work in retail, at some point in their lives.  And it’s not because of some grand social ideology of seeing how rough it is for people stuck in low paying jobs – that’s a side benefit – it’s to see how fucking annoying customers can be.

I’m not talking about the “If you tell me to wear a mask I’ll shoot you” type of customers, I’m talking about the little annoyances that build up day after day.  Like whenever something doesn’t want to scan so the standup comedian goes, “It must be free.” Yeah, that wasn’t funny the first forty times I heard that today.  Or the people who assume – since you work there – you must know the price of this random item, half of which I didn’t even know we sold.  Or, why do so many people feel the need to explain – sometimes in detail – why they are buying anti-diarrhea medicine? 

Similar to knowing the price are the people who assume I know what all the sales are.  It seems that I’ll be off for three or four days and I’ll walk in and someone will immediately come up to me, show me an item, and ask, “Is this on sale?” And while I want to just shrug and go, “Fuck if I know,” you can’t do that and stay employed.  Speaking of sales, a couple of years ago, it was probably mid-December and we needed to get rid of all the Christmas lights so we could start putting out Valentine’s Day crap, so we had a one day sale of Buy One Get One Free on your basic, $2 Christmas lights.  This one lady got super pissed off when she found out it wasn’t on these $20 Projector light things that just so happened to be on the same shelf as the stuff that was on sale.  Apparently, she wanted us – shorthanded to begin with and at Christmas – to rearrange everything on a shelf for a One Day Sale, because she couldn’t be bothered to read to see what exactly was on sale.

Probably the issue that irks me the most are the customers who assume I have no idea what I’m doing.  For example, several times each shift someone will ask, “Did you ring up this item?” Sometimes – because of the stupid layout of everything – I won’t see a pack of gum or something small.  But nine times out of ten the item in question is a 48 roll of TP that takes up 2/3 of our counter space.  I almost want to slap myself and go, “How did I miss that?”

Worse are the people who don’t know how everything works, so they assume we’re cheating them.  Like our system for calculating sale discounts makes perfect sense … to a computer.  It’s just not the clearest thing for customers to understand, so we must be ripping them off.  “Why did those each ring up at $3 when on the shelf it says 2 for $5?” “Because it doesn’t actually take the sale price off until I hit the total button.” The reason it does that, is because some sales are “Buy X, get Y for half-off,” and it is so much easier for the computer to check all your items for these X-Y, or 2 for whatever, sales once at the end instead of after each item scanned. 

A related issue are our receipts.  It’s almost a code that gives as much information about each item sold in as small a space as possible, and once you know what it is doing it makes perfect sense.  I don’t know how many times people have come in five minutes after leaving – looking over their receipt in the parking lot – and demand to know why they didn’t get some discount, like a $5 off their total sale.  And I look at their receipt and go, “It did take the discount off.  It took a little bit off each item, that’s what these little amounts here are,” and I sometimes circle the discount it took off each item.  And they usually argue with me, like I was the idiot that designed the system.  And half the time they usually just huff and leave the store thinking we cheated them, when they are the ones who refused to listen to the explanation. 

That’s why I think everyone should work retail at some point in their lives because when you’re the one standing behind a register, you see how fucking annoying people can be.  I consider myself a good customer: I don’t tell pointless stories, I don’t make scenes, and I don’t demand to see a manager because I don’t understand a line on the receipt.  Part of that is because I’ve worked retail.  Probably a big part is that I’m not an asshole.