THERE IS A HELL! - - - IT IS CALLED RETAIL THERE IS A HELL AND IT IS CALLED RETAIL! | Page 7

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Things You Learn At a Retail Job
1. Folding shirts:
never ends.
There is some
present in mid-size
that is at its most
when you have just
stacking them by size, and
enough to walk away for
them, the perfect little
tops, ready to be daintily
discerning shopper to find their
destroyed by the rabid horde
them with their frothy spit
pirate digging for buried
born with some innate
shirt stacks and destroy
that you are left
second you walk back
display table. They are

The job that
sort of pheromone
retail store shirts, one
deliciously potent
finished perfectly
finally feel secure
thirty seconds. All of
flapjack-esque stack of
thumbed through by a
size, are soon to be
of semi-human creatures, flecking
as they tear through your pile with the urgency of a
treasure. Retail shoppers are
longing to find these
them with such vigour
considering suicide the
to your once-perfect
cruel.

2. People steal anything and no one cares.
Though there will always be the facade of training employees to be vigilant and even
aggressive towards shoplifting, it is an inevitable part of the retail world, and you totally stop
caring. You’ll walk into a dressing room and see a bunch of plucked off security tags, or go
into an electronics section to see a conspicuously empty video games section, and you just
kind of sigh and walk away. The thing is, if you were to actually try to stop people who are in
the process of stealing from your store — and a huge amount of them are organized and do
this routinely to resell the stuff, this is their livelihood — things are not going to end well for
you. A worker I knew at a clothing store once got a knife pulled on her when she chased
down a guy stealing a bunch of shirts. Her job was not worth a stab to the kidneys, and
neither is yours. You are not paid to be a cop, and you quickly come to understand that.
3. Listening to the same song every hour, on the hour, is the cruellest punishment
conceivable.
Most of the bigger chain retail stores have enormous music contracts that give them access
to a certain number of poppy, easy-to-enjoy music to rotate at hour-long intervals from open
to close, for at least three or so months at a time. Do you enjoy that Katy Perry or Terry
Tinsel songs? Get ready to enjoy them twenty times a day, every day, until you long to ram
your head into the cash register repeatedly every time you hear the opening notes.

dodie ste®eo p®odu©tion ™

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