Retail Tale.

2003-10-16 at 8:58 p.m.

Yeah, that's it.

Retail is an easy job, really. You have to put up with idiots with a grating smile on your face.

"Why no, I don't mind that you came in a minute before closing and now you can't make up your mind about what weight you want the paper in your sketchbook! Seriously! Browse away! I'll be... right here! Right over here! Waiting! With this kind of freaky smile on my face!"

And it can occasionally be a challenge to find stuff to do if there aren't any customers. But folks? It's not THAT challenging. Bored? Change a display. The pens? Always need to be sorted, because apparently students are INCAPABLE OF PUTTING SHIT BACK WHERE THEY FOUND THEM.

The worst part of retail, I'm finding, isn't putting up with college students who couldn't find their ass with two hands, a map and a flashlight--I still can't get over the girl who asked my what binders she should buy if she has an English class, a biology class, and a spanish class. No, that's the source of priceless stories. "That woman? Just asked me how long a yard is. While HOLDING A YARDSTICK."

The worst part of retail, I'm afraid, is how dumb some of your co-workers are.

I'm not saying all of them, because I work in a bookstore. Maybe it's just a bookstore, or maybe it's all retail, but in this bookstore, so many people have Other Lives that it's kind of freaky. Martin? Published author. Jake? Travis? Kelly? All in bands that play regularly around Portland, and that are actually quite good. Li'l sexy Eva? Also a bouncer at a dance club down the street, and going back to school. Idris? Apparently, he's DJ Lovechile. Heh.

But there are some of them, where saying "Dumb as a box of rocks" is a compliment. Or an insult to rocks.

Poor F. F is the sweetest wouldn't-hurt-a-fly girlie girl to ever mince across the street. But unless you tell her exactly what to do and when and how to do it, she'll stand behind the counter with a vacant expression on her face, slack jawed and drooling. Even giving her a list of things to do doesn't work, because unless you remind her every five minutes, she forgets. And sometimes, even telling her what to do backfires, because she doesn't pay attention and so mixes up the plain and the lined index cards, or puts the sweatshirts on the wrong peg "because they were both black!" or just plunks down the notebooks where there was an empty space instead of refilling the spot on the shelf where the notebooks actually belonged. So one ends up redoing all her work. And one might as well have done it oneself in the first place.

I'm just saying.

It's just worse because she is honestly the niciest nice girl that ever girlie girled along all "tra la la" and "gosh!" and "super!". No, seriously, these are her epithets. I'm all "Fuck!" and "Hell!" and "God Mother Fucking Damn It!" and she's there going, "Oh, gosh, that'd be super!" and I feel like an evil bitch for mumbling under my breath while having to re-sort the pens that she put back in the pencil aisle. Because they were pink too, and pink pens go with pink pencils, don't they?

So I'm good at the retail part: I am excellent at getting a customer to close the sale, I'm honest without being mean about whether they look good in that t-shirt, I have better ideas about what they might like. I stay busy, I make the store look better, I make things more salable. I'm good at the retail part.

It's the rest of it that really sucks ass.

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