The Retail Rant

As I may have mentioned previously, I’ve started a new job at a legal database company as a copy editor, and I have been working there about a month. All my previous jobs (ignoring a few unpaid internships) have been in food service or retail. Now that I’m working a 9-5 job in an office cubicle and happen to have a lot of downtime between projects, I’ve been reflecting on all those shitty retail jobs. Although this job is fairly boring, I am so relieved to finally be out of a department store, especially since Christmas is coming up.

I got my first real job a few months out of college. Now I had seen a few confrontations with rude customers growing up, but I didn’t understand the magnitude of shit you have to put with until I was behind that counter with my hat and scanner the first day. Imagine the avalanche of manure falling onto Biff’s car in Back to the Future, then repeat it for 40 hours every week.

Obviously, there are many things that make food service and retail jobs a nightmare – I’ve had management change the schedule without telling any of the employees, registers have gone offline during a rush, and shipments of products have arrived completely destroyed – but the customers are clearly the most trying part of the job. I’m sure this is far from a groundbreaking discovery. Everyone I know who’s worked in retail, even if it was only for a couple weeks, has a collection of stories featuring their worst customers.

Look, everyone has a bad day, and I can accept that a mother with a van full of kids and a million errands to run might get snippy when something she thought was on sale is regular price, but I am convinced that some of these customers are in fact an army of poorly-disguised troll people that have crawled their way out of the earth to spread chaos and misery in every mall and grocery store in America. Customers have called me “retarded,” accused me of swapping price signs on them, flipped me off, and once when I said a product had been discontinued, an old man asked if there was anyone working in the store or at corporate who was not high on pot.

To be honest, I haven’t had it as bad as some of my friends. For example, I’ve never been physically attacked by a homeless man at Wal-Mart after asking him not to pour cologne down his shirt. A woman I knew in college worked after class at a coffee shop. A customer stumbled into her while she was carrying a tray of hot coffee, and she ended up pouring it down her apron, nearly scalding herself. The customer just laughed: not a nervous chuckle, mind you, but a full-on laugh. She ran to the break room and burst into tears. Another friend worked at the returns desk at a different Wal-Mart and rang something up wrong. He realized his mistake and told the customer that he was going to abort the transaction and start over.  The customer joked that his mom should have aborted him.

I never worked returns or customer service specifically, but I’ve often had to deal with an enraged customer or at least, try to calm them down until the manager arrived. After so many years, I’ve theorized that most of this conflict comes from a number of assumptions the customers make. Such as:

1.     YOU HAVE ENOUGH CONTROL TO FIX THEIR PROBLEM

So many customers have come to me with a problem that I am powerless to fix. Maybe they bought something last week at regular price and now it’s on sale, or the store won’t allow me to price-match a competitor without evidence of their price. The customer doesn’t realize that there is a system of rules in place telling me the circumstances where I can return something or match a price, and if the present situation does not fall into one of those categories, there is nothing I can do. I’m all for good customer service, but no employee can break the rules to appease a customer. I may disagree with the rules myself or think that they don’t make any sense, but if I break one of them or try to make an exception, I’ll be written up or fired. Call me cruel, but giving you an extra dollar off every one of your clearance items is less of a priority for me than paying my rent.

If I worked for myself or owned the business, then yes, I could make you special offers if I felt like it, but I can’t. I can’t call up the supplier and order a bunch of Panasonic TVs because my company doesn’t have a contract with Panasonic. I can’t give you 50% off a purse that was on sale a month ago because that purse belongs to the company, not me. I can’t stop selling a certain brand because you don’t like their CEO’s politics. I am a small piece of the company and there’s an even smaller portion of the company that I have control over.

Which brings me to:

2.     YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR EVERY ASPECT OF THE COMPANY

Everybody knows that a corporation is more than just the cashier making $8 an hour. There are whole divisions of people working behind the scenes to make the company run: logistics, research and development, marketing, things that the customer never sees. Most companies have some manner of customer service where customers can voice their opinions, but when a customer can’t find an item or they don’t like the products, they usually don’t call the hotline, they find the nearest person in the store and complain.

I understand that every employee is a reflection of the company, but imagine a person finding that all the produce in a grocery store is rotting, so they run to deli section and yell at the guy cutting up lunchmeat. If marketing put out a flyer advertising a new lamp on sale and the store didn’t ship those lamps to a store because it’s a smaller store and there’s no room, that is not fault of cashier. Nor are safety recalls, price hikes, or the fact that an item is sold out. Yet for the customer, talking to this one cashier is the same as talking to the company. Asking to speak to a manager is a little better, but manager’s hands are usually tied as well. Every manager I’ve worked for has collected those complaints (along with e-mail complaints and phone calls) and brought them up when they meet the district manager. I’ve rarely seen it change anything.

One company I worked for completely redid the layout and made huge changes to the inventory of every store in the country. My store was the smallest in the city, and a lot of products that didn’t sell very well (like origami paper) went to the larger stores so we could stock more of the high-selling items. Many of our regulars were mad that they had to drive across town to get their origami paper and demanded that we start carrying it again. A lot of phrases like “inconvenient,” “outrageous,” and even “the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard” were thrown our way. My manager kept appealing to her superiors saying that if customers couldn’t origami paper here, they would two blocks away to our competitor, but two years later when I left the company, it still hadn’t changed.

Often, these divisions of a company don’t talk to one another very well.  At times, it felt like a gigantic game of telephone where the phrase “put the Christmas trees on sale” goes in one side and “peel the Christian fleas in Hell” comes out the other.  I remember setting fixtures that were half-empty because half the inventory hadn’t been shipped yet. Other times, corporate would change the military discount from 10% to 15%, then inexplicably change it back two months later. These changes and miscommunications can be inconvenient for a customer, but far worse for the employees.  One of my relatives (I’ll call her Sarah) works at a Volkswagen dealership and since the company’s emissions scandal has made international news, she receives dozens of calls daily from furious customers. Even though engineers at Volkswagen created the problem, customers expect Sarah to fix this enormous problem herself. As a matter of fact, her dealership is suffering because they can’t even sell that make of car until this entire fiasco is resolved. Customers can’t yell at Volkswagen’s CEO, but yelling at Sarah seems like a good substitute.

3.     ASKING ANOTHER EMPLOYEE OR A MANAGER WILL YIELD A DIFFERENT RESULT

No matter how many times I see this, I can’t help but laugh. A customer will ask a question of an employee – say they want a certain type of paint – and when that employee gives them an answer they don’t like, they’ll move on to another employee and ask the same thing. It makes sense if someone is asking how to use a device and the employee doesn’t know, so they call over a coworker who is more familiar with the device, but I rarely saw this.

I remember a man asking if we had a certain type of shadowbox. I was working in that section of the store and explained that we didn’t carry the type he wanted, but I showed him our inventory and tried to suggest a substitute. He kept explaining the product we wanted, and I kept reiterating that I knew what he was talking about but we simply didn’t carry it. Frustrated, he went on to ask two other sales associates who told him the exact same thing I had. At last, he got a manager. She didn’t know much about shadow boxes but she knew I did, so she called me over because it was my department after all. I walked over and gave him a little wave before he sighed angrily, then turned and walked out with more sass than I thought a fifty-year-old balding man was capable of.

I must admit it is a little satisfying when a customer demands a manager, only to hear the exact same thing they didn’t want to hear a minute ago.

4.     THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT

I’ve heard this all my life, but have yet to meet anyone who wholeheartedly believes it.

Advertisers and salesmen entice customers to buy their product or service by convincing consumers that they have far more control than they really do. Yes, consumers wield tremendous power in choosing where to spend their money. Businesses know that in a free market economy, unhappy customers can always go to a competitor, and so businesses go great lengths to ensure their customers are satisfied. The moment a customer claims that they’ll start shopping elsewhere, service reps and managers will leap through hoops to keep that customer, even if it ends up costing the business. I’ve seen a lot of employees bend the rules and make “one-time exceptions” to keep that customer returning. This even happens at a corporate level. Friends have told me when the introductory offer on my phone and Internet service expires, I should tell the sales rep I’m thinking of switching to another network, and then they’ll extend that introductory offer.

This is all great for the customer, but by putting such tremendous value on satisfying customers, we’ve created a culture where if customers complain or throw a huge fit in the store, they’ll be rewarded. Any child psychologist will tell you not to buy a toy for a screaming child. It teaches the child that if they want something they’re not supposed to have, all they have to do is throw a tantrum and they’ll get it. They’re being rewarded for bad behavior. They know they can manipulate the system, and they continue to do this when they grow up.

I saw this firsthand at my last job. A man was interested in a service, so we printed up an order and started ringing him up. When my coworker told him he would have to pay the full amount in advance, this guy lost it. He sighed angrily and collapsed on the counter. He then kicked it like a toddler and started yelling at the top of his voice how stupid it was that he should have to pay for something without seeing it first. My coworker explained that if we didn’t have that money up front, we couldn’t pay for shipping, labor, and supplies until the customer picked up their order (which they sometimes took months to do). Furthermore, it was just a company rule and we couldn’t make an exception.

The man stormed off, and we thought that was the end of it. A day later, though, we learned our unhappy customer had sent several strongly-worded e-mails to customer service who then forwarded them to our district manager. The DM called our store manager and asked how we were going to fix it. My manager explained that we had done nothing wrong. We had followed the rules that corporate had put in place, we explained them to the customer, and the customer left because we would not alter company policies. The DM thought this wasn’t good enough, and so he personally called the angry customer to tell him that he didn’t have to pay in advance; he could pay when he picked it up if he wanted. Not only that, he only had to pay half of what we quoted him. My manager and everyone in my department were fuming at the decision. Why would a company put all these rules in place, train us on them, issue us warnings for infractions, and then completely disregard them for a sale that meant a loss for us?

The sale cost us about $150, which seems miniscule for a company with hundreds of locations across two countries, but here’s why it matters. Our store always set daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly sales goals, along with specialized ones for departments and even individuals. These goals were based on how much cash each of us should be bringing in every day to pay salaries, vendors, utilities, etc. If we didn’t make those goals, the store had to eliminate expenses, and the easiest way to do that was by cutting employees’ hours. Every retail store operates this way.

Recently, our department had exceeded the yearly sales goal and, as a reward, we were allowed to hire another full-time employee on. However, if we dipped below our sales goals for too long, that full-timer would be fired or demoted to a part-time position. During slow seasons, the part-timers in my department had almost nothing to do and had to work on registers or work the truck, just to get enough hours to earn a reasonable paycheck. When customers exploit coupons, we lose money. When people shoplift, we lose money. When items are returned damaged, we lose money. And when we lose money, hours are cut and the employees who are still working have to pick up the slack. If you’ve ever been to a department store and had to search and search for an employee to answer your questions, and then you find them and they’re surrounded by a dozen other customers, that might be what’s happening.

5.     BECAUSE YOU WORK IN RETAIL, YOU MUST BE A LAZY HIGH SCHOOL DROPOUT

This one has to be the most painful. We’re all told from an early age that we should try our hardest in school or we’d end up serving fries at a burger place or mopping up bathrooms for the rest of our lives. In a country where “all men are created equal,” we don’t like to admit that there are still traces of a class system ingrained our society. We look down on people in service and retail jobs. We reason that these were jobs we had as teenagers and that they require no skills or effort. We think that because more and more young people are going to college looking for degrees and good jobs, that those working minimal wage jobs were either not smart enough to get into college or that they were too lazy.

As a matter of fact, in each of the four businesses I worked for – two craft stores, a hardware store, and a pizza chain – there were dozens of employees who had either graduated college, were still working toward a degree, or had to drop out for financial reasons.  At my last job, nearly half the staff had some college. One of my managers was studying American history so she could be a teacher; a coworker had a B.A. in video production and did freelance projects on the side; still another was completing a pharmacology degree. Yet there they were unloading trucks of Christmas ornaments and sweeping floors.

We were all there for different reasons. Many were taking night classes or just worked part-time so they could concentrate on college. Others found the costs of school to be out of their budget, so they took a year off to make a dent in their student loan debt. Of course, like myself, there were plenty who had graduated college and found themselves looking for work in a terrible job market. Entry-level jobs had become unpaid internships, careers in science and public works were quickly disappearing as state and federal budgets were slashed, newspapers and magazines were laying off staff in every town, and what jobs were available required five years of experience new grads simply didn’t have and were increasingly unlikely to get. So we took whatever jobs we could simply to pay the bills.

Though teenagers usually come to mind when people picture retail, about half the staff at my last job were mid-thirties or older. I knew three or four women who used to be stay-at-home moms, but with the cost of food, healthcare, and housing rising, their husbands’ income provided less and less, so they had to find a job that they could work right away. One woman’s husband was laid off and another survived on disability. I’ll never forget working on a cash register next to an employee who must have been in his late sixties. He had worked for almost twenty years answering phone calls, but the company cut his job and moved him onto a cash register. I don’t know if he hadn’t saved enough for retirement or whether there was another reason he didn’t simply quit.

Yes, there are employees who are rude, unreliable, lazy, and frankly, stupid, but every company has these people.  In retail, they don’t last very long. People who don’t show up on time, work only when the boss is looking, or barely put forth any effort are quickly dismissed. Retail is chaotic enough, and the last thing we need is an unreliable employee. Despite what people may tell you, these jobs aren’t easy. They’re stressful, low-paying, and thankless. People don’t work retail because they enjoy it or find it fulfilling, they do it because they need to make ends meet.

No six-year-old tells their parents they want to be a custodian or a produce stocker when they grow up, but even if everybody did have the education to become an astronaut, the talent to become an award-winning singer, or the opportunities to a senator or congressperson, the world would still need people to mop a public restroom and take customer service calls.  People are not worth less because of the job they hold. Retail and customer service workers are not indentured servants. Some of them may be stuck working a low-paying job like this for the rest of their lives. Some are working two or three to support their family. Some are working to pay for college. Some may have been released from prison or rehab, and they’re trying to turn their lives around.  No matter what reason they’re behind a cash register with an ill-fitting baseball cap and apron, whether they have a degree or kids to support, or whether this is just a summer job, they’re a human being and for God’s sake, they’re entitled to a little respect.

I graduated in June 2009, right when the economy was at its worst. The housing bubble collapsed, several megabanks closed, American auto manufacturers had to be bailed out by taxpayers, and companies were either cutting staff or closing altogether. Unemployment was 10.2% for the general population, 17.6% for recent B.A. grads, and 26.6% if those grads were men. http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2013/ted_20130405.htm

I searched all over my state for jobs in journalism, editing, and publishing, sending out dozens of resumes and job inquiries a week. I couldn’t afford New York City were all the major publishers were and the few in state were tiny. I thought I could find a magazine here and maybe make the move once I was more successful. A few local jobs did exist, but I had little experience and was always beaten by people with years of solid credentials who had recently been laid off themselves.  Freelance writing was too big a gamble for me. I kept finding freelance sites with people bidding to write product reviews for less than their competition, in the end, writing it for the price of a coffee.

With only six months before I had to start repaying my student loans, I needed to find work – any work – fast. Even if it were a terrible job, I would only have to endure it until I found something better. So I got my first job at a pizza chain working under a store manager three years my junior. Meanwhile, I created a huge spreadsheet of companies and positions I had applied for; I wrote three different resumes tailored for certain types of jobs and had friends and coworkers edit them; I signed up for several job hunting websites and newsletters and found my inbox flooded with spam; I meet a salesman in a hotel conference room only to find the company was a pyramid scheme; I even signed up for interviewing and networking classes at a nonprofit workforce center.  Only a few companies responded with more than a form letter. Interviews were separated by months.

All my money went toward student loans while I lived with my parents. I was fired from my first job. I quit my second. My store closed during my third job, and I went on unemployment while looking for the fourth. One day at my fourth job, my manager cheerfully handed me my two year anniversary pin, and my heart sank. I tried to keep my head up and push on, but it took a lot out of me. Six years had passed since graduation and I had made so little progress. There were months when I didn’t bother to look at the job boards and deleted the newsletters en masse. I stopped trying at a certain point and wondered if I was only good enough to work in a big box store the rest of my life. All the encouragement – “keep your nose to the grindstone,” “follow your dreams,” “hard work pays off,” and
“you’ll find something eventually” – had all become empty platitudes. It may sound like schadenfreude, but the only thing that helped was knowing that my friends were in a similar bind, taking their psychology degrees to call centers for example.

When I finally did receive a call offering me my current copyeditor job, I wasn’t really sure how to react. This may be a crude analogy, but it was a very similar sensation to watching the World Trade Center collapse in my freshman biology class. I kept asking is this really happening?

Retail is the worst. Customer service, food prep, cashiering, inventory, cleaning public bathrooms: it’s all hell. There’s little pay and little respect, both from others and from your own sense of self-worth.

Before I started working these retail jobs, I didn’t think much of people in the service industry. I don’t mean I thought little of them, I just didn’t think about them at all. I saw a few customers yell at staff when their cards wouldn’t read, but I didn’t realize how normal that is for a cashier or a customer service rep. Working sporadic hours, dealing with an angry public all day, cleaning up after people who claim to be adults, and doing it all for minimal wage, I gained a lot of respect for people working these jobs. I have to include teachers, firefighters, police, secretaries, DMV workers, EMTs, and bus drivers, too.

I doubt there’s any way to do this – outside of a communist or totalitarian state – but I really believe that everyone should have to work at a phone center or fast food restaurant for three months, no matter how educated or qualified they are. I’ve heard of CEOs of restaurant chains making their children start out flipping burgers or working a register so that they get a taste of what their employees experience every day: the noise, the stress, and the backed-up orders. They meet the people who will be affected by their decisions at corporate and hopefully, they gain a little perspective.

I’m not saying the end result would be world peace, but I will say that if more people had some experience in these jobs, there’d be far less drama when a customer got their burger with fries instead of onion rings. People would see small mistakes for what they are: small mistakes. They would put items back in their proper places because they know an employee is going to spend half-an-hour picking them all up before they can go home. They’d watch their kids to make sure they don’t climb up ladders or destroy product. Hell, when they get their change and receipt, they might even look the cashier in the eye and say, “thank you.”