retail adventures
i was always really confused working retail because i spent a lot of time reading complaints by employees when i was younger (age like, 13, livejournal) and my retail experiences were for the most part pretty good.
but like i think this is largely because of the kinds of jobs i had (vintage store, coffee stand, record store, vintage store) and i still get the idea this is kind of atypical.
like, the closest anyone’s ever come to actually being MEAN to me is the one time where a guy was kind of impatient and demanding and made me go upstairs about three times working at OK coffee, but he then thanked me for my trouble and like, was not really that rude. (i think jobs get worse the more capitalism-y they get though, and like i was allowed to give free coffee to homeless people at OK coffee, sooooo idk) but like also i worked there maybe a month, max. @stacey-marie, what were yr OK coffee experiences like?
people were pretty much very nice to me at minx, too, and at worst somewhat impatient. best stupid customer moment was when two bros thought that all our old t-shirts (in various prints and styles and sizes) were replicas designed to look like vintage shirts. but like, they were delightful bros that showed a childlike enthusiasm for the whole store.
like i thought for a while maybe no one was mean to me in retail because i haven’t worked long enough, but i HAVE worked over a year in various retail jobs. i am not sure!
Hm, I always tried really hard to remember that even though I was working at the same place for x-amount of time and having to answer the same questions and repeat the same behaviors ad infinitum, the customers were having a different experience (or maybe a first experience in the establishment, or maybe they’re tourists, whatever). I mean, my basic expectation was simply to be treated like a person as opposed to a customer service machine and I would try to treat customers like people and not consuming machines.
I’ve been working retail for over a decade and of course some jobs were better than others. OK Coffee was great (excepting the obvious, Katy) because of the small town atmosphere; practically everyone was a regular and I got to know everyone’s drinks and tried to remember their names and I’d often have conversations with the customers. It was the least jobby job I’ve had. And usually, if I was having a bad day and being slow or visibly upset, customers would ask me how I was doing and they weren’t weirded out if I said I was just sleepy, or stressed out from homework, or had a fight with my boyfriend, or whatever Real Life Shit sometimes invades the workplace.
Of course there were a lot of times during my work career when I was having existential crises about OMG CAPITALISM and pondering the absurdity of selling coffee or comic books or video rentals but I tried to focus on the non-consumerish services I could also provide (which is sort of a way of taking pride in my job, however menial): I will wash the hell out of those dishes, I will make a beautiful cup of coffee, I will ask you about your day, because this is also a Relationship and not just a Business Transaction.
Often I would try to find something positive about “problem customers” that people complained about. For example, I worked in a library for four years and there was a disheveled mom who would come in once a week with her disheveled kids and return boatloads of overdue library books and she would always beg us to remove or reduce her fines. Lots of the other clerks complained about her — “what’s so hard about returning your damn books on time?” — but if I checked her out I’d waive the fines, I didn’t care. I was excited those kids were reading so voraciously and mom obviously looked like she had a lot more on her plate besides overdue library books.
I don’t really have a lot of work horror stories, though. Lots of funny stories… one time someone’s kid put stinkbomb firecrackers into the video-return slot with their movies, which was really annoying but kind of hilarious. Also kind of a foolish move since we scanned in the videos and flagged the parents’ account. One time on Halloween a guy at the comic store (not in Athens) pretended to rob me — “gun” hidden under his jacket-style — but it was only a candy bar, and that almost gave me a heart attack. I guess the worst was my first real job bagging groceries when I was 16: this woman wearing a fur coat and lots of jewelry threw up in my line, and as she was leaving she told me, “you’re going to have to clean that up.” That was pretty degrading and I almost quit on the spot.
Working in a restaurant is more stressful and to me, there’s more opportunity to be treated poorly, like people snapping their fingers at me when they want a refill, or eating all their food and then demanding a refund because it didn’t taste good, or grabbing my arms to see my tattoos or asking me to lift up my dress to see my tattoos… that shit is aggravating.
But anyway. I try to be nice and not a jerk because even if the job sucks it’s not necessarily the fault of the customers (in spite of what Clerks professes…lol), they got their own shit to deal with, too.
ETA: After reading RGR’s previous post on “people are stupid narratives,” I remembered this other thing that happened at OK Coffee quite often, was that people would order in Starbucks-speak to me, and I literally, honest-to-god, have only been in a Starbucks once in my life so I really don’t know what all of those drink names and sizes mean. But I didn’t want to sound like an uppity anti-everything punk jerk while circumventing my own embarrassment: “Um, we have a 12oz, 16oz, and 20oz, which costs x, y, and z…?” as opposed to “Starbucks is across the street, buddy!” I also asked people what a Frappucino is so that I could make it for them in the blender here and then I “invented” espresso chocolate banana surprise, which is an amaaazing drink, y’all: 1 shot espresso, one banana, chocolate syrup to taste, vanilla flavor shot to taste, a splash of milk product, copious ice, blend, enjoy.
