Tuesday, December 14, 2004

Retail Woes Part III

One thing I will never understand about department store customers, is how, when there are large signs posted in EVERY fitting room, practically begging the customer to return their fitting room merchandise to the long hanging bar right outside their fitting room door, the clothes still end up inside the fitting room, on the floor, inside out, times about twenty.
Are they all really pigs like that at home? Or is it the sheer knowledge that someone in the store will ultimately come along and pick up their crap "empower" them to be slovenly and piggish?
Ok, rant over.
The majority of the next eight hours is spent out on the floor, being paged to put out numerous "fires" (like the dishonest Christmas Ornament Return Lady) and helping muck out fitting rooms, change cash tills when they get too much cash in them, listening to disgruntled customers yell at me over our policies (which I usually give in "one time only" for them) and floor recovery. "Floor recovery" is a retail euphemism for Cleaning Up The Tornado The Customers Left In Their Wake.
A page comes over the loudspeaker system "Code 99 to the Handbag department." That means all available managers must go "recover" in the Handbag department, which means that the store manager walked by and noticed that the whole department looks like a sewage dump and is currently freaking out over it. We all hurry to Handbags and lo and behold she's there, frantically heaving piles of handbags with tangled straps from the floor to the sale table they originally resided on.
I spend forty-five minutes in the handbag department on my knees, tucking in straps and replacing tissue into the bags (while answering my pager phone every minute or so) and silently cursing that after this I will never want to see another handbag again.
After the department is satisfactory I realize I never had time for lunch so I grab a diet coke and a Cinnabon just outside the store in the mall (besides, at my stage in pregnancy to walk all the way to the Food Court would kill me) and I eat hurriedly at my desk as my phone rings every 30 seconds because I have turned off my pager and they know it, so they try my office. I bark out instructions and advice on the phone with a mouth full of cinnamon roll, and finally drain my diet coke and heave myself out of my chair, turning my pager on. It immediately beeps and its a 911 from the Lingerie Department.
Whew, only eight hours to go!

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