I worked in retail for most of my time at university. I worked at the Rideau Centre in a store called Canary Island. Imagine piles of shirts stacked in wooden shipping crates (oh, the slivers!) and an overall jungle-theme which included an endless rotation of Jimmy Buffet on the stereo. The store was eventually overhauled and became Northern Elements, owned by Venator what used to be known as Woolworth. (They also owned Northern Reflections, Northern Getaway and Foot Locker, among others.)
I hated working for minimum wage. An hour of my time was worth much more than $6.85. There were also a lot of annoying rules we had to follow. These have forever cemented a deep sympathy for retail workers everywhere. One of the things we had to do was greet customers within 10 seconds or three metres of entry, whichever came first. Sometimes that meant RUSHING from the back of the store (because it wouldn’t be good to shout) all the way to the front to deliver not only a cheerful greeting but an open-ended question. Which is, by definition, a question that cannot be answered with a yes or no.
Good greeting: “Good afternoon! What are you looking for today?” Followed by a chipper “just to let you know, our socks are on sale 3 for $9.99!”
Bad greeting: “Can I help you?”
I really hated harassing people. A good salesperson learns to read people. A good salesperson can tell whether or not they are the type of customer who likes attentive service.
Oh, and I hated team-building exercises. Every once in awhile we’d all gather somewhere and perform dramatic re-enactments. Ugh.
The other thing I hated about this job was the closing routine. There were always two people to close at night. The shift would end at 9 p.m. I would be paid until that time. But the float had to be counted and deposited by both people. So one person would count while the other hung around and straightened up the store. We’d stay as little as 15 minutes or as much as one hour. But it usually meant an extra half hour for which we were never paid, each time we closed. I figured this was illegal. And it bothered me. It bothered me more that I was a university student who was too chicken to complain for fear of losing a Mcjob.
Shoplifiting is a big issue in retail, and the way they dealt with it was to have each of the two staff members check each other’s bags on closing. This infuriated me. But we had to do it because we lived in fear of “the spies from head office” who no doubt were lurking around the corners, watching to make sure we rummaged through each other’s backpacks after we locked the door. I refused to do the search. And when I was a more senior person on staff I only made the most cursory of glances. I hated being treated like I was stealing something. I hated treating my juniors staff members like that too.
What else did I hate about that job? Well, some of the customers were doozies. Demanding, irritated, impatient, condescending… Here’s a tip: if you’re nice to salespeople they’ll want to be nice to you. But for every bad customer there was a good one. Or a funny story. I was working with a friend one day. I went out to get us some coffee and when I came back he was freaking out. He was wide-eyed. He looked like he’d seen a ghost.
“WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? WHY WEREN’T YOU HERE?!?!?!”
“What’s going on?”
He told me a grannie had come in to try on a shirt. She started to disrobe at the front of the store. My friend tried to direct her to the change rooms at the back, but she pretended not to hear him. She took her top off and wasn’t wearing anything underneath.
“SHE CAME DOWN TO HERE,” he described, making a yanking motion at the waist.
Poor guy. He’d never seen a naked wrinkly elderly person before, who was so, um, gravitationally challenged. “I DIDN’T MEAN TO LOOK!!” he shrieked, while I rolled on the floor with laughter.
I liked the people, and that’s ultimately what kept me there. My friend, the traumatized one, liked to play very loud dance music. Gloria Estefan would be discarded for Whigfield (remember that song called “Saturday night” ?) which we would blast until the point of distortion. We were never caught.
He and I had a running joke. We’d go buy a coffee at the Second Cup. I’d order a medium Ethiopian. He’d lean over to the person behind the counter and say “but she’d REALLY like a large Frenchman!”
Oh how we laughed. There was this unspoken bond between retail folks in the mall.
Staff came and went (retail is a big rotating door of employment) and most of them were good to work with. For the most part the customers were pretty cool too. When the store converted into menswear-only it became more interesting. There were plenty of clueless fellows to keep me amused. They’d wonder aloud if this shirt matches those pants etc etc. There was also an equal number of men who primped and fussed and worried whether the pants made them look too fat.
In my final year of journalism school all of my friends were mailing stacks of resumes far and wide. The job board in the main foyer always featured at least one reporting job in Flin Flon, MB. I didn’t want a reporting job that badly, so I stayed where I was. In Ottawa. In retail. One day, my thesis advisor and TV prof suggested I needed find a real job. He’d heard of a writing/research gig at a non-for profit called the Media Awareness Network (MNET) that wouldn’t necessitate a move to Manitoba. They were right here in town. And so, with some trepidation, I arranged an interview.
It was downtown in the old National Film Board office on the corner of Rideau and Dalhousie. (Now a Second Cup and a pizza place.) The NFB was a major sponsor and had given MNET some office space. There were film reels stored in the back.
I don’t remember much from the interview. I do remember Ann, the boss lady, offering me a cup of coffee. She poured it in a mug and asked if I wanted cream or sugar. I drink it with plenty of milk and also sweetened, but I was so nervous (and didn’t want to offend) so I declined the additives and accepted the black mug of steaming coffee. And I forced myself to drink it throughout the interview. It was not unlike drinking hot battery acid.
I was hired, and it wasn’t until I started that I realized what a cool place this was. MNET was, and is, a clearinghouse of information for parents and teachers about media literacy and gender stereotyping in the media. It’s grown quite a bit since I left. There are some amazing (free!) resources in there. They’re quoted all the time in the major media. I’m so proud of how far they’ve come. The women who work there believe so passionately in their cause.
At the time however, they didn’t have such a broad reach. The World Wide Web was in its infancy and a lot of our information was being distributed by snail mail. My co-workers and I had to teach ourselves to update our website. (Haha – this was the old homepage. What an eyesore. I think I did that. Eeep!) I remember what a huge deal it was, because we used to email the files to our service provider for updates, even for things as simple as adding an image to an existing page.
The staff consisted of an amazing group of women. People came and went, but there were always 6 or 7 of us at the core. At lunchtime we’d sit around the lunch room and talk about the issues of the day. It was such a great experience for someone like me. I was a twentysomething girl surrounded by all these terribly smart women. It was amazing. And I was sad to leave. I moved into private/for-profit industry in the area of website production for the promise of a better paycheque. So much for my journalism degree. I have, however, been starting to make better use of it in recent years.
I meet up the MNET ladies about once every six weeks or so. I count them among my good friends.
Had my professor not found me that job with MNET, I wonder where would I be today. That job was a real fork in the road. I’m glad I took it.