Strongly Worded

So this retail thing ...

OK, now I have really been initiated as a Houseware Heaven employee. I worked a full day Saturday, 9-5:30. My whole body hurts.

The highlights:

• I felt somewhat useful. Among other retail triumphs, I hooked two different guys up with suitable canisters (one ended up with a big bad "Brio 18 oz", and the other with a 4-oz set of "Daisy 4 oz" cuties).
• I restocked some things. I am still horrified by the stock room, but I can navigate a tiny bit better than last week.
• I "mastered" the register. So if you want a gift card, I can hook you up. Want to pay cash? Bring it on. Does a check suit you better? I can do that too. For returns I need to have a manager--that's the rule.

The lowlights:

• For 8.5 hours of pretty hard work, I will be paid roughly the same amount as I would for two hours at my "real" job (sitting on my ass at my computer).
• At HH you don't get paid for lunch or breaks.
• Because the service concept is so extraordinarily customer-oriented, the managers really frown upon standing at or near the register. So the job entails pacing around the (relatively small) floor with two other associates, "greeting" customers without stalking them. This is hard.
  
• The managers tend to descend upon you the second that you lean against the counter or (gasp!), or use the wrong-sized wrapping paper for a package.
• One of the two girls I was working with was MEAN. "Anne" and "Beth" were all chatty-chatty talking, and actively excluding me (the kind of thing I haven't experienced since middle school--two people talking with their backs against the third person, actively resisting her participation in the conversation). I felt AWFUL. I had crying instincts. I thought: what did I do? Am I uncool in general? Did I break some unwritten rule of HH conduct? Am I not pulling my weight? Am I pulling too much weight and making them look bad? Why am I doing this when I could have a relaxing Saturday--and sitting down-- in the company of people who actually like me? Then I noticed that Beth was surly to customers, too. She did not do her greeting very nicely either. Nor did she stock one single product. So I realized that she was being mean to me. She is either just a mean person always, or having a horrible day. Phew.
• The management is all managerial. As I may have mentioned about sixteen billion times on this blog, in my "real" life, my job title is director. Oh, right, and I have an MBA, which included a course on operations. So I could tell these managers a thing or two about the hard-core bottlenecks in HH's stocking process. Bottom line: I do not take so kindly to all this "manager approval" stuff, or their unexpected floor monitoring, or to their lunch assignments. Associates have to wait until the manager declares it lunchtime (at fucking 1:30 or 2:00), and then (s)he decides who goes when.
  

I have not bought any housewares yet, other than a jar of olive tapenade, which, even with my employee discount, cost $5.25. My mom told me on the phone last night that a comparable product is sold at Trader Joe's for about $4 (which I never bought in the past because I considered it pricey).

There is some sick thing about the employee discount that makes it harder to spend money than it would otherwise. If I were not working at HH, I would have, while just randomly browsing as a non-employee, bought several of the peppy colorful cutting boards they're selling, as well as the slate cheese plate with the matching spreaders. But since I work there, even though I can get these things at 30% off, I still consider them in terms of hours worked at this job, not in terms of my general "real" salary. Is a cutting board worth a hellish hour in the stockroom? Should I spend my three hours of meager earnings on slate cheese plate when I already have two wooden ones?

Who knew cheese plates could be a source of existential angst?

Posted by Dori at 7:56 AM