The Return of the King

Yesterday was my grand return to work. I had been looking forward to this for some time now. Since I was delayed a week after returning from Florida, I was even more excited to finally go back and see everyone.

Although it was a radical shift from the last time I worked, it was good to be back. You can imagine since my last day was Boxing Day, it was a 95% decrease in customers. But at least everything is clean now. And most of all, I don't have to be angry at the customers anymore.

You really get a sense of how disgusting people are after having worked the holiday season in retail. To get an idea, there is actually a Facebook group dedicated to retail workers who have gone as far as to lose their Christmas spirit because of their experience. It really makes you lose faith in our society.

Just how lazy can people be. Being responsible for the toy department in a store, I got the worst of it by far. They will just leave things anywhere that offers support for an item. And that includes the floor. People will continue pushing their carts while dragging an item until it becomes dislodged and can be kicked aside. It's ridiculous.

I know many will say, well that's not my job to clean the store. Well certainly it isn't. But it was also your job to be educated enough to have the courtesy to put something back where you put it instead of throwing it on the floor. In the end, you're ultimately hurting yourself. We as employees only have a certain amount of time to do work. The only duties we had in December in terms of tasks were to assist customers, and clean up the store. If you figure how packed the store in December, there is pretty much someone who needs help at any given amount of time. So there is little time left to clean.

So the little time we do have when we're not helping someone, is spent cleaning. And in this type of environment, 'cleaning' can only mean picking things up off the floor. We can't possibly begin to put things where they belong. Because nothing belongs anywhere anymore. As customers have shuffled everything out of place. As a result of this, I'm forced to remove all the price tags from the shelves. Otherwise a customer will demand the item for free when he feels cheated by the misguided price tag. So for the better part of 2 weeks, 95% of inquiries were 'How much is this?', 'Why are there no prices??' Well that's why there are no prices. And we don't have time to put new prices because we're too busy cleaning up the mess. At the end of a typical last week before Christmas day, the store ends up with about 15-20 carts of merchandise to return to its department. Either from items left at the cash, returns, and most likely items misplaced throughout the store. How is that relevent? This blew me away, on one of these days, 2 CARTS worth of toys were found in the clothing department. That's 2 carts of toys left in the clothing department by customers. Sickening.

Anyway, this was not the intention of this post to go on a rant. But I needed to paint a picture as to why such a rage against customers had been bloomed before going on vacation. But after 3 weeks off, I come back and I'm at peace. I can be happy to help the customers again. Nothing makes me happier than to have someone thank me for my help.

So it is good to be back. Even though no one else shares my enthusiasm.