Retail Hell

Most people at one time or another has worked in the retail sector. Either during high school, college, or in between jobs, so everyone has a working idea of how shitty it is to work that type of job. I thought that my days of working retail were far in my past. I was wrong.

Recently, my catering company sent me to work two days at Warner Brother’s Studio, for a job described as “coffee service”. When they found out that I had zero experience making coffee, they stuck me in the Warner Brother’s store. The store is just a big merchandise rip-off that the tourists go to after the tour of the studio. It’s full of t-shirts, mugs, key chains, posters, and everything in between that has either television shows or movies that WB makes.

To make matters worse, the boss was an incredible anal man named Robert, or Anal Bob as I referred to him. He would walk around the store and point out every t-shirt that wasn’t folded properly, every mug whose handle was not pointed out in the right direction and every person that we had not greeted properly upon them entering the store. I could care less about everything there, but I wanted to do a good job so I jumped right in.

T-Shirts

All of the t-shirts had to be folded in exactly the same manor so that whatever word was showing on the fold, was showing on all of the t-shirts in exactly the same manor. And when I say exactly, I mean EXACTLY. I can’t tell you how many shirts I folded because the “s” on a “Friends” t-shirt didn’t match up with the others. One time he took me aside and made me re-fold about 30 shirts that had the WB crest over the right chest because they were all not uniformed. So 30 minutes later, I had folded all of the shirts, they were looking good, and I was pleased. Until I turned around 30 seconds later and saw a woman who must have had NO idea what her size was because she picked up 28 of the 30 shirts and unfolded them to put them on her to see if they fit. Then she didn’t even buy one. She threw them all in a pile and walked away. I wanted to strangle her with a shirt, but I calmly walked over and re-folded them AGAIN. I figured out that if you are doing something to a pile of t-shirts or mugs, then people automatically are drawn to them and as soon as you are done, they mess them up. But I didn’t always have to fold t-shirts, I was put in charge of printing pictures for a while.

Pictures

On one of the parts of the WB tour, people stand in front of a green screen and look up at something scary. Then by the magic of special effects, they can pick up a free picture at the end of the tour that has the General Lee from the Dukes of Hazard movie jumping over them. You would have thought that this was a picture of God himself the way people would carry on about them. The tours are pretty big, and sometimes it would take a while for the pictures to be sent to the server for the gift shop. Let me tell you, if you don’t have that picture ready for the family from Milwaukee, WI as soon as they walk up, they are NOT happy about it. One woman was so scared that we had lost her family’s picture. She kept going on and on about it being missing and didn’t even say thank you when I found it and printed it off for her, because she wanted another free one and we can only give one free per group. The other copies cost $4.99, which didn’t please her even though she had just plunked down $25 for a t-shirt that simple said “ER”. One man was so taken by his picture that he kept asking for more stuff. Thankfully he was not talking to me. Here is a portion of the exchange.

Man: This picture is really great. Any way you could email me a copy?

Worker: I’m sorry sir; we don’t have the ability to email the pictures.

Man: Huh? That’s weird because I know a lot about computers and it doesn’t
Seem that hard to email it.

Worker: We have an independent server and it only hooks the computers here
there is no outside internet service.

Man: Hmmm. Could you put it on a disc for me?

Worker: Sorry sir, we don’t have that ability either, but you could buy
another copy if you would like.

Man: Noooo. I just think that it would be really easy to give people a
disc or an email. I am really good with computers so it would be no
problem for me to get it.

Worker: I’m sorry to disappoint you sir.

Man: What about different backgrounds? Any chance you have anything else?

Worker: Well, we change the background depending on what movie or TV show is
Popular at the time, but we don’t have the other backgrounds now.

Man: Wow! I know a lot about computers and it would be neat to see this
With a different background and it doesn’t seem that hard to me.

Worker: Well, they are thinking or maybe having that option in the future.

Man: Really?! When?

Worker: I don’t’ know.

Man: Any chance it would be in the next week, we leave then?

Worker: No.

Man: If I gave you my email address, could someone could let me know
When that happens, cause I know a lot about computers and it would be
No problem for me to have this sent to me with different backgrounds.

Worker: I don’t know when that would be sir?

Man: Let me give you my email address and you can let me know when that
Happens.

Worker: Okay, sir. I would be happy to do that.

Man: That’s great, cause I know a lot about computers and I would love for
this to be a Christmas card.

By the third time he said he was “good with computers” I wanted to scream at him to just make the picture himself. I know people who can put your face on Captain Kirk’s body in about 10 seconds, but apparently this supercomputer guy could figure that out. Thankfully I didn’t have to work the pictures all day, we took shifts.

Loose Keys

I was working with a woman from my company that I am friends with. Her name is Eva and she is from Austria. I went up to her during the second day and asked her if there were a lot of loose keys floating around Europe. She asked me why and I told her that every European tourist that comes in buys at least 5 key chains. She told me that they are cheap gifts to bring back to people. The cheapest key chain that we had was $5, which if it was me, I would not buy a “Gilmore Girls” key chain if it was $5. But I am not very European.

So that was a re-cap of my two days of retail hell.