Paddy, of Dillinger Four fame, offered this bit of advice to those in the crowd: “Steal as much as you possibly can. Your boss is fucking you, why not fuck him?” He mulled it over for a second and then amended his words. “Well, not my boss. He’s actually a pretty cool guy. But man, bosses past…”
The worst part about working retail is the way it reduces human interaction to dollar signs, the way it synchronizes your mind and movements with the impossible quotas foisted upon you. Morning pep rallies and condescending glares from shoppers. The hellish glow of fluorescent lights leaching your humanity from you. Celebrate, loyal Americans, the specter of mutated Taylorism! Celebrate downcast, defeated eyes!
There are things that can make even a lousy job tolerable: fun coworkers, a living wage, a sense of purpose, or the sacrifice of bringing home the bacon for your spouse and kids. None of these things apply to me. The spasmodic doors of the toy store look like the gnashing jaws of Hell most days, malfunctioning and attempting to grab me in their vice-like grip. If this seems like an exaggeration, it is because everything about my job is exaggerated: my manufactured, syrupy sweet voice and my spastic motions as I throw toys on shelves, those cheap plastic vessels that burrow into a child’s heart for a few days, weeks, months and then end up in a landfill. Do your job. Stick to the script. A little subterfuge here, a phony ingratiation to the boss there. Busy, busy, busy. For the love of God, look busy. It’s like this for most people, most jobs. Part underpaid actor, part uniformed sociopath. It poisons my soul, almost convinces me to start smoking full-time again just to make the poison palpable. On the worst days it makes me want to abscond to the woods and write manifestos on rock walls in deer blood.
When I first started working at the toy store, hired as a seasonal grunt to unload trucks and stock shelves during the Christmas rush, the doors were locked by the manager each night at 10 p.m. and not opened again until 7 or 8 a.m., when all our work was done or the store inevitably opened for business. There were of course security reasons for this. Still, I couldn’t help but feel that they may as well have shackled us together, a tangled knot of surly humanity marching from aisle to aisle, prodded by the inspiring words, “No one leaves until all this stuff gets put out. C’mon, guys.” For two weekends the company experimented with keeping its doors open twenty-four hours. Who in their right mind, you ask, would possibly need or want to shop for toys at three or four in the morning? Apparently the public asked themselves the same question because I can count on one hand how many people actually came in. I spent my nights hovering near the cash register and idly chatting with the security guard, a racist ex-cop who was getting paid over three times as much as me to sit in a chair with a gun on his hip, sometimes dozing off, sometimes spilling ice cream on his pants.
They offered to keep me on after Christmas and I was desperate enough to say yes. With a relatively meaningless college diploma and a tanking economy framing my options for the next few months, even the bottom of the barrel began to look good. How else would I make payments on the money that funded my meaningless college diploma? Consider it accommodation for a paltry paycheck, sacrifice in order to salvage the part of myself that never truly clocks in. The nature of work has changed since Christmas, though. No longer is it strictly a mad rush to get stuff on shelves. I still unload trucks each week, arriving at 4 a.m., but merchandising is now paramount. The bosses seem to think stocking shelves requires the attention and care of a diamond appraiser, not the indifference of someone getting paid barely above minimum wage. Since I’m also working daylight hours now, when the store is open, they have me jockeying cash registers and foiling the attempts of honest, abiding customers to return faulty merchandise at the service desk: me, the hired asshole, as thin line between waste and profit, a line I care nothing for but must uphold for the sake of my job. Sorry, it’s company policy. Read the fine print. Amazingly, the computers are even set up in such a way that exceptions generally cannot be made.
The worst part is the quotas, which the bosses innocuously call “goals.” When we unload trucks, a physically demanding task in plenty of ways, we are expected, with a skeleton crew not really big enough for the job, to unload 1,300 to 2,000 boxes in less than two hours. One person climbs aboard the truck and sets up a metal conveyor belt. Boxes slide down the conveyor to awaiting workers who sort them based on tags and then load them onto wooden pallets. Stacking boxes is a precarious matter since they come in all shapes and sizes. Imagine Tetris mixed with Jenga, except it really, really sucks when the stack falls. When enough boxes are piled on any given pallet, someone has to stop what they’re doing, grab a pallet jack, and drag the product out to its section of the floor to await spreading. This excursion to the sales floor deprives the line of a sorely needed person and brings the entire process to a halt, boxes getting jammed and backed up on the conveyor, the boss unreasonably bitching even though all of this could have been avoided if they had scheduled an adequate number of people, something the profit margins of course forbid. When all the product and pallets are taken out, we are given a fifteen minute break. Most workers rush outside to suck down two or three cigarettes, and the rest, myself included, stay inside the break room and stare at bottles of soda, often in absolute silence, already tired and wanting to get the hell out of there.
After the break, we grab boxes off of pallets and throw them into the aisles where they belong, prepping them for unpacking; this is called spreading. When that is done, we are expected to individually unpack and shelve thirty boxes an hour, a complete impossibility, especially when it is taken into consideration that entire sections must often be rearranged, metal hooks retrieved, price tags printed out, etc. We work hard but it is never enough. Normally there are multiple pallets we are unable to get out by the 10 a.m. deadline, so we are forced to backstock them, which creates a huge ordeal since the company’s lack of foresight in scheduling enough people extends not only to truck days but to normal operating days. The result is a logjam of tasks assigned to workers over the coming days, tasks they do not have enough time to complete on top of the other things they are expected to do—help customers, run register, etc. It all builds up and overflows into the next week, when we receive another truck and the cycle begins anew, a cumulative snowball effect that ensures we’re always behind. Each week our bosses castigate us for our inefficiency, our failure charted on a large graph by a big red dot that dives below the unwavering blue line mapping acceptable output. I leave each of these “truck days” sweaty, sore, and trailed by the measured belligerence of the bossman.
Running register is no different. We receive a sheet of quotas telling us what we are supposed to sign people up for at the point-of-purchase. In a five hour shift it is not uncommon to be expected to sell $50 worth of batteries, $35 worth of warranties, and to sign up thirty people for a Rewards Card, three people for a credit card, and ten people for the Birthday Club promotion. All of this, too, is impossible. People generally do not want these things, nor do they want to be asked these questions. They want to buy their stuff and get the hell out the door, and yet there I am, standing between them and the exit, asking them question after question.
“Would you like to save 10% on your purchase by signing up for a credit card?”
“May I please have your phone number?”
“Do you have a Rewards Card? Well, would you like to sign up for one?”
“Do you have a son or daughter? Would you like to sign them up for the Birthday Club?”
“If you’re interested, there’s a warranty available for this. $2.99 for fifteen months.”
“Do you need any batteries?”
“Need any gift receipts?”
Many customers can’t take it, rightfully so, and begin to cut me off or yell at me. At the end of my shift, most of my quota categories are big goose eggs. This does not please the bosses.
I’ve always considered myself a reasonably good worker, the type of person who shows up on time and sweats more than need be for the pittance I’m being paid. I’ve never been able to heed the words of Paddy and his ilk, never been able to steal outright from my employer. I worked for two years at Dairy Queen and over five years at Tower Records, never having a problem with management at either job. I aspired to bigger and better things, of course, but I did my job properly, received my paycheck, and they left me alone. It’s different at the toy store. A friend’s sister used to work there, and when she heard that I’d bitten the bullet and agreed to don the douchebag uniform of red polo and black slacks, she said only, “You poor, poor thing.” She knew then what I know now: some companies remain profitable not solely through their business model or market niche but by squeezing as much productivity out of their workers as possible, keeping things understaffed and high-pressure and then looking you over like a puppy who has shit the carpet when your shift’s up. Considering the way things are right now, I should probably feel lucky just to have a job. But that’s a copout. It’s not as simple as that. Take, for example, my coworker Lisa, a thirty-something year old mother who lost her home in a fire and never received the insurance payoff because of a technicality. I work with a lot of people like her—thirty- and forty-somethings trying to support themselves and their kids amid mounting bills. They form a choir of “How the fuck am I supposed to do this? How the fuck am I supposed to do this?” What good is a job if you can’t survive on it?
Mark, an old acquaintance of mine who I haven’t talked to in years, is my all-time retail hero. He got a job at one of the big box stores when he was hard-up for money. Rather than attempt to reconcile his ideals with his shitty environment, he waged a full-scale war of sabotage against the company. While unloading trucks, he would throw entire boxes of perfectly good product into the trash compactor, blow his nose in linens and towels, and smash lamps and dishware for the hell of it. What did any of this amount to? Nothing much, really. But he did manage to cordon off a part of himself that wasn’t for sale. He accepted money from a company whose values disgusted him and in return repaid them with shards of glass and mangled merchandise. He escaped from that crucible of quotas and talk of “team members” with his dignity.
The toy store is not the worst job I’ve ever had, not by a long shot. I was once a telemarketer. Lured by the promise of $12 an hour plus commission, I showed up at an office suite on Route 20 for an interview. The interview consisted of making sure that I was indeed a living, breathing human, and then they showed me to a cubicle and strapped a headset on me. There were no windows at all and I couldn’t see my neighbors over the walls of the cubicle. The boss played really loud techno music. He liked to keep things “high energy.” A script lay in front of me. I would be cold calling people from all over the country and selling magazine subscriptions to them. I heard the words “fuck you” shouted in so many different regional accents that it eventually became a travelogue of malaise—Brooklyn, Midwest, southern California, Southern accents that could’ve been from anywhere. I traveled there in my mind, loosing myself from that basement office suite, curses rammed into my ear like leis being draped around my neck. The only people who bought subscriptions from me were elderly folks, and all they really wanted was someone to talk to. In between hashing out the details of the subscriptions they were being coerced into buying, they’d tell me about sons and daughters who never visited anymore, medical conditions that kept them up nights. I began to feel like a beta fish, boxed in and ready to attack. Give me my reflection and I will butt heads with it; give me a mirror and I will turn my face into rivulets of blood. I sat in that cubicle and contemplated the coming hours, the coming days, the coming weeks, months, years—my life. I got up and left. I was a telemarketer for three hours.
A sacrifice or an accommodation can become a lifetime. A job taken for short-term reasons can become the arena in which the rest of your life plays out. I’m situated at the intersection of downward pull and steady trajectory, the child of a lower-middle/middle-middle class upbringing, warned by my father for as long as I can remember—as far back as 3rd grade—that when I grew up there’d “barely be a middle class anymore.” Everything would be stratified into rich and poor. It may sound like the paranoid ranting of a suburban class warrior, but there’s a nugget of truth to it, and it accounts for my parents’ insistence that I pursue higher education. Become a professional. Become middle-class. Throw yourself into the gears of bureaucracy until they can’t untangle you from the machinery and cast you down with the rest of the dispossessed. Fight your fight so you can fight for others. Cast off the moorings of frivolous things. Become a purposeful, deliberate being. Just as there must be preconditions for a successful revolution, a culture of abundance that does not supplant one form of poverty for another, arguably so too must there be a threshold, a physical and spiritual subsistence from which opportunity flowers, a bare minimum to hinge life’s possibilities on. Could I ever be happy on $10,000 a year? Yes and no, but mostly no, I think. Accumulation, status symbols, planned obsolescence—I want none of it. But give me the means to make a life for myself. Give me shelter, give me health, give me leisure, give me books and paper and pen, give me an allegiance to humanity unencumbered by archaic allegiances to company or state. Give me my demands for a life, my life.