Holiday Retail Jobs - why not just kick people in the genitals?

I've usually been the one of the poor people behind the cash register/on the sales floor. The worst experience I ever had was when I worked at GAP when I was about seventeen, and this woman came in on Christmas Eve and refused to leave when the mall was closing, saying she was going to finish her shopping and that if we didn't like it, we could suck it. We called security but nobody ever came, and I had to sit there for like twenty minutes yelling at this woman and she just kept burying her face in the wall of denim and flipping me off. Then I had to ring up her stupid sale rack Favorite Tees and she was so smug I almost started on fire.

Never did it, but one time when I was purchasing a cookie jar from a WB studio store, I asked the cashier if she minded hearing the same Christmas songs hourly every day for a month. "Oh...[she looked around a split-second, probably to see if there was a supervisor there, then shrugged her shoulders]...you get used to it." You could tell she was lying through her teeth.

The actual horrors of holiday retail (I worked at Monkey Ward's in '95 and '97) were overshadowed by the actual nature of the workplace: in my '95 stint, my coworker was a jarhead who mocked my long hair ("If mah kid had hurr lahk yers I'd shave his head bald") and liked to sing wacky songs about people with ten-foot penises. In my '97 stint, I was stuck in the childrens' apparel section for a few days and had to answer pertinent questions about training bras.

Training bras just don't make sense.

Michael, I had a similar experience the other day. I was chatting with the checkout chick in a book store and said "hooray! only 15 more days until you can stop listening to this horrible christmas music!" and she laughed appreciatively.

Wait...what exactly were they training bras to do?

TAKE OVER THE WORLD

It's like having training jeans or training shoes or something. It doesn't make any sense.
Also, I wish some customer would commiserate with me about the Christmas music at work. Instead, they just say things like, "Why are you PLAYING this?" and I say, "It's not my fault" and they just make nasty faces.

This thread died far too early.

I've done this twice, when I was a teenager, once at Woolworth's and once at Caldor's. It SUXORED on a scale I can only shudder at now.

However, the best experience this way was the day before Xmas, at Caldors - all along, they have this "the customer is always right!" policy where you have to be nice to people, no matter how irritating or annoying they are. The last shopping day, word came down from the supervisors "you don't have to be nice any more. Just get the people out of the shop, we don't care how!"

A month and a half of pent up aggression coming out in one go. Most shouting I've ever done in one day!

Kate, as much as I would have loved to be a fly on the wall at Caldor's just the thought of you letting rip at customers gives me the phear.

The only time I have ever done retail over the holidays is while working at the Astor Place branch of the Body Shop, and as we were all fairly happy with the job and each other, no hassles.

I read this thread title and was like, "Wow, I thought that said genitals"...then i was all like, "Whoa, it actually does say genitals".

That is all.

i am currently in this predicament. our store is not doing as well as it should, so we are understaffed at night. tuesday night, i had to pull a few hundred cds for return to the record labels, pull another hundred for transfers, and then answer the questions of 40 phone calls, and another 40 customers, all while running to the register to help customers. what makes this all annoying is that most of the transfers must be found in the barely sorted christmas sections. most of the questions revolve around those sections too. i end up spending a lot of time reading the tracklisting of various trans-siberian orchestra cds over the phone and listening to people try and figure out which one they want. sucks. when i am not fielding those kinds of questions (btw. dont bother your salespeople with christmas music questions. buy the vince guaraldi record, and the booker t and the mgs record and you will be COVERED for christmas music!), i am answering dumb questions about music from people who dont come into music stores during the other 11 months of the year. as for that, all i have to say is that. ladies and gentleman of alexandria, VA: Ryuchi Sakamoto is not brazillian, no, i DONT know which windham hill compilation is appropriate for your schoolteacher friend and her special-ed studens, and no, i do not know which music would be right for you guitar-playing, soft-rock0listening third cousin. and as for our regular clientele, you "authenticity" loving motherfuckers, i have never given a shit about the new trailer bride album, and i never will. for the rest of you, we are currently out of stock ont he new sarah brightman and opera babes cds. now fuck off so i can put the latest kraftwerk album on the system and go have a cigarette!

I work in a Sainsbury's, but am so anti-social and generally distracted looking that I'm not allowed to actually sit on the checkouts anymore lest I fuck up the mystery customer score and get the manager lynched. Instead I now push trolleys around a car park like the Sisyphus of Retail. There are worse things, and it dodges all the Xmas rush bullshit

I worked in a newly-opened chain bookstore on Cape Cod during the Xmas season of 1997. Some of you may remember this was about the time 'Titanic' came out, so guess what was on rotation in the CD carousel--if it wasn't some drippy Putumayo 'world' music, we had to live through what felt like hours of a sinking ship, followed by that noxious Celine Dion song. I can't seem to think of any specifically Xmas related stupidity though, it all blends into one long season of customer idiocy and/or complaints about nothing. Like the time some guy paid for his CD entirely in pennies. Or the woman who sent her young (and obviously mentally impaired) son to do a complicated video exchange, and then began yelling at me from across the huge store once she could sense the manager and I were failing to understand what he wanted. Or the man who loudly demanded a recipe for shad roe. The woman who refused to believe we didn't have a photocopier for public use...IN A BOOKSTORE. The people who came in clamoring for 'that blind tenor on PBS' and then looked at me sceptically when I assured them Andrea Bocelli is the only blind tenor currently available. And I once had to tell a woman the difference between a CD and a cassette.

Her, holding up a Celine Dion CD: 'Now, what shape is this?'
Me: '...it's...round, about this big' (makes circular shape with hands)
Her: 'Now, the ones that go in my car are shaped like this,' (draws rectangle in the air)
Me: 'Oh you want a cassette'

Argh, the whining about parking, the credit cards that were thrown at me, the guy who actually stepped on me once as I tried to shelve books, the leering men slavering over '1000 Nudes'...I am SO GLAD I no longer work there. It's amazing how having a counter between you and a stranger alters human decency for the worse. I could go on with the tales of horror, but I'll stop now.

"opera babes" ??

Winter, 1999, Amazon.com -- I was an editor but had to work customer service for 3 weeks up until X-mas time. I'd broken my leg during the WTO nonsense that year, and was staying at a friend's while about to get divorced from my ex-wife. Good times.

Everyone else was shipped off to Fernley, NV to work in the warehouse -- 12 hour shifts my coworkers had to put in -- but still I'd rather have done THAT than customer service on the phone, the first year that AMZN decided it was wal-mart and could sell people everything under the sun. Ahh, the repercussions

CUST: I've been on hold for 20 fucking minutes.
ME: Sorry to hear that ma'am. How can I help you?
CUST: Well, I've ordered a gameboy for Timmy. X-mas is in 3 goddamn days. You people have sent me the batteries I ordered, they came in their own box, that was interesting.
ME: Yes?
CUST: And you sent me the 4 games that I ordered for Timmy.
ME: Uh huh?
CUST: But NO SHITTING GAME BOY!!! And Toys R Us doesn't have them anymore. Ohhhh they had them back when I PLACED the order with you all, thinking it would save me time, and it would save me money. So am I going to get my Gameboy or not?
ME: Hold on and I'll see if there is anything I can do. I'm very sorry ma'am, but I cannot locate a single unit in any of our warehouses. I'll gladly refund your shipping on all the items you've received thus far, and I can offer you a ten dollar gift certifica...
CUST: Screams, hangs up.

Work in a guitar shop. There, the customer is never right, and even other customers have no sympathy for each other. In most towns instrument stores are clustered together so you can just shrug and say "go across the street, then" whenever somebody questions you on anything. People were always being ejected by security for no reason. I used to demand to work whenever there was a holiday or post-holiday sale, you could get away with just about any form of aggression as long as a customer was the target.

jbr - they actually exist... look them up in amg... they are "classical crossover"... CLASSICAL CROSSOVER!

speaking of opera babes -- one of the "similar/related artist" entries for maria callas' in her own words is crass' penis envy. that's so awesome.

similar/related album, that is

oh god, aaron has basically summed up the past 3 weeks for me EXACTLY. except he forgot the part about all the janky middle aged women who come in lusting after the new josh "grogan"/groban album. oh, and the idiots who come in demanding that they be given their money back for the cd they bought last week because it skips - and well yea it bloody well must skip by the looks of the bottom of it - BECAUSE YOU OBVIOUSLY PUT IT ON THE ROAD AND DROVE OVER IT WITH YOUR FOUR WHEELER 98253 TIMES AND THEN WIPED YOUR DORITO-FINGERS ON IT.