It’s really frustrating, and I can’t understand it.  I know the economy is bad, but it must be REALLY bad when places like Target aren’t even hiring.  To add even further curiosity to the mix, even UPS isn’t hiring.  UPS!  How can UPS not be hiring?  It makes no sense.

I’m still cautiously optimistic though.  I do have to admit, however, that there was no way I expected getting a job to be anywhere near this hard.  I have more than two decades of work experience, and fourteen years of that in management and supervisory positions!  When Radio Shack sends me an e-mail saying that I don’t meet their qualifications, I just have to laugh at the absurdity!  I could probably build a Radio Shack out of the spare parts in my closet, and then manage it with utmost efficiency and profitability.  Why do they bother to post job listings when they simply turn away qualified candidates?  Absurd.

Sorry if I seem like a schmuck.  I’m not trying to come across as some kind of braggart.  I’m not at all.  I lack a lot of formal education, because of poor choices in my youth, so I have to draw attention to the skills and experience that I have.  I am damn good at assessing situations and motivating people to do good work.  I’ve had way too much success to say otherwise, and I don’t think that’s bragging at all.  I have tons of computer and technical knowledge, and I’m good under pressure and in complex situations.  I’m not perfect, but then again no one is.  I can still bring a lot of experience and ability to any job, if they’d only give me a chance.

I’m pushing forward.  Just today I’ve applied for two jobs so far, and I have several job sites bookmarked, which I check frequently for updates.  It’s almost becoming an obsession.  You know you’re in trouble when every time you get in the car to drive somewhere, you constantly scan storefronts and shopping areas for “help wanted” signs.  I’m not destitute by any means, but I’m annoyed.  I want to get a job and be done with this worry. 

How did we ever come to this?  Isn’t this the land of opportunity?  What opportunity is there when someone with more than a decade of retail management experience can’t get hired at Radio Shack?  How did our country turn into such a mess?  I just don’t get this.

Last week was the one-year anniversary of my departure from retail, and I though it would be fun to regale a few tales of my time at Best Buy.  For old-time’s sake.

I started with Best Buy because of a girl.  I was in the store in Trotwood, Ohio one day, just browsing around looking at cool stuff, when I spied a pretty girl working at the customer service desk.  Now normally I’m a shy guy, but for whatever reason that day I got it into my head that I wanted to talk to this girl.  I approached the counter, but the only thing that I could think to say (that didn’t sound stupid) was, “hi!  Can I have an application?”  She smiled at me, a very pretty smile, and handed me a card with a phone number on it.  Of course, it was the call-in application thing, but hey, she gave me a number right?  I chickened out then of course, took the card with a smile, and went on my way.

I already had a great job as a fitness instructor at a local gym.  Part of the greatness of this job was that I worked full-time Monday through Thursday, so I figured why not get a part-time job at Best Buy, maybe selling computers on the weekend, and earn some extra cash?  Sounded good to me anyway, so I called the number and applied.

My first interview was great.  The sales manager and I hit it off great, and I got my second interview with the store manager soon after.  As I sat down with her, she looked at me appraisingly, and then told me that things had changed since my first interview.  A senior (assistant to the supervisor) position had opened up in customer service, and because of my previous management experience with other companies, would I be interested?

Long story short, I was actually promoted twice before I even started.  My first day at Best Buy I walked in as a department supervisor, in charge of tens of thousands of dollars in retail electronics and a few young employees named Brandon, Amanda, Dan, Other Amanda, and a couple more I can’t remember, and had no idea what to do.  Good times.  I remember I was with the company for the better part of a year before I really got a good grasp on what I was doing.  Trial by fire.

Oh, the girl you ask?  Her name was Sally.  Very cute blonde… worked part-time at customer service.  We never hooked up, but we were friendly with each other and chatted a few times.  I still remember her pretty smile.

That first year was tough.  I never got any real training, other than the “manual” for my department, known as the “purple book.”  I didn’t have a senior position for my area, so the whole leadership structure consisted of me.  My department was also a new thing, something that Best Buy was really counting on being the “next big thing.”  I sold cell phones, satellite TV, Web TV, and giant-ass digital cameras that you put floppy disks into.  This whole mess was termed “Cellular and Satellite Systems”, or CSS, and here I was running it with no clue.  Digital cameras I could handle, Web TV was a joke but easy, but cell phones freaked me out.  Remember, this was in 1998-99, when cell phones were all analog and about the size of a box of Kleenex.  Plus, the activation procedure was a nightmare, and the credit check and deposit was always seemingly too much for most people.

Actually, thinking back on that, I remember one time Roger Troutman came into my department.  He and his brother Larry came in sometimes, always dressed to the hilt in loud, stylish suits and throwing cash around like it was nothing.  I mean, Roger was a Funk and Hip-Hop legend, so money should be no object to him, right?  He curiously eyed some of my new Nokia 6162 cell phones –cool new styles with a “flip” cover– and asked if he could buy a few.  “Sure, no problem” I said.  I had him fill out the form and told him to hold on for a minute while I did the credit check and activation.  He said, “no way man.  I got stuff to do, places to go.  I’m a busy cat, you dig?”  He gave me his personal cell number (apparently he already had at least one cell phone) and told me to call him when the phones were ready.  Well, Roger Troutman, Hip-Hop legend, inspiration to a generation of Rap artists, and singer of “I Wanna Be your Man” and “California Love” (with Dr. Dre, no less) failed the credit check just like everyone else.  No new “flip” phone for Roger.

Not long after that, brother Larry shot Roger several times in an alley near his recording studio, and then shot himself.  Roger died in the hospital.   I don’t know if he ever got to own a “flip” phone.

I have so many memories of the last ten years.  It was my initial intention to share a few of them here, but I’m coming to realize already that my post is getting too long.  I’m wordy like that.  All I’ve written so far happened in like the first four months.  I have TEN YEARS of Best Buy memories clogging up my brain.

Would you guys actually like to hear more?  Maybe I could do a little series or something.  I surely don’t wanna annoy people with my reflections.  Still, this was a big part of my life for ten years, a part most people don’t know much about.

Leave a comment and tell me if you want more.  Or you could just say, “please stop with your boring Best Buy stories!  We want to hear more bitching about gas prices and gay people and speed-bump stoppers!”  I’d oblige naturally.

It’s good to be back!

Having worked numerous Black Fridays in retail, I know all too well what that scene might have looked like.  I’ve spent many an hour in a store during the morning hours on the day after Thanksgiving, dutifully setting up displays and attending to last minute details, all the while staring at voracious masses just outside the front door waiting with no patience to get in.  These people are sometimes completely unruly, riotous  and without regard for others.  They’ll stop for nothing or no one to reach their objective.

Have you ever seen a zombie movie?  In every one, there’s always a point where the heroes are trapped in a building or structure of some kind, while outside the undead masses — completely void of higher brain functions and of single-minded determination — scratch and claw and group in huge bunches in an attempt to seize their prey.  This is exactly what Black Friday feels like from a retail worker’s perspective.  Unwashed masses by the thousands hungering for what you have with no thought to you or your person.

Even so, I blame Wal Mart for this.  Yes, I understand the initial crush of customers that come through in the beginning, but it doesn’t have to be that way.  You need people to go out beforehand and organize the crowds.  You have to have strong, direct people to stand up and tell the crowds how things are going to be.  You need organization, you have to have discipline and order, or else someone really can get hurt.

There was absolutely NO excuse for a mad dash through the doors.  None whatsoever.  Any managers working that early morning shift deserve immediate termination for failing to contain that situation.  What’s more, I hope the family of the victim sues the ass off Wal Mart and wins millions and millions of dollars.  No, this won’t bring the victim back, but it will help Wal Mart to see the big picture here.  Someone screwed up, and someone needs to pay.

And what if you were one of those shoppers?  What if you were one of those people who literally stepped on a helpless man in a Wal Mart isle early Friday morning in an attempt to buy some stupid, pointless toy or piece of junk DVD player or a crappy TV made in Korea?  How do you live with yourself knowing you took an innocent person’s life away in your greed and your insolence?  How do you sleep, knowing that when your kids open their shitty DVD player on Christmas, you paid for it with blood?  What about that man’s kids?  Just think of how their Christmas morning will play out, murderer.  You should be ashamed at the price of your foolishness.

What is it all really worth?

Fortunately, (or unfortunately in a financial sense) it didn’t work out that way.  As you all know by now, the Big Yellow Tag decided to terminate my employment back in January over the matter of roughly $4 worth of broken DVD casing.  To add a little salt to the wound, they also challenged my Unemployment Insurance claim so that the state could deny me any sort of income after the fact.  I’m not bitter though.  In fact, I still have no regrets about it to this day, although I won’t shop there anymore.

Ten years is forever in retail terms.  In my position, which was management, the average term of employment is probably something like four or five years.  Really good managers tend to get recruited away to better-paying places, or they grow to hate policies that hold them back and leave for greener pastures, and sub-par managers tend to get weeded out.  It’s the average ones that tend to linger, and they still probably only stick around for seven or eight years.  The fact that I made it almost ten years is quite exceptional, and those that go on past ten are almost unheard of.  Retail is a harsh career, and it will swallow your soul after too long.  I’m glad I got out, regardless of how it happened.

I’ll look back with a few fond memories, and a few bitter ones.  In the end, it was a good experience overall.  I made lots of friends and got to travel the country.  It’s too bad it had to end the way that it did.

(Click for a larger, readable size.)

Ok, so it’s not technically a blog.  A blog is a web log, a term specifically created for the digital age.  You can’t just call any old bit of writing a blog, but there are similar characteristics, so I’ve decided the moniker is still a fitting one.  This would be a "blog" of mine from the dawn of the online age.  Well, not the dawn so much as maybe early morning… but still… way early on.  The year?  1995.

I came across this one whist searching an old folder in my possession.  This folder contains lots of loose bits of notebook paper, tons of photocopied sheets, and several fresh-off-the-dot-matrix printer articles written by yours truly, and a very good friend of mine, the always entertaining Claire of Claire De Lunacy fame.  There are also a few written by other contributing parties as well.  These bits of paper all came together at one time to create a masterpiece of literary importance and historical significance called, "It’s All in the Attitude."

First, a bit of history.  The Attitude came about sometime in early 1995 as a request from management for a newsletter aimed at the service department of a regional retailer named Meijer that Claire and I both worked for.  This retailer was one of the first hypermarket one-stop-shop kind of places, where you could buy all of your groceries as well as clothing or sporting goods or whatever all in one place.  These days, Wal*Mart has the corner on that concept, but this was before Sam Walton’s kids descended upon every single community on the planet with huge mega-mall parking disasters full of white trash and loiterers.  No, before Wal*Mart Supercenters, the white trash and vagrants belonged to us.  The Attitude was our release from the mayhem and our voice.

Anyway, Claire and I both worked in the customer service department as cashiers.  We’d met a year earlier when I started working there, and our personalities just seemed to click instantly.  I don’t know what else to say, but despite our differences in almost every other conceivable aspect, somehow our brainwaves just match up perfectly when we come within a certain radius of each other.  We think on the same wavelength.  At any rate, management noted our talent for humor and extreme intellectualism, as well as our propensity to charm co-workers and clown for people, and thought we’d be the perfect people to detail the daily life of a Meijer cashier in a nice, corporate-conforming newsletter aimed at the wonderful service side of a major retailer. 

Boy were they ever wrong.

Right now, Claire and my other Meijer bestest friend Jess are chuckling to themselves in a knowing way, and who’s to blame them?  Management really should have seen this coming in my opinion, and I think it’s their fault for encouraging us.  You don’t take a oppressive, horrid environment like retail, mix in a brain-dead customer base, some "colorful" management, and hand it over to the two most creative and outspoken people on your staff.  People that have the pulse of over 100 cashiers and the power of the written word at their disposal.  It is folly, to be sure.

In the beginning, we set out to adhere to conformity.  Management wanted a simple, two or three page newsletter that attended to things like dealing with customers, and shoplifting, and coupon abuse, and stuff like that.  We obliged.  Of course, all of that stuff is pretty boring, so we thought we’d spice it up a bit with some humor and inflict our own brand of wit.  After all, it must be informative as well as entertaining, right?  The first issue was pretty straightforward.  Nothing controversial at all really.  It was released to eager employees who gobbled it up and asked for more.  Management was pleased.  "Do another one!"  They said.

The second issue was anything but the first.  In it, we included our thoughts and feelings on the working atmosphere of Meijer, as well as taking a couple of shots at various procedures.  We knew this going in of course, which is why I wrote what I wrote in the article posted above (assuming you clicked it.)  It became more of a platform to express our issues than an informative newsletter, and management was not amused.  It was pulled from circulation by the store director, who had a "talk" with the service department manager, who in turn had a "talk" with us.  There were to be no more issues of the Attitude that weren’t approved beforehand.  Of course, this didn’t set well with Claire and I, who pointed out (correctly) that the employees in the store (by this time the newsletter had expanded beyond customer service) loved our writing.   We were popular and liked by the masses, because we were willing to say out loud what everyone usually only whispered to each other.  In the end, it didn’t matter.  The Attitude was over after only two issues.

There was a third issue, but it died on the operating table.  As far as I know, only one thing remains of it, even in my giant folder of goodness.  I do seem to remember that it was even more scathing than the second issue, and was bound to get us into more trouble, but at that point we didn’t care.  Claire and I were moving on to other things at that point, and Meijer was the least of our concerns.  We had fun, and in that type of environment, that’s all you had to look forward to really.

I still have a full copy of the first edition, along with all of the edited copy and loose-sheet hand-written pages, and I have the notes and a couple of articles and the artwork for the second.  The only thing left of the third is a cover picture I made.  It would have been grand, let me tell you.

I’ll close by posting Claire’s article from the first edition.  You can really get a sense of the writing styles we both possess from these and recognize them, styles that would later become blogs in the 21st century, transmitted not only to a few cashiers, but to millions of people all over the planet.  With both of our blogs, and both of our styles accessible to anyone, the Attitude lives on.

Now, ten years is a long time in retail. In that decade, I saw so many people come and go in so many ways. The turnover rate in that industry is absolutely hideous, and no one is exempt. Everyone from the lowliest part-timer to district managers, vice-presidents, and even presidents come in and go out with surprising regularity. The nature of retail is so volatile and sketchy that you never really know from one day to the next what’s going to happen. Sure, you can speculate, but you tend to be wrong more often than not. For me to survive ten years in that environment is quite the achievement. It’s actually something I’m proud of in a lot of ways.

You may ask why I spent so long working in retail. After all, isn’t that for starving college kids and just-out-of-school teenagers looking for their first jobs? Don’t retail people make minimum wage and curse themselves daily for filling out that damn application in the first place? Do you have a vast collection of plastic name tags and khaki-styled pants? How could an intelligent, college-educated person subject themselves to the torture of retail for an entire decade? Shouldn’t you be dead or in jail for shooting the place up by now?

Well, most of those are valid points. I’d say a majority of the people that work on a store level are young adults, or even outright kids. The average age is probably about twenty, give or take, and for many of them, it is their first or one of their first jobs. Retail is easy to get into, and it offers a lot of promises if you stick it out. Sadly, a vast majority (and by vast, I literally mean over 90%) don’t stick it out, and those that do realize that those promises will eventually be broken.

As for that other stuff, well, I do actually have a pretty good stash of old name tags, and I do own probably about 10 pairs of khaki pants. I’ve never actually fantasized about shooting the place up, but I’ll admit that if I were to have had, say, some sort of cool super powers, like electromagnetism, it would have potentially served me well in a number of occasions. I never worked for minimum wage though, and I actually made pretty good money at my level. The benefits were fantastic (ten years had its advantages), and there were perks, like a healthy employee discount and a good social experience.

Lest you think I’m actually advocating retail however, know that it wasn’t all fun and games. The biggest problem with retail is that it promises lots of things but doesn’t deliver. Do a search for your favorite retailer and you’ll undoubtedly come up with all kinds of articles and posts about how this person got screwed and that person got screwed and so forth. You’ll get some positive responses as well, but it only takes one negative experience to balloon out of proportion, and the whole thing collapses. Retail is hell on Earth, and you don’t have to look any farther than Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) in order to know that. It’s a day of absolute misery for employees and customers alike.

I stayed in retail for selfish reasons and stupid reasons. After a point, I made pretty good money. Money isn’t a huge driving force for me personally, but like anyone, I have to eat and have a place to live. I also have expensive hobbies, so good money was definitely a positive. As I mentioned, the benefits were good as well, so I didn’t have to worry too much about medical expenses killing me. Mostly though, it was my life. It was routine, it was normal. After so long, you get to a point where you just sort of cruise on autopilot. You don’t have to think about work, you just sorta know it’s there and you go. Like eating a meal that you don’t particularly hate or like, it’s just sustaining. You know what to expect, you know how it tastes, you know the routine and the outcome, and you just let it happen. A little effort is required here and there, but nothing too spectacular. You just drone on, day after day in sort of a numb capacity. It becomes who you are and how you define yourself. You stop thinking about it.

This is so unhealthy. You should never, never let a job you don’t care for define your life. If you love what you do, say if you’re a musician or an artist or whatever, and you are lucky enough to make a living from that, then that’s a different story. I’m not a retailer though. That’s what I did, not what I am. My existence became about going to work, getting my paycheck, then getting some sleep so I could go back to work again the next day. That’s no way to live.

A parting shot

So today I’m looking at my finances and I discover that I’ve received a paycheck from my former employer. Now, It’s been four and a half weeks since my liberation, and they’ve already paid me for my vacation hours and whatnot, so I’m a little surprised. I logged on to my direct deposit account, and low and behold, I see this:

This is an actual screen grab of my paycheck. I’ve taken the liberty to blacken out the sensitive stuff, but I highlighted some things to prove my point.

Firstly, I know that I have no argument in this case. I know that this is all perfectly legal and I have no recourse. I’m simply posting this because IT SUCKS. It’s a perfect example of why so many people can never get ahead, and that there are certain rules and laws in effect for no reason other than to make life harder.

As you can see, during my last dying gasp with the company I managed to accrue 4.62 extra hours of vacation time beyond what they paid me after termination, at a rate of 16.15 per hour. This equates to $74.63 in taxable earnings. However, they’ve deducted $56.61 in pre-tax dollars for my health plan. This is all well and good, except that my health plan was discontinued last month. As of January 31st, I was no longer covered by my health care plan. What does this mean? Exactly. I just paid $56.61 for nothing. Gone. Vanished into thin air, never to be seen again. I get absolutely no benefit from that $56.61 at all. Nothing. That money was stolen from me.

I know this is an automatic process. Still, it feels like they screwed me. It feels like a knife in my back. It’s not enough to take away my livelihood and my means of supporting myself, no… You have to dangle a tiny carrot in front of my face, and then snatch it away at the last second while laughing gleefully at my expense. I get $16 of my original $75. A pittance. Somewhere, the retails gods are rolling on the floor in a fit of laughter and spite. I can just hear them now. Fat bastards.

Happier even though

I don’t regret my time in retail. It’s given me invaluable experience in dealing with people, it’s given me a skill set that can prove handy in other aspects of my life, and it’s given me some friends that I’ve come to know over the years. It’s also given me some money that I was able to invest and live off for the time being until I find a new job. Still, what did I trade for that time? What did I give up to get these things? Was it worth it? Was the price too high? It’s hard to say right now. I can say this though, I’m happier without it. The job I mean. It was eating me from the inside out, and controlling my life in a way that I didn’t like. It was like a cancer growing and stealing away precious time. You should work to live, not live to work. Life comes first, job comes later. Notice I didn’t say second… I said later. These things I’ve had lots of time to ponder over the last few weeks, and in the end I have to admit, I’m happier now. I have more control over my life, and I don’t miss the old job one bit.

Now it’s time to move on and find my path.

Here’s to the future.

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