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But anyway, as I was considering topics for the one last free post this web site owed youall yesterday, three topics came to mind. I'm asking you to vote, this weekend, on which post goes live Monday: "More People Who Don't Pay Workers" or "'The Star-Spangled Banner' Explained for Children and Foreigners."
If you have a preference between these two, please use the comment section (yes, Google wants you to get there through Google +; yes, they've really tried to streamline Google + so that it runs slowly but safely on older/smaller devices). In the absence of comments I'll decide based on what the computer tells me about where this web site is currently being read, and this week it's appeared that readership is way up in Turkey where, reportedly, this site has become relevant because some international corporations are refusing to pay workers. If you are a teacher/homeschooler who'd rather read about "The Star-Spangled Banner," please weigh in.
The topic that won out for today was suggested by a Twit who I'm reasonably sure doesn't liiike me, and never will. I want to heap coals of fire on his head.
Also, this morning, even as I was thinking (in response to a particularly annoying comment) "No! The solution is not to feed the Gimmee Monster by whining that vendors can't afford to support the fire department! For a V.F.D. that actually saves people's houses we should be willing to pay ten dollars. The solution is for shoppers to plan on spending their $200 in the Friday Market. When they go to Wal-Mart, that's where they should pinch off the one-dollar bills!"--at the same time I was thinking, "Hey, today books are moving faster than junkfood and dust catchers! How pleasant to see so many active senior citizens who've invested in the right glasses so they can read real books, instead of paying twice or ten times as much for electronic adaptations." I share this Twit's inclination to be cheerful.
Someone, apparently a retail employee, had tweeted, "It is basic human decency to not throw books at people."
On Twitter people will argue almost anything--I also tweeted, recently, that although they exploited German Christians as much as they could the top Nazis preferred Thor and Odin to Jesus, and somebody replied that he did too--so I suppose it's somewhat encouraging that apparently nobody took the position that it's fun or justifiable or something, when you're buying some nice books as a present for a nice friend, maybe to age the books so they don't look so guilt-inducingly new by bashing them against the counter, or maybe against the clerk if he or she was wearing an annoying shirt...(Some people seem to be taking the designation of "Real Twits" literally. Duh. That was a joke.)
What the original tweet brought to my mind was a scenario where this grumpy old geezer walks into a bookstore, and he's grumpy because the cold weather is aggravating his rheumatism, and because the only book he remembered having read to him when he was the age of the grandchild for whom he's shopping was a Bobbsey Twins book, and because he asked this clerk for a Bobbsey Twins book and the clerk said "Oh, no, sir, those actually went out of print because so many baby-boomers thought they were incredibly lame and also racist, sexist, and elitist, but we do have the Little House books, y'know, like 'Little House on the Prairie'?"...
...and old Grumpy McGrumpalot is one of the very few people who didn't like "Little House on the Prairie," so he growled at the clerk and prowled around the children's shelves for himself and picked out a book by its cover...
...and as he shuffled toward the counter his cane bumped against a stand-up display in the aisle. And he haaates to have anyone see him stumble. So he throws that book onto the counter and snarls "Why don't you keep the floor clean? This store's a @#$% MESS!" as he recovers his balance and digs for his bank card.
I can believe people who buy books sinking that low; it's about the only way I can believe book buyers being that mean, apart from crime fiction scenarios where somebody buys a book to distract attention while his buddy stashes the stolen diamonds inside the hollowed-out book he sticks behind the display, etc.
Anyway someone in my Twitter stream did feel a need to retweet that basic human decency teaches us not to throw books at people, so I saw that person's comment, "your annual pre-holiday reminder that retail employees are human beings & how you treat them is who you are as a person ".
I normally expect retail employees to be human beings. I have occasionally been disappointed. Some of them are pondscum that's been stuffed into human shapes by Satan. In any case I object vigorously to the idea that retail employees have any kind of right to judge their customers "as persons."
Back when I was young enough to be taken seriously when I was willing to consider jobs as a retail employee, the rule for retail employees was to leave your silly little ego at home. You're young, you're cute, you're hired for those reasons, so in a clean and legal and indirect way you are a sort of high-grade sex worker...and it is, or used to be, not only the right but the duty of all older people to correct that obsession with me-me-me-and-my-little-feelings that seems to be part of the experience of being nineteen years old.
Nobody wants to know your cute little name. If a customer looks at your cute little name tag, you are in trouble.
Nobody is interested in your sex life, really, except that the only reasons why customers imagine you might be in any noticeable emotional mood all have to do with your sex life. Nobody wants to know that actually your boyfriend has been as supportive as a nineteen-year-old boy can be about the fact that you sat up crying all night last night because your best friend was killed in a head-on collision with a homicidal truck driver.
Nobody is interested in your health, either, except that if you are ill customers are going to skip the boringly probable explanations about flu, mono, being on your feet all day, etc., and attribute anything less than cheerleader-level perkiness to your using illegal drugs, being pregnant, or (if possible) both.
And as if that weren't bad enough, some full-grown people also chastise you if you're not ill. Peer pressure is the only thing that keeps a lot of nineteen-year-olds from spending a lot of the time leaping around the room, squealing that they can catch the sun in their hands and light up the sky like a flame. After all, they're nineteen, they're full of hormones, so if they're not ill or in mourning they probably feel incandescent...
...But no. The thing being a retail employee is meant to teach young people is that, whether you're in mourning, or freshly dumped, or feeling that you're going to live forever and learn how to fly, your job is not about you. It's about the customers. You're being paid to make them want to come back. Pleasant though it might be if customers thought you were as adorable as your mother thinks or as cute as your girlfriend thinks, customers are not being paid. You may not think you're being paid much. You may actually be underpaid, or you may be living in a place where rent rates are controlled, all right, but they're not controlled by people taking minimum-wage workers into consideration (e.g. Washington). But you're being paid, and the customer is not being paid. You're working, and the customer is supposed to be, to some degree, having fun. So how you, the retail employee, treat the customers is who you are as a person.
Some customers are, in literal fact, insane. Some customers are walking around on antipsychotic medications. For some customers those medications are not working. The person who retweeted the original comment also tweeted about "the dude who threatened to report us to the better business bureau bc the gift he bought his wife had not gotten him laid ".
Sometimes retailers would be better served if they could afford to hire $250-per-hour specialists in the care and management of lunatics. Instead, they hire the very young, pay them the minimum wage, and expect them to do the best they can with those lunatics. And it's actually beneficial for the young to suffer through this, because, along with the discovery that their own emotional feelings don't matter anywhere near as much as it feels as if they do, the young also discover that it's possible to work around the demented but nonviolent customers and their moods. This is how the young begin to learn the real spiritual practice of compassion, as distinct from the hormone reaction that feels like surplus empathy and causes some of the young to start bawling because the rain on the windowpane reminds them of tears for all the people who've ever died, boohoohoo.
It's how the young become people who, when they get paid and start shopping, don't throw things at other retail employees, even if those other retail employees are like total losers who once scored an own goal in the Homecoming football game and are also wearing incredibly annoying shirts and aftershave that smells so bad you're sure it will soon be identified as a carcinogen.
Also, with proper management, the young become people who, instead of gossipping about people who have obviously walked or taken a bus to the store and who only ever buy the items on the red-hot sale and never buy the profitable items the manager expects people to buy along with the sale items, learn to thank those people for spending any of their money in the store at all.
In my corner of the world we have some very badly managed stores where this is not happening...but what should be happening, any time retail employees start finding fault with customers, is that a manager immediately barks "Shut up with that gossip! Go and mop the bathroom floor! No more breaks for you at the same time anyone else is on a break, Little Miss Mouth, and if you think you've got anything else to say, get over here and I'll tape your @#$% yap hole...By the way, I don't trust you with a regular mop. You're so stupid you think the customers are here to please you! When you mop the bathroom floor, you get down on your knees and use a hand rag!"
Because the very young do not develop compassion for poor old Grumpy McGrumpalot when adults worry about their cute little feelings. They develop it when, and while, they work for old-school drill sergeant types. Only when they reach the stage of feeling compassion for the said old-school drill sergeant types, themselves, can they be considered adult enough for jobs that pay more than the minimum wage and also, not coincidentally, raise the young people even onto the very lowest rung on the ladder of office hierarchy.
So my comment was "No, how retail employees treat *customers* is who *they* are as people. They're paid. Customers are paying. Make shopping fun! "
Well, what would anyone expect? Many Twits are very young, which is understandable...and stupid, which is a choice, but not understandable. They wanted to defend their little egos. Someone thought they'd "found the person who treats retail employees like"...a rude word for what some ego-obsessive retail employees may actually be, although I never treat people like that until they've demonstrated that it's what they are.
What retailers (and conscious, public-spirited customers) treat ego-obsessed retail employees like is, in fact, something that needs to be flushed out of sight and buried underground. What comes to my mind is pondscum, but if you prefer to think of things that smell worse, that's up to you.
But another kid posted, more appealingly: "10:00 a. m. & I had a hungover guy scream at me for being "too cheerful."...I guess I wasn't making things fun enough for him, idk. Or maybe I just deserved abuse bc I was making minimum wage. "
Or maybe, dear child, it's not about you. Maybe he was screaming just because he was in pain. Maybe you're old enough to be able to imagine the pain he was in, and feel sorry for him...and, if all he did was vent his misery, instead of making trouble for you with your employer, give thanks.
Maybe you can learn something about modulating your self-expression to match someone else's. I don't know how you express yourself, or whether it would be entirely good to try to monitor and modulate your expression of cheerful moods. If that is something you want to do, maybe you can practice observing other people's moods and matching the pitch and pace and so on when you interact with them. Maybe it's better for humankind, in your corner of the world, if you just don't take "hungover" people too seriously; after all they're the ones who made the conscious decisions that produced the curdled moods they're expressing.
It's not possible to charge in, with your ego and your feelings foremost, and singlehandedly force people to have fun. (Many shoppers prefer to browse in silence.) Grumpy McGrumpalot is not having a good day, and nobody can give him one. It's possible that the nicest thing you can do for him is be quiet and unobtrusive.
What you can do is make sure that you are not spoiling the shopping experience. Watch people's body language carefully; be aware even though some (sick, crazy, messed-up, extrovert) shoppers want other people to recognize them and chatter at them, a lot of other shoppers' idea of fun is just browsing in peace, finding things they like, and hearing you thank them when you take their money. (Encourage those people; they'll happily pay prices you might have been willing to let them haggle down.) Try to make sure you look and sound friendly, but not pushy. When it's obvious that people are having a bad day, empathize.
When it's obvious that people are at best unpleasant, and quite likely barking mad, get out of their way.
You can "be assertive" about things like making sure customers pay for things they start to carry out of the store--in situations where there's a clear, objective outcome that you have a right to insist on--but trying to "be assertive" about your own emotional feelings is self-destructive stupidity. When the source of your distress is that people obviously don't think you're wonderful and adorable and special, the best thing to do is put your big-kid pants on and be satisfied that there are other people who think you're enough of those things to have allowed you to form any expectation that anybody ever would think that.
Always remember: you're getting paid; the customers are paying. Your reward for what you're doing in the store is money; the customer's reward is satisfaction. Don't be greedy. You're entitled to use your money, once you've earned it, to become a customer and expect satisfaction from the people you are paying. Meanwhile, take what's coming to you and don't try to grab at what's coming to someone else.
As a retail employee, all you should expect others to recognize you as being is a part of a store. You are not the big attraction. Deal with this. The merchandise is the attraction. You are an object your employer is using to help people enjoy the merchandise. You can "be a person" on your own time. While you're working in the store, your employer's options are to use you or to use a machine. If the employer chooses to use a machine to replace you, then you won't even be getting any money you can use to become a customer.
Do you, dear child, seriously believe that the idea that nobody should ever act hungover and hostile in your presence is something you made up all by yourself? Of course it's not. It's something that's been fed to you by people who had an agenda. Retail employees have been taught for years that enduring people's projections of their own little mood swings was part of the job. It didn't become something terribly hurtful for "a person" (a very special little snowflake) like you until payment-processing machinery started to be manufactured.
When I was the age of the people who are currently working as minimum-wage retail employees, I had enough talent that most of the time I had slightly better paid jobs as a typist. At that time, the normal career progression for typists was to work up to being secretaries, who "knew the secrets" of the company--enough that, once in a decade or so, you heard of one of them being promoted to a decision-making position. Also at that time, people were telling us that it was terribly demeaning and hurtful for us to be treated like secretaries, who were often (oh, how sexist!) expected to make coffee and sometimes (oh, how abusive!) trusted to run errands, even buy presents, or play hostess at company parties or something.
Funnily enough, I didn't mind making coffee, running errands, or even chatting up the winners of high school essay contests at parties. I didn't know any grown-up secretaries who minded that, either.
What we did mind was that, as executives and managers were bombarded with this strange new idea that it was cruel to employ secretaries, they were also being sold computers--and suddenly typing jobs became much fewer, much more poorly paid, much deader-ended.
Retail employees can profit by the example of secretaries. When people encourage you to whine about whether or not people are recognizing you "as a person," you need to be aware that their long-range goal is to make everyone so sensitive about your "being a person" that no one with a conscience could possibly offer you any kind of job unless, and until, you've gone all the way through medical school.
So, if you really are cheerful...since I do prefer being thanked for my money by a young person rather than a robot, by all means, stay cheerful. And let that cheerfulness sustain you while customers relax from the stresses of their lives by being scary-quiet or annoying-chatty or loud or verbose or hostile or gloomy or whatever else they happen to be...and then you can go home and cheerfully spend your money.
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