It’s been a hell of a couple of days. As I always mention on these posts, my “normal” job is retail work, specializing in a retail sector that includes gaming and electronics, among other things, and as you probably know, this past Friday was the most horrible day of the year for retail workers: Black Friday, that horrible tradition of hyper sales on special items to “kick off” the holiday season, which the way things are honestly starts sometime in September, cranks up in October, then finally flares up in November, with the “final battle” so to speak being the month between now, and Christmas.
Anyway, it’s a hell of a day. Well, more of hell of a weekend, one that isn’t over yet – I still have Sunday to deal with! That being said, it generally starts on Thursday now. That’s right, on Thanksgiving day! Usually sometime in the afternoon / evening, rather than midnight now, the sales begin, often in waves for larger stores (for example, some at 6, some at 8, then some at 10 or 12) while smaller stores just fire away with the sales. Thankfully, my place isn’t to terrible on that day. Friday itself was something else, but Thursday was alright. Funny how that is.
People were pretty cool. I only had a few people who were less than enjoyable, wondering why some areas, namely electronics, were “blocked off” and getting quite mad, for some reason, when it was explained to them to go around the long ways to get to that area, and that it was secured to keep too many people from entering and making us unable to help them. Sorry convenience to the shopper is a problem for you! (I’m not sorry, that’s sarcasm, just to clarify.)
The other case of an unlikable person was a guy who felt that our counter, where, you know, we are checking out customers on the busiest day of the year, is a place to sit toy-to-life game figures and sort them for his upcoming purchase, completely blocking my friends ability to check out his next customer! What’s worse, when I get to helping this guy when he was FINALLY done selecting his figures, he then wants to check them all out, pulling them out of the position I had them in, which helped me to very quickly scan them, and turned them around so he could make sure he didn’t have duplicates. Needless to say, on this very busy day, he didn’t turn them back around. He didn’t even seem to realize he had caused several issues in his near 30 minutes of hunting and pecking for a grand total of 12 toy figures for video games. Let me also make note here that this man was probably around 40-45 range, easily, if not slightly older.
Beyond that, though, most people were nice and understanding. We actually had plenty of items, at least in electronics, and items didn’t sell out immediately – they were available for some time.
The only thing I hated out of all of it, in the long run, was the grand total of 20 times people asked about the NES Classic Edition. It’s known to not be available, stop asking people! Any bit of online research and you can learn just how scarce the item is, but people kept asking, not just Thursday, but through Friday as well – even if we had any, they would have sold by then, since it happened to be the busiest day of the year!
Friday really was rough, with many more unlikable people. It wasn’t horrible, but the treatment of the store was pathetic – as I have said numerous times here, people simply do not have respect for the places they shop, but they want to complain immediately if anything isn’t up to snuff. I even had one couple, after I told them the price of an item, later argue with a cashier over the price of that same item – it wasn’t worth making an issue out of it, but on principle it’s still absolutely stupid, and honestly an asshole thing to do. Also an asshole thing to do is to leave mountains of items that you don’t want by price checkers, rather than put them back where they go, but that’s another story. I’ll just say this, even other customers commented on how absolutely lazy those people must be.
In whatever case, it was an eventful few days that were very exhausting – I also helped with some special tasks after work Friday, into Saturday morning, but it was worth it. 1 weekend down, almost, 4 more to go. I’ll try to keep the articles coming, and more retail commentary as the season flows. Keep an eye here for more updates.