working title

Job Number Twelve, Adventures in Retail

I was biding my time and looking for an office job. With a Bachelor’s Degree, I felt I was overqualified to work as a clerk in a store, but I just couldn’t find work in an office, particularly when I was limited to my current town due to transportation. I still didn’t have my driver’s license even though I was nearing the end of my twenties. In Philadelphia, I didn’t need my license, but in this small town, there were very few buses and they basically ran to the local malls. They started late and ended early, so they wouldn’t help me getting to and from an office job. So I started applying to local retail outlets once more. Trying to find a job in a small town area is pretty tough.

Excerpt from journal: If the drug store doesn't hire me, there's a new coffee-shop that opened in town. I haven't been inside, but it seems like one of those artsy coffee-shops. Maybe they'd let me have weird hair and piercings?

Eventually, I got a call from a department store chain at a nearby mall. I had an interview and was hired on the spot. Later that same day, I got a call from a nearby gas station asking for an interview. I explained that I just agreed to start another job and they asked that I come in anyway, that maybe I could work at both places at the same time. I went in, interviewed and submitted a drug test. I briefly wondered if I could do both jobs at once, but I realized it wasn’t realistic for me to do so, and I ended up working at the retail store and not the gas station.


I actually really liked working at the department store. After such a bad experience with a family-owned deli and restaurant, it kind of felt nice to be treated like a number. There were a group of others hired at the same time as me and we watched our training videos as a group. We ended up laughing through a good bit of it, quietly of course. We didn’t want our supervisors to know how funny we thought the outdated videos on safety and harassment were. Most of the others had to leave halfway through the training to smoke.

My second day was spent learning the registers, which were crazy easy. They timed us how long it took to check out each customer and we were supposed to aim for a low time. They even had a scoreboard kind of thing in the back room, and I think you could eventually win things if you were high enough on the list. It only took me a week to get in the top three.

My shifts were usually four or five hours long with one break every two hours. A few times I was asked to stay for a full day’s shift, and then I’d get a lunch break, too. That was another nice thing about working for a corporation – I get regular breaks for once, something that was new to me. I would go into the break room and sit for fifteen minutes, just reading posters on the walls or attempting to talk to other workers. The thing was, I was around other cashiers mostly, and we never took our breaks at the same time, so if anyone else was in the break room, we didn’t know each other. I didn’t find anyone there to be particularly friendly, either. I’ve always said hi or hello or some type of greeting to coworkers even if I didn’t know their names. No one ever said hi back to me at this job. Not one single person.

I guess that’s the downside to working for a corporation; it feels nothing like a family. The people who’ve been working there longer are intimidated and feel threatened by new people coming in. New people get more hours on the schedule so they can get used to the job, and older workers (who make more money) get their hours cut so the company doesn’t have to lose as much on payroll.

Working as a cashier was insanely easy. The hardest part was dealing with customers who couldn’t read sales ads or signs in the store. “But it was on the rack with the sign!” they’d argue, but if they read the sign, they’d realize the item was on the wrong rack, so it’s not on sale! In a lot of cases, I could give it to them for the sale price. That’s one thing I never knew – how much power a cashier has over the price given to the customer. I mean, I couldn’t give people a huge discount without the register/computer asking for a supervisor’s pass first, but if a customer was nice when they said they thought it was on sale for $1 cheaper, I could change the price for them. Because sometimes the system wasn’t quite up to date. It happened every Sunday when we had new sales starting – some of the sale prices weren’t in the system yet, so we had to manually change it when checking out those items. Let that be a lessen to you when you’re a customer – if you’re nice, you might get the cheaper price. If someone was rude to me, they definitely weren’t getting the lower price.

To get the store’s discount (which was 10 or 15 percent), I had to work at the store for 6 weeks. I ended up there for about 7, I think, before I left for another job. I worked somewhere between 15 and 20 hours per week, and I was restricted mainly because I had to take a bus to get there since I didn’t drive. Once I got a ride home from a coworker (because the coworker’s mother was my supervisor). Mostly I left because I wasn’t getting enough hours and I didn’t feel comfortable there. I know I did my job well, but the frostiness and indifference shown by my coworkers was a bit much for me to handle, especially when I was used to working with friends and family. The job bored me to tears, too. (On Sundays, the mall closed at 5pm but our store didn’t close until 10pm, which mean almost zero customers. I hated working that shift)

Eventually I got to do a bit more than just ringing out sales at the cash register. I got to hang clothes on racks to prepare them for going out on the floor. Big excitement there, I tell ya. Anyway, after a few weeks, I got a call from the local grocery store (to which I had also applied when I was originally looking for a job). I interviewed with them and they offered me the job right away. I called the department store and they seemed shocked. The Human Resources person said, “But everyone really likes you here!”

That was a shock to me! No one ever, ever talked to me there. No one would even say hello to me as they passed by me in the store. I felt alienated and like I was just a number there. Sure, the job was easy, but I wasn’t exactly happy with easy. The job was too boring and slow for me. A grocery store seemed like the better option, and it paid just a little more. Plus, it was walking distance from my house, so there were no restrictions on when I could work because I would have to catch a bus. All around, it was the better option.


Before I left, I took advantage of April’s Bicycle Safety Month and bought new bikes for me and for my husband, with my discount. It wasn’t much, but it helped. I used my bike to get to my next job, which was across town, almost a mile away. Back to deli work!