In Jake We Trust

At the cash desk I’ll ask the customer if they’d be interested in buying a few pairs of socks as an add-on.

If they decline I tell them ‘Winter is Coming’ before proceeding with the transaction. Nobody has gotten the reference as of yet.

Will someone please explain to me exactly what it is about sales that makes people completely lose their shit?
 

Most of the stock in my store hasn’t even been reduced by much, with the possible exception of some of the more expensive items like jeans and coats. The T-shirts for example have been marked down by 3 or 4 pounds at best. Not exactly what you’d call a massive bargain and yet the ordinarily reasonable people of my home town take these savings as license to completely abandon their sanity and manners.

People seem not to realise that in clothes shops, someone (namely me) has to stand, and individually fold each and every one of the expensive bits of cloth we are given to sell into neat, size ordered piles, ready for customers to look at. If one or two of these piles get a little bit messed up by someone I dont mind so much, at the end of the day its what im paid for I’ll happily sort it out.

What I object to however is when customers stroll through the shop during sales grabbing items from the very bottom of every single pile of carefully folded clothes, disrupting the whole thing and making loads more work for me to do.

One particular middle aged woman who shall hereafter be refered to as ‘Twat’ not only went around the store doing this; filling her obese husband’s arms with size XXL clothes for him to squeeze into as she went, but also to add insult to injury Twat decided that she didn’t really want any of what she had picked up, leaving all of it in a lovely mound in the centre of the store before walking away without so much as an apology or a backwards glance.

Weirder still, one man took our sale as an opportunity to advertise his buisness. I watched him walk to the back of the store, turn, and walk straight back out again scattering handfuls of his buisness cards as he went. I mean what the fuck?!

Only in a sale does shit like this happen. People who shop during sales; you are dicks. People who work in Primark; You have my unreserved sympathy.

In addition to working towards my degree I work part time in a branch of Jack & Jones in my local shopping centre. I love my job, its relatively simple work, I get payed well enough, I get a 50% discount and I don’t work with any dickheads.

There are however two main things that I dislike about my job:

1) Mannequins. They just plain freak me out, and I dislike the idea that there are disembodied limbs and torsos lying around in the stock room for me to find.

2) Customers. That might be a strange thing for someone who works in retail to dislike but it genuinely irritates me how confusing, stupid and unpredictable they can be.

Number 2 is my primary problem with my work. Today, me and my supervisor Beth were standing behind the cash desk doing our usual thing; chatting, taking things out of boxes, tagging them and folding them, when two dishevelled looking people wandered into the shop.

I walked over to them and gave them my best ‘happy to help’ smile and asked if they were looking for anything in particular. The tall, greasy looking man who was wearing an especially fetching tracksuit grunted indifferently in response, I genuinely haven’t the slightest idea what it was that he said to me but I took it to mean ‘fuck off’. His dwarven, bearded lady companion cackled manaically at whatever it was that he said and I walked away and returned to my folding.

Not five minutes later a wild shopping centre security guard appeared. He was a fat, balding, moustachioed man with thick glasses. He simply said “hello” to the two people, it was super effective. The bearded lady rolled her eyes and without another word and despite incredibly confused looks from me and Beth they left the shop with the security guard walking several metres behind them with long, self important strides.

The security guard later returned to explain himself. Apparently the tall, greasy moron in the tracksuit was not only well known to the shopping centre but also to the police as a serial shoplifter and drug addict. He had been banned from entering the premises again, but for reasons beyond my comprehension he assumed that since he had just recently finished serving a prison sentance it would be totally fine for him to come back in again.

The security guard then left in a flurry of unwarrented pride and well maintained facial hair leaving Beth and myself, yet again, incredibly confused.