A Merry Retail Christmas

Every job has times when the employee thinks “am I really paid enough to handle this shit and not have a breakdown resulting in extreme pooping all over my work place and waving my junk around like a fleshy wind turbine?”

Luckily, a loose sense of shared social boundaries mean the second half of that sentence only happens very, very rarely but there comes times in every worker’s year/month/week/day/hour when the added stress of a job might just cause the line between normal and bat-shit crazy becomes a little hazy (there will be no more rhyming in this post).

For air stewardesses, it’s probably between the 78^th and 79^th time a drunken businessman has made a crude pass at her. For bin men, it could be when the students at Number 12 have left the bin bag unsealed, AGAIN. For bar staff at a Spanish holiday resort it’s after a long hard Summer of serving pints of lager to shaven-headed English men who call them “Jose” every five minutes with that hilarious exaggerated lisp.

And now to bring the personal experience.

As regular readers of this blog (all four of you that I haven’t sent Christmas cards to by the way, just in case you happened to be sitting eagerly outside your letterbox every morning for the last fortnight…weirdo), circumstances dictate that I currently work in retail at a well known supermarket and, as anyone who has undergone this experience before will tell you, Christmas is generally our breakdown breaking point (there will be no more alliteration in this post).

It’s an age old joke in retail that it would be the perfect job, if there were no customers. Christmas music being played for six weeks or so? That can be blocked out. Frequent heavy lifting? Long term damage to my body won’t be felt for ages, live for now dude. Being very low on the company’s food chain? Being sneeringly and depressingly contemporarily ironic will overcome this obstacle. Working your fingers to the bone and it never being quite enough to earn praise? Ah well, it’s only a job, it’s by quite a long distance not the most important thing in the world.

But customers will always be akin to Thomas Paine’s state; a necessary evil.

Whether it be repeatedly having a trolley driven in to you like you’re the crippled Irishman in one of Mr Burn’s flashbacks or being patronised when providing a service to someone (“I have a degree thanks” is what I’ll say every time this happens…after I hand in my notice and have another job lined up); there are just sometimes when it all gets a bit too much.

And then Christmas compounds this with the strange brand of abject misery it can create.  Stress and having to see way too many family members in way too short a space a time produces a situation where it’s fine to be more aggravating than usual. Add to this the usual, boring, stressful shopping experience, Hell might well be created on Earth in the relations between staff and customers. Yes, I’m well aware that you’re the most important person in the word and you cannot spend more than one minute here longer than you need to but it sure would be fantastic if you treated me like a person. And laughing at my small talk would be awesome too.

It probably doesn’t help us staff’s merriness levels either having to work extra days over the Christmas period. To be fair, it’s probably less customers not being able to handle the shops being closed for two days and more vice versa. Why not open up Boxing Day and squeeze a few more pennies out of pockets? It’s the kind of shrewd fiscal thinking (read institutionalised tightness and exploitation of needs) that our system is based on. If you don’t like it go to….China?

At least they don’t celebrate Christmas there.