Retail Hell (Page 3)

Page 3

"So have you done your Christmas shopping yet?"

I hate this question, and I hate it more now that it's one of my favorite customers asking me: the effervescent, perpetually well-dressed woman from upstairs with the gorgeous red hair. Even though I have a few options, none of them feel very good. Playing along makes me feel like I've denied myself, and declaring my religious and ethnic identity will produce an instant politically-correct shame reaction in my customer. I decide to be ambiguous and vague.

"Nope," I say as I count out her change.

"Gee...why not?"

I look at her and decide that she's nice enough to merit some genuine honesty. "I'm Jewish," I say cheerfully, but the two-word sentence has landed on the counter like a brick from a foreign country.

"Oh...well, you shop for Hanukkah, right?"

It's a good save, but the practice of gift-giving is a recent development in the history of Hanukkah and, in my mind, a by-product of assimilation. It makes me angry. But this isn't the time or the place, and I decide to knuckle under. "Well...yeah, sure. I shop for Hanukkah."

"So have you done all of your Hanukkah shopping yet?"

Now I feel like a pain in the ass, making a stink over which holiday name precedes the word 'shopping.'

"No, I haven't," I force the corners of my mouth into a smile. "But almost!"

"Well, good luck with it. Have a nice day!"

She strides away, and I'm happy to see that she's apparently unruffled. I glance over at my boss. He shrugs apologetically.

Later, after closing, he remarks on the closed-mindedness of customers and the lack of awareness about other cultures. I bend down to touch my toes, stretching the muscles of my lower back which began aching ominously this morning.

On the walk home, I listen to the airy crunch of snow underneath my boots. I think about my boss' remarks, and wonder if insensitivity is really the problem. I run through the number of times I've balanced what felt like an essential part of myself against the book selling machinery, whether it was my Jewishness, my education, or simply my desire to not have to speak to someone with whom I don't want to speak. I think about the kidney stone I had back in the spring and wonder if retail employment is having long-term effects on my health. I think that six dollars and fifteen cents per hour is not worth having to ask these kinds of questions, but then I think that I'm too tired to start looking through the classifieds, and what I'd rather do on my next day off is stay in bed and read.

•

My father likes to tell me that I'm not very mature about work, and that I've complained about almost every job that I've had. He says that work is inherently difficult, no one really likes their job, and the sooner I accept these things as intrinsic facts of the world, the sooner I'll be a happy person.

He's certainly right about the complaining part. I don't like working for other people, and during the periods of my life that I've been employed in a hierarchical setting I've griped to any available ear, sympathetic or otherwise. But if everything you've read here sounds like nothing more than whining, ask yourself a few questions: how well does your job speak to your life? How much of your time do you spend doing things that don't make you feel excited about your life? What parts of your life are supported by the work that you do over the course of the day? If you're able to include your wallet on that list, do you consider yourself fortunate?

Don't answer these right away. Think about them for a while. They're not easy questions, but Bookland of Maine and my other former retail employers have taught me to reconsider them every time I think about my next job. The answers haven't brought me a ton of money, but they have kept me out of environments where self-respect is the first casualty.

•

It's a grey day in early fall. I've been toying with the idea of freelance writing, but the fear of uncertain paychecks has been winning out over the desire for total self-employment. In the meantime, I've come down to the Old Port on my bicycle for an interview at a new café with plans to open in a few months. The woman who conducts the interview is amiable and fun to talk with. We discuss my retail experience and how that would serve me well in the offered position. Eventually we come around to the issue of money.

"I hate telling people this," she says, "but we start at five twenty-five per hour."

I try untying the knot in my stomach by reminding myself that I still have some savings in my bank account. After a slightly uncomfortable silence I open my mouth. "Well," I begin, "not only does that not satisfy my check book, it challenges my self-respect."

The woman blinks once. Then she says, "Well, I appreciate your honesty and your frankness. I'm sorry we won't be able to have you." We shake hands, and I put my bicycle helmet back on. I ride home, worried that this new policy of sticking up for myself will render me broke and destitute.

Two days and three identical interviews later, there's a message on my answering machine. It's the woman from the café. "You stuck in my head," she says, "so when I heard about this ten dollar per hour job in Yarmouth I thought of you." It was a food service job. She left a phone number, which I quickly copied down on a scrap of paper.

Ten dollars an hour. It's tempting, especially since it was a show of self-respect that brought me the lead in the first place. But how long would my self-respect last in food service? Longer than in retail? I twist and untwist the phone number around my index finger. It was rapidly becoming wrinkled and unreadable as I chew and deliberate.

Finally, I toss the phone number in the garbage. Walking over to my desk, I push the useless piles of classified ads off my keyboard and switch on my computer. Freelance writing might be unstable, uncertain, and terrifying, but as the hum of the hard drive kicks in and the first of many blank pages appears before me, I know that my pride is wholly intact.

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