Shitty Retail Job Flashback
The worst day I have ever had working was during the last weeks of shitting retail job. The day itself wasn’t extraordinarily different from everything else. In fact the day itself was rather par for the course which might have been the problem. At that point Pervy Manager K was in rare form.
The above probably being from the fact that once again corporate HR had come to interview employees about the reports made to them. He was on edge, probably because he knew that the complaints were against him and he had barely gotten through the first round and that was only because there was a supervisor who happened to fuck up at the right time to save him.
Anyway, K was walking around the store with his usual arrogance. He had his Bill Cosby sweaters (an analogy we jokingly used that only became more apt later) and slacks. He would always carry a Rockstar with him, something that added to his over all “bro-ness.” He was on razor’s edge of temper and the smallest thing was setting him off.
Unfortunately, my customer service bubble didn’t protect me from that since I was only five feet from his office at all times. While the majority of interactions were fine, this day was different.
My anxiety had already been keyed up, the cause of having a manger who would yell if the phone rang three times instead of two, ignoring that you were helping a customer.
Before I get into this next part, I’m going to explain a little bit about Kohl’s return policy. There isn’t one. If you bought it at Kohl’s and it can be found in the system, it can be returned. If you have a receipt, even better because no matter how much time passes, you will get back what you paid. Once something is old enough it no longer has a normal SKU, it becomes a 000SKU which is essentially a cheater code where the price is manually entered in by the cashier. When things are returned that way, there is no way to add or remove them from the system so the damaged merchandise has to be marked down manually through these forms.
It was the job of who ever worked customer service to fill out these forms and complete them once a week. Well schedules had been shifted and the forms had gotten forgotten in that time period. As we prepared for inventory, Stock brought out these large plastic totes filled with items that needed to be damaged out but they were all 000Skus and needed to be filled out. I had been working on these totes for the better part of two months at this point, but it had barely made a dent due to the fact that I was one person and it was a never ending cycle of damages coming in due to the not really there policy.
I was already anxious and tired and frustrated with this project when K came out and saw me working on it. For some reason seeing me work on something that really should have been something he had taken over as the store manager, infuriated him and he started to yell. It didn’t matter that a customer walked up and he stood blocking the exit for the customer service area.
I remember leaving that day, drained and exhausted. I started applying for random jobs on every site I could find and ended up finding a blessing. A job that became a passion that became a dream. I’m grateful for that and the path that I find myself but sometimes I think back on that day and I get mad at myself for not fighting for me. For not just quitting right then and I hope that I don’t fall into that pattern again.
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