If you have ever worked retail, you know that in and of itself it’s a horrible adventure. I have not worked in any other food service industry so, I don’t know that I can accurately parallel the experiences of ‘working in a candy shop in December’ to anything else in my life, or even my friends lives with any accuracy.
I can however tell you that the further you get into the month; the better you understand the concept of Hell.
The first week of December, not really so bad… it’s a bit like Dante writing about the start of his decent. You can sort of see the outer edges of purgatory from here, the normal all too familiar monotony of low sale days and distracted customers whom are just there to see if anything happens to be on sale, but also wanting to know how FRESH those sale items are. (It’s on sale… go ahead, take a wild guess).
The Second week, well, things start to get more exciting. Experienced holiday shoppers have started to plan ahead, knowing that this still qualifies as perishables those who didn’t want to put their goodies in the deep freeze are starting to enter the store and buy their ‘custom made gift boxes’. This is when most people in the store start having trouble keeping the shelves stocked. Multi tasking isn’t nearly as common a skill as entertainment and books would like us to believe. Even the shop owner, when she decided to pull a shift to ‘show how things were done’ ended up calling in an employee to help out.
I, being an idiot however, start running two registers at once, and sharing chocolate information with customers while I put fresh candy into the displays as quickly as my gloved fingers can sort them. At this point the store starts seeing amazingly high numbers for sales, this means daily deposits so there is ‘never too much in the store’ (also a pain because you need a certain amount of extra funds in the store for those customers who come in wielding 100 dollar bills and requesting $2.75 in candy. Still, the week is pretty survivable, it’s even almost deceptively fun because the days go fast and most of the customers are in a good mood.
Week three – we’re starting to see the inner rings of Hell now. Customers are standing in lines deep enough that the tiny store now qualifies as a fire hazard. Each person in line scowling at the next because the person ahead of them is ordering customized boxes. This is of course, -awful- of them to do, because it is time consuming for the employees as each person picks out one of this…two of that, oh wait that’s a different price per pound? What do you mean that won’t fit in this box, well make it fit! But don’t squash it and so on and so forth. – Except of course, the person or persons currently glowering at the current box maker –also wish to make custom boxes. Thus the circle of life and hate in the candy store continues.
Of course… we also get ‘the specials’. – Like all candy stores we have the ‘fancier boxes’, the ones you actually have to pay for because they won’t make you run the risk of ‘will this folded together cardboard bottom hold or will it magically dump all my chocolate like a delicious unexpected piñata onto the floor?!
Problem: no one really wants to pay for them, or at least, they don’t want to REALIZE that they are paying for them. If the box is already made, they tend to be snapped up in a hurry by those kind souls who realize that limited registers, limited counter space and limited patience of their fellow shoppers is actually a THING that starts to happen when you wait till the last two days before Christmas to do your shopping. But there are still those who get sticker shock at the idea that they might have to pay for their package to look like they didn’t put it together in some kind of recycling-shop class.
These same people are sometimes the same people who want to put 4 chocolates in a box intended to hold 16, (which in our store incurs a ‘you pay for the box then’ penalty.) – After much bickering about how we’re awful people and should be ashamed of ourselves they finally succumb to the weight of the glares and low growls that their fellow shoppers are starting to manifest, and the following conversation normally happens.
Customer: I want it in a BOX, I want it in a CHEEP box, I shouldn’t have to pay for my gift to look good!”
Us: we’re sorry, there is a fee to us and we do our best to reflect as little of that back to the customer as possible, but to maintain this service we have to follow the store rules on this policy. You’re chocolates are going to have far too much room in this box, we have smaller ones you can pay for or we have these nice cellophane bags which…”
Us: *put the chocolates in the box; show the customer that they are indeed rattling about in the box like a bee-bee in a barn.
Customer: that looks…AWFUL!!!
Us:… silence because there is pretty much nothing we can say at that point, though eventually one of us will suggest that we could add a bunch of wax paper to keep the chocolates from becoming a smear.
Customer: FINE, do that, god!! Do I have to think of everything?!”
Us: stuff box full of enough paper that the chocolates won’t die. Box as a result looks as though the giver in a fit of low self-restraint consumed the contents and that they attempted to cover the fact up. OR, depending on the customer, it just looks cheaper than they are. (Also the cellophane bags they refused are cheaper AND PRETTIER)
Customer: stares at the results, now face to face with the fact they could have even bought 2-4 more chocolates and saved a small trees worth of waxed paper. Scowls at us as though it’s our fault. Grabs the box and leaves and or… decides to swap to cellophane having seen how nicely it turned out for another customer, thus triggering a string of ‘refund’ and ‘redo’ – which is of course all our fault for ‘not telling them’ that the box was too big and more so because we have to charge for the pretty boxes.
I’d love to call this the innermost ring of Hell, but I know tomorrow Christmas Eve, let the true last minute panic begin.
