Retail Sales Associates Don't Get Paid Enough

[View on the web] [Facebook] [Twitter] [Instagram] 6 Truly Horrifying Stories About Working in Retail Anyone who’s ever worked retail has inevitably accumulated a handful of horror stories throughout their time in the biz. I have plenty, spread out over a decade of working at a record store in high school, a Bath & Body Works in my hometown mall, a few chain store jobs in New York City, and finally, my pièce de résistance, at a high-end department store. Sales associates truly don’t get enough credit for the stuff they have to put up with. There’s a particular level of outrage that comes with opening a fitting room door after your “client” has left, without saying goodbye or thank you, and having to undo the carnage that is 20 pairs of jeans turned inside out. Inside out! Who even takes off pants like that? I met some of my best friends working at my last retail gig, and even though we all quit that job more than six years ago, we still regularly relive our collective horror stories, which have all, over time, become so jumbled in my mind that they’re just one big, hazy nightmare. Because misery loves company, we asked a few friends and readers to share their worst experiences, too. Mine’s there too, and I’ll warn you: It’s gross. —[Tiffany Yannetta], shopping director [Insert alt text here] I have more than a handful of horror stories from working as a “jewelry consultant” (read: salesgirl) at a major commercial jewelry store inside of a mall in in the middle of nowhere. Overall, my experience working at this store (to be kept anonymous) was a positive one, but retail is retail. The one that sticks out the most occurred during the dreaded post-holiday return season. I was swamped during my entire shift doing returns and exchanges and fighting with customers when the phone rang. The connection was bad and the man on the other line sounded like he was calling from underwater; we were on the phone for an hour total and it took 20 minutes into the call for me to realize what was going on. He was calling from Afghanistan. He had proposed to his girlfriend with a ring he'd bought from us before being deployed. She cheated on him with his best friend, broke off the engagement, and returned the ring to our store with the refund going on her personal debit card. It was the most excruciating hour of my life trying to figure out a way to correct a mistake that went under so many people's noses. I hung up the phone in tears. —Frankie Greek When I was in college, I worked at Victoria's Secret. Which was itself sort of embarrassing, but beyond that, the dress code was a black pantsuit with some sort of stylish pink accessory, if I remember correctly, so I felt like I was always dressing up like some dowdy managerial thirtysomething version of myself. Men would always come in and ask for “help” with shopping for their girlfriends and inevitably use me as a comparison point: “She's a little smaller than you... up top,” or “She's basically your size” (surveying me up and down), or “She's like you but curvier.” I recall at least one “Maybe you can try this on for me.” I got really good at steaming things so I could just hide in the back with the steamer. —Jen Doll In my early 20s, I worked at a high-end department store and saw a lot of weird stuff, mostly in the fitting rooms, and mostly involving bodily fluids in some way. The strangest experience was absolutely when one customer got her period while trying on clothing and didn’t have a tampon with her. We would have gladly gotten one for her, but instead she made a makeshift maxipad out of toilet paper and kept on trying on clothes. It fell out while we were talking to her, and no one really knew what to do. Do you acknowledge the makeshift maxipad in the room that’s now lying on the floor? Or do you keep talking about the benefits of stretch denim? Another customer defecated in a silk romper in the fitting room. This romper was actually beautiful, and I think it cost, like, $395 or something kind of outrageous. I don’t remember which one of us found it — if it was me, I must have blacked it out — but one of my close friends actually had to bring it to the dry cleaner across the street. —Tiffany Yannetta [Insert alt text here] The only time I ever had to call someone out on shoplifting was when I moved home from New York City to Vermont after college and started working at a local boutique. Every salesperson's nightmare. A young girl, probably in her late teens, went into a dressing room with a few items (that I counted and took mental note of, thanks corporate training). At the last second, I saw her grab a white knitted pompom hat to take in with her. A few moments later, she came out and handed me the items that didn't work, but the hat was missing and I KNEW she'd stashed it. I asked if she was planning to buy the hat, which she denied having brought into the room. The most aggressively awkward and uncomfortable 60 seconds of my life followed, in which I had to ask her to both show me the inside of her purse and to unzip her giant, knee-length winter jacket. She promptly refused and literally RAN OUT OF THE STORE like a varsity track captain. I was so stunned that I just stood there while the other people in the store gawked (and then chastised me for not chasing after her). The next morning, a box appeared in front of the store with the hat inside and a typed apology letter from the shoplifter saying she would never steal again and was so ashamed for having done it in the first place. File under: happy endings, and only in Vermont! —Anonymous I was hired at Topman in Soho, a store I *really* loved, as part of its Christmas intake. For some reason, during orientation, all the American staff gets a brief “British training” session to learn the English equivalent of American words for things like “register” (“till”) and “trash” (“bin”). Carrying on the British spirit of the brand, I guess. Also, when you are packing a lot of men into a small space, the smell can be a problem. As customers shuttled in and out of the fitting rooms, the whole area gradually began to smell like an armpit. Thankfully, we could Febreeze it regularly. When that Febreeze ran out, however, management was adamant that such a thing was an unnecessary extravagance and said there would be no more. Sometimes the line for our small fitting room was ten to 15 people deep, and I had to reprimand some customers (usually European tourists) for stripping down on the store floor for trying on jeans and chinos in the open. —Adam Moussa A couple of my favorite Best Buy stories are from Black Fridays. One year, a woman — apparently overtaken by her pure lust for deals — ran through the doors as soon as we opened them and just, like, form tackled a palette of DVD players. DVD players weren't even the kind of thing that sold out on Black Fridays! Even in 2006, you could get a cheapo DVD player without committing an act of violence against a retail display, but apparently this lady wanted to show her fellow shoppers who was boss. In her defense, it was an impressive dominance move. On a different Black Friday, I watched my 65-year-old manager pursue on foot a guy trying to shove a PlayStation box into his coat, and the chase included both of them hurdling a chest freezer that had been moved into the middle of the sales floor to cordon off the Disney World-style snaking line that's necessary for post-Thanksgiving store traffic. The dude later gave himself up and the police carted him off, but a couple hours later, we realized he had brought his six-year-old child to shoplift with him that morning and he hadn't told anyone during his arrest. We eventually sorted it out and got the child to a guardian, thankfully. Weird stuff happened during normal days too, though. Once a toddler whipped off his diaper and defecated directly in the middle of the media section, and when he was done, he then tore off, naked as a jaybird, waving his diaper in the air while an assortment of employees, unaided by his oblivious mother, tried to corral him so he wouldn't whack anyone with his diaper or decide he also needed to pee on the floor. Even once the baby was contained, there was still a lot of finger-pointing over who was going to pick up the turd itself — stores didn't have janitorial staff during the day, which meant the duties fell to employees who did not anticipate touching poop when they woke up that morning. —Amanda Mull And they’re not all restricted to employees… I was trying on bathing suits in a dressing room at Macy's Herald Square when I heard a woman in a nearby room shriek “Oh my god! It splashed on me!” Turns out, another woman had gone into the dressing room next to hers, urinated on the carpet, and when it splashed under the partition, the urine ricocheted onto the woman. Nightmare. —Marisa Kabas Feature [Why Local News Anchors All Have the Same Look] [Insert alt text here] Mark* was a sophomore in college, interning at a popular local television station in a medium-sized city in the South, when his boss told him to consider plastic surgery. “One of the first things he said was ‘Oh, your ears are a big distraction. You should think about getting them pinned back.’” Mark, whose ears stuck out from the side of his head — “awkwardly,” he admits today — was stunned. “He said it to me like it was nothing else. I think when someone tells you to change your body like that, you expect it to be a serious conversation. But he was so casual about it.” The following summer, as he dreamed of becoming a TV news reporter, Mark and his parents agreed to plastic surgery. While he was under, they had the doctor perform a chin implant, too. He never told his coworkers or classmates about the surgery. Seven years later, as a reporter at a network affiliate in a large midwestern city, Mark now meets once every three months or so with a consultant who sorts through his suits and ties and tells him what to wear and what to avoid. “You’re pretty much banned from wearing shirts that aren’t solid light blue or white,” he says. “They don’t like me to wear green. They don’t think it’s my color, so I don’t really wear it. Unless my news director’s out of town.” [Keep reading >>] Ad from our sponsor Just One Thing The Hat No Runner Should Be Without [Insert alt text here] Headsweats [Bigfoot Hat], $25 I run a lot: eight marathons so far, one ultra marathon, and one of each on the docket for spring 2017. I don't think much about what I wear while running (I have 20 of the same running tank top — thanks, eBay!). For most of my ten-year running career, athleisure has been whatever sweats my dog hadn't made into a bed while I was out beating up my quads. When I need to present myself after a workout, though, for a trip to the bagel shop or that mythical post-run coffee where you can look athletic and cute in $150 tights (which I certainly do not own), I pay attention to one thing and one thing only: my head. I have a lot of hair, and post-run, it's a flyaway mess. Solution: [Headsweats’ Bigfoot Hat] ($25). Does this sound stupid and not something that a 36-year-old woman who is [sometimes tapped as an authority on running] should wear? Possibly. Do I care? Not really. The absurdity is part of its appeal. "Being from the Pacific Northwest and growing up camping and hiking in the forests there, you couldn't help but hear stories about the big fuzzy guy, and I guess he always stayed with me," said Tim Ray of Headsweats, who designed the hat. "When I think of a scene of the outdoors, he's always lurking back behind a tree somewhere keeping an eye on you." It's technically a trucker hat, but not in a "OMG the 2000s are back, everyone put on your low rise jeans!" kind of way. It has mesh panels on three of its four sides, which is great ventilation if my hair is still sweaty when I put it on. It has an opening in the back to shove my braid through. And unlike my college baseball hat, it's not cotton, so I'm not stuck with a soaked hat pressed against my forehead while I eat that bagel or drink that coffee (after which I will promptly take a nap). The first version came out in 2015, and in one style: a sunset. Mine, which is a blue/violet/white mountainscape, was added soon after, and now Headsweats [sells a few dozen items], including visors and beanies, with Bigfoot blazed on it. In 2016, four of its top ten products in revenue were from Bigfoot truckers, according to a Headsweats spokesperson. Of course this hat has other functions: I can wear it when running errands, when I drive my Jeep with the windows out, and I usually wear it hiking, too. It's been a hit at Home Depot and Nordstrom alike. And when I need to throw a shadow across my face, like when I cried for days on end after I put that beloved dog down and the sight of sweatshirts left unmussed sent me reeling, Bigfoot provided that cover. Life can be an ugly business. Running can be, too. If I'm going to cover it up sometimes, I might as well do it with the help of a mythical beast. —[Jen A. Miller], contributing writer [More good stuff to read today] - [How the Best-Dressed Man on Reddit Shops] - [Retailers Are Lobbying Against Trump's Proposed Border Tax] - [We Live in the Clothes We Leave Behind] - [Will Fashion Still Flock to Kanye West?] - [Watch:][Ingrid Nilsen Shares Her Newest Collab] Ad from our sponsor From around the web A selection from the editors at Racked [Woman in overalls.] [How to Get Dark Denim Dye Off of Your Fingernails] A million (rough count) ways to whiten your nails from whatever caused them to get all discolored. [Read more] [Macy's store.] [A Day of Reckoning for American Department Stores?] 2017 could bring a final judgment for some of America’s biggest department store players. [Read more] Ad from our sponsor [Facebook] [Twitter] [Instagram] This email was sent to {EMAIL}. Manage your [email preferences] or [unsubscribe] to stop receiving emails from Racked. Vox Media, 1201 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20036. Copyright © 2016. 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