Retail Hell Underground

Arcade Anarchist's Name Tag Acessory

 

7 Stages of Retail Hell Grief

From Arcade Anarchist:

The 7 Stages of Retail Hell grief:

1: Denial

This is the stage early on where the slave is still feeling good about the job. The coworkers are nice and the management is lenient. You get the nifty in-training badge that spares you some of the customer dickery. Personal morale is good. This either lasts until the first bad customer for someone who's totally fresh to Retail Hell. Over possibly a couple of weeks for someone who just changed from a worse job.

2: Pain/Guilt

This is the point where the slave starts to realize the error in their occupational choices. Management becomes dickish, and so do some coworkers. The work may take a heavy physical toll making hurt backs from picking up after anyone and everyone, at this stage your still the entire stores bitch. The amount of hours or lack of pay begins to also take a toll as it becomes seemingly harder to keep up obligated payments.

3: Anger/bargaining

One may start to become angry at the retail situation. Possibly even taking it out on customers, coworkers, or job performance. Be careful as this may result in termination from the job And a bad reference later on. On the other side the retail slave may begin to bargain with herself, or others.... maybe Satan. To make the job more bareable, "If I sacrifice a goat or small child this morning will I not get any shitty customers this week?"

4: Depression

At this point it may feel useless to go into work. Customers are bad and management is shitty. Everything seems to be against you. You may want to seek seclusion by calling in sick, or locking yourself in the employee bathroom pretending to have diarrhea.

5: Upward Turn

This is where the Retail Slave begins to make light of their situation outside of their job. Maybe they start blogging and making fun of custys or hellspawn in their spare time. Or take a better focus on stuff outside the job so they can forget about it better. Either way depression is lightened as outside work is not spent thinking about how bad work is.

6:Reconstruction

In this stage a Retail Slave either decides they want to find better work, and looks for something else during their spare time. Or their outside life starts becoming better, and a alternate source of income becomes available, maybe they graduate from college, publish a book, or find a better job that treats them better.

7: GTFO

There is no last step. The Retail Slave has left the shitty world of retail hell and the recovery has begun.

--Arcade Anarchist

 

Custy's ID Name Missing Some Letters

From Arcade Anarchist:

This is a story My brother told me who is also a Retail Slave.

My brother works as a cashier at one of the big name hardware stores. They also have various appliances which is what I assume was being bought.

Some stores have policies that if possible, you are required to refer to a customer by name. If they give you a credit card take a quick glance and find their name blah blah blah.

Well on this particular day he had a visit from a very ghetto-fab woman. Lots of gold and unable to control the volume of her voice, or just incapable of speaking at a non obnoxious level.

She gabbed on her cell phone so that everyone in the store could hear her side of the conversation (I like to call these people mad-lib custys cause I like to fill in the blanks). Annoying behavior aside, most of her transaction went off without a hitch, and when it came time to pay she was off her phone.

His store doesn't have the pin-pads for customers to do all their credit stuff, so she had to hand him her card. 

He looked at the card and immediately noticed there was no full name on it.

Only a few letters and a dash.

I'd imagine anyone having trouble deciphering this name:

"Le-a"

No last name on the card and no signature. So he asked for an ID. She hands it to him and it matches. The name "Le-a" is on the ID.

So out of curiosity and to keep to his stores policy, he asked her how to pronounce her name while he was running the card.

She said: "Ledasha. The 'dash' Aint no silent."

A grand laugh to be had.

Arcade Anarchist

Holiday Hell Spawn Encounter

From Arcade Anarchist

So I have made it no secret that the top two things I hate most about retail are:

1: Misbehaved Hell Spawn.

2: Customers that dont speak English.

Now it's the Christmas season and my job is normally pretty easy going. So I tend to do a little extra for the season, even if it isn't company policy.

I've worn elf hats cause I just love wearing em, and this year I bought a big supply of miniature candy canes to give out so people will stop in front of the arcade and maybe come in. This was a big mistake this Sunday (last Sunday before the big over-consumerized holiday).

Parents complained that it was not good customer service for me not to give their kid a second (or third) candy cane. This would normally lead to me having to explain that it was indeed good cause the money for the canes was not the stores but my own.

After working 2 full open to close days, including a 12 hour Saturday of answering dumb questions about how much a game was, if it worked, or if it took quarters, I was still in a surprisingly jolly mood.

So on Sunday, about 4 hours into being there, roughly half my day, I was on my second energy drink for the day, walking the arcade handing out my candy canes. It was fairly full so I had to keep an eye on some of the problem areas of the shop.

Mind you I've always thought the skeeball would be an issue at some point. But I always figured it would be thrown back during a swing and clonk me or another customer right in the head.

This day my fears came to fruition but not in the way I expected.

A small family - a boy a girl and a dad, were getting ready to play.

ON THE FIRST BALL, the little girl hucked the ball into the scoreboard of our mint condition 50's shuffleboard and pulverized it, shattering the irreplaceable glass covering of one of the few games that doesn't even use computers. Glass flew everywhere.

This Demon Child is a little super villian!!!! To huck a wooden ball with enough force to basically make 2 inch thick glass shatter like that, gives her X-men powers - especially since she is just small girl.

So now I had to call my boss and talk to her parent to figure out how I should handle it. At this point, I discover that neither the parent or the little girl can fucking speak English.

All my holiday spirit is gone at this point. So I haft to talk with the son who can barely understand and ask for a name and number in case my boss needs to get a hold of them for whatever reason.

They give in, and comply. A little bit of my spirit restored but not much. Perhaps these customers were going to take some responsibility for their actions.

I call my boss and most everything is fine. He tells me the next day he will come and fix it up. Now I haft to clean up the glass.

The real kicker to this is that an hour later my boss calls again and tells me that they gave me the number for domino's pizza.

Arcade Anarchist.

Paycheck Hell with a Dumbass Store Manager

Arcade Anarchist recounts a horror story about his paycheck:

This story comes from deep within my retail history.

About 4 or 5 jobs back I was working at a grocery store deli. Cutting cheese and the like. I was supposed to be paid biweekly, and was working 25ish hour weeks. The store was going threw lots of remodeling and was getting ready for a "grand reopening" kinda thing. How you can have a grand reopening without actually closing I'm not sure.

Now I know that some jobs hold first paychecks for whatever bullshit reasonings (luckily enough I have yet to have a job do this), so I wasn't too surprised when I didn't receive one the first payday. So I went about my work as per usual.

Two weeks later during my lunch break I decided to grab my paycheck and have the customer service cash it out for me. Once again they didn't have it. This was kind of ridiculous, it has now been a month. So I ask them for an advance much lower than I should have gotten but enough to pay for the stuff I needed like LUNCH.

Two weeks later, no check!

I'm off duty at this point and there was no one else around. So I ask if they can look threw the entire pile of checks, unlike the first two times where they only looked threw the deli-worker section.

I was very surprised to discover the store had another employee who shared my last name. This is because it's a very uncommon one. I have never met anyone with the same last name as me that I didn't know to be family.

But that was beside the point, still no paycheck so I had to get a small cash paid out.

I was at this job for about 3 months, 1 month after the grand reclamation of souls.

The last day I was on the job also happened to be a payday, and as before no paycheck. I was just furious, and ended up having a long conversation with the store manager. He gave me a cashout and was going to try and figure out what happened.

Before when I complained it ended up forever on the bottom of his to-do list. So he told me to come back when my last payday should be and hopefully we would settle it by then.

When I came in those two weeks later there was a paycheck there with my name on it, for not very much at all.

BUT, they refused to give it to me because I had taken so many cash pay outs.

Once again I had to talk with the manager who laid me off, about the money they weren't giving me, for the work I did on the time I coulda been doing something more productive and less stressful... like take up shark wrestling.

He explained to me what the problem was. When I was being put into the system by him he had gotten my name, gender, and department wrong.

Okay so I am a 6'5" male, my first and last name together are only 8 letters long. This manager d-bag ass-hole placed me in the computer as a 5' female named Rachael working in a department the store didn't even have. I don't know why the computers even needed my height, but it was wrong. Too many things wrong with this situation.

It took me months after that to get it all cleared up and get what they owed me. Then about another 2 months later, I received a letter in the mail from them.

On the front it had something explaining that it was a check for what they had still owed me. I was still unemployed and looking for work at the time, so I thought it was great to be getting a little more money.

A whole 37 cents worth on the check.

Arcade Anarchist

p.s.

Oh, and to anyone who remembers my last post about my current boss, he went to the hearing at the licensing board, and the arcade gets to remain in business, so I get to keep my current employment.