A Retail Christmas

It is officially Christmas season. It is that time of the year where you will hear Rocking Around the Christmas Tree every time you step in a Walgreens. Last year I wrote about my distaste for the holiday. I touched on this in that post but, I guess the biggest reason for my dislike is the seven retail Christmas holidays I worked at Kmart. Working at the Mart was great for eleven months. However in December it simply sucked.

First off they kept the store open later hours. So instead of getting out at 9:30 the store would stay open until 11. It was pointless because no one knew this and the store would be dead for that hour and a half. So, for the most part during that time it was our job to get the store in somewhat of an organized state just so the general public could fuck it all up the next day.

In my early years I was in the Health and Beauty aids and the Party Goods departments. Being in H&B was cool because Xmas had no effect on my job. I mean there wasn’t a lot of F.D.S. being given out as presents. However Party Goods was another matter. I had two main items that caused me headaches. One was wrapping paper and the other was Christmas cards.

The paper came in these cases that would have like five different patters in them. Of course inevitably there would one horrific roll and I was constantly taking the aluminum silver bells pattern and condensing it with all the other nicer designs. It was an endless job. I could bring out ten cases get them all nice and filled and by the time I went back to the stock room all of my work would be for nothing. As bad as it was it was nothing compared to the Christmas card aisle.

Sometimes in the middle of the night I wake up in a cold sweat having flashbacks about trying to straighten that aisle. You see when a customer would rummage through the cards they inevitably looked at every box of cards just to make sure the one they picked expressed just the right holiday message that they wanted to convey. Meaning that there were hundreds of boxes that were just tossed aside like used wads of Kleenex. It was my job to take those tossed aside boxes and straighten them and make the aisle look pretty. It was fruitless because as soon as I did this again, five minutes later it would be right back to the state of chaos it was before I bothered.

As bad as that was, it was nothing compared to the toys department. I saw two women get into a shoving match over a Teddy Ruxpin. I was verbally assaulted many times because we would run out of a certain toy. (Like I was in charge of purchasing for Kmart.) When it comes to making sure little Johnny has that brand new and latest cool toy under the tree these parents can get absolutely insane with their behavior. I’ve seen better behavior watching Jerry Springer.

So you would solider through the month leading up to Christmas Eve. Let me tell you about working Christmas Eve. The store is full of desperate and clueless shoppers who have no idea what to get people and are just looking for some act of God to give them an idea to buy their relatives something they may actually need. This usually leads to many purchases of socks and underwear. One Xmas Eve I was stuck working checkouts. Suddenly a toothless woman and her inbred offspring came into my line with two shopping cars filled to the ceiling with the latest in Kmart fashion trends. As I rang them up I just kept bagging clothes. They had one big ticket item, in a VCR which back then went for a couple of hundred bucks. Everything else was clothing items. It took me over a half an hour to ring them all up. The total came to over $2,000 bucks and the trailer park Momma then reached in to her sweaty bra and pulled out a sticky wad of twenties and started peeling them out to me. I don’t want to know how she got the money. Maybe it was her savings from all her time working the various truck stops on the interstate.

At long last the holiday would be over and I would enjoy the night and Christmas day with family knowing that Dec. 26^th loomed like a black bleak death. You see as bad as it was for the previous month it was in no way going to prepare you for the horrors that awaited you that faithful day after Christmas.

You see you had every bargain hunter in the world looking to pounce on discounted Christmas bows and stale candy canes. Then you had the other people who just had to return all those un-wanted socks and underwear their loved ones had purchased just two days prior. You would be surprised at the things people would try to return on that day. I saw a used toilet seat, moldy shoes, and shirts with Sears tags on them, it was incredible. I never understood this bizarre need to return this crap one day after the holiday. I mean you know everyone else in the world is going to be there, wouldn’t you want to wait a couple of days to return your crap? I mean did you hate your gift that much?

So, every time I hear that crap about how great the holiday is and how much it brings out the best in people I want to vomit. It brings out the worst and is such a cause of stress that it drives most people to moronic behavior. Sure, I know I no longer work retail and I no longer have to deal with most of this nonsense. Still, those scars don’t heal quickly. All I need to do is look over at my cynical Uncle Dan as he sips on his Miller Genuine Draft trying to forget the horrors he just went through dealing with all the holiday merriment to remind me.