Chapter 1
Every time another person or group of people strode in through the doors of the giant box store where I worked, I hated the holiday season a little more.
At least we had several registers open. As it was, I had a dozen people waiting for me to ring them up, and of course, my current customer had decided to write a check. Yes, in this modern era of debit cards and practically being able to do a telepathic contact-free insta-pay just by giving the machine an intense look, there were people who insisted on writing checks. And they were inevitably not in any great hurry to do so while the people behind them were inevitably frantic like they were buying fire extinguishers to battle an actual blaze-in-progress.
Suppressing the 24/7 frustration that came with this time of year, I smiled at her and spoke in my customer service voice: “Your total is ninety-eight twenty-two.”
“Thank you.” Then she started writing the check. Started. Most people who wrote checks at least got a jump on it while they were in line or while I was ringing everything up, but no, she waited until now.
While she took her time painstakingly filling in every blank, I kept my well-practiced smile in place and finished bagging everything.
She looked up from the check. “What’s the date?”
It took so much restraint not to point to the plastic display right in front of her, and I just said, “December twenty-second.”
“Thank you.” She added the date. Then she flipped to her register and carefully entered the same information before pausing to do the math manually despite her smartphone sitting right there. Once that was complete, she tore off the check and handed it to me.
I tried not to judge. I really, really did. People had their routines and their reasons behind them, and God knew some of mine probably drove people up the wall. This was the holiday shopping season, though, and my feet hurt, I hadn’t had a break in six hours, three people had yelled at me in the past hour for things that were beyond my control, I really needed to pee, and as it was, the only thing in shorter supply than patience were those butt-ugly plushies that were The Gift this year. Just put your shit on the belt, pay for it, take your shit, and go away. Merry fucking Christmas, everyone.
The lady eventually gathered her things and, in the kind of hurry usually reserved for glaciers, moved along. She’d barely stepped out of the way before the huffy red-faced dude with a wind-ruffled combover practically shoved her so he could take her place.
“Hello, sir,” I said, another little piece of me dying at the sound of my customer service voice. “Did you find everything you were—”
“This store is a disgrace.” He noisily tapped the edge of his credit card on the place where the lady had been writing her check. “The shelves are a mess, and there’s barely anything on them. Doesn’t anyone take pride in their work anymore?”
I ground my molars behind my cheerful smile. “I’m sorry, sir. We’re certainly working as fast as we—”
“And you people think we should raise minimum wage.” He huffed, tapping the credit card even harder. “Would you mind hurrying? It took me so long to find anything, and this line was ridiculous. I need to get home.”
I mumbled something bland and non-committal, all the while thinking, Bro, if you only knew how bad I have to pee and how tempting it is to resolve that issue all over your shoes…
Miraculously—more like, thanks to years of practice—I finished with Combover and managed to flag down Chloe, one of the assistant managers, to take over for me for a minute.
“Thank you so much,” I said over my shoulder as I hurried toward the restroom.
Of course, two customers stopped me on the way, one to ask where the Royal Dansk cookies were (literally right in front of her) and the other to ask if I could explain the differences between a couple of GPS units. I promised that person I’d be with them in just a second, and I didn’t give a damn if I got yelled at or written up. I couldn’t wait any longer.
Not to be crude, but there is no relief on the planet greater than that of a retail worker who’s made it to the restroom during the holiday season. It’s just a fact.
After I’d washed my hands, I stood at the sink for a moment to bask in that brief peace and quiet. No one yelling at me. No one asking me questions. No one accusing me of being a stupid, lazy Millennial who wouldn’t know hard work if it slapped me in the face.
I couldn’t stay here long, though. The store was in utter chaos, and Chloe wouldn’t be able to man my register for more than five or ten minutes. Plus I’d left that one dude hanging in electronics, and I probably needed to find someone who knew the difference between a Garmin and a Cuisinart. Better go get yelled at for that so I could relieve Chloe.
I took a deep breath, straightened my vest and my nametag just to give myself a few extra nanoseconds, and then headed out into the mayhem.
It wasn’t like this was my first rodeo. I’d worked here for the past five years, ever since I’d been laid off from the shitty office job I’d earned with the degree I’d never pay for, so I was used to the chaos that lasted from Black Friday until New Year’s. Still hated it, though.
Mostly I hated what it turned people into.
On a normal day, people were generally decent and polite, but there’d usually be at least a few who made me seriously weigh the pros and cons of getting fired for inviting customers to go fuck themselves.
During the holidays? Oh my God.
It was like everyone in the world was totally chill and normal most of the year, but Black Friday was the full moon that transformed millions of people into were-assholes who descended on retail establishments to rain chaos on minimum wage workers until the day after Christmas. After that, they would slowly return to normal just in time to be dicks for a Presidents’ Day sale.
When I’d been promoted from stocking shelves to working a register, I’d thought the modest pay raise was to acknowledge that I’d moved up ever so slightly in the company’s hierarchy. Nope. I was still shit on just as much by management. I just dealt with a whole lot more bullshit from customers and had the responsibility of making sure my till balanced at the end of a shift, which was clearly deserving of another eighteen cents an hour.
Usually, I could sneak out for smoke breaks pretty regularly. I didn’t actually smoke, but a coworker had told me on my first day to pretend I did.
“You’ll thank me someday,” she’d said as we’d stood outside. “Almost nobody here actually smokes, but we’d all go insane without the smoke breaks.”
Oh, I’d definitely thanked her.
But during the holidays, the smokers all blew their overtime pay on Nicorette and everyone had mastered wordless conversations where we said “Oh my God, my feet hurt, my back hurts, we don’t get paid enough for this, would anyone notice if our boss mysteriously went missing?” through nothing more than exhausted looks as we passed in the aisles. We even had a secret language of grunts and groans that sounded to the untrained eye like a bunch of defective Frankenstein-themed Halloween decorations, but actually translated to “this is bullshit,” “I don’t get paid enough for this,” and “don’t go near that customer I just talked to because his questions will make you lose all faith in humanity.” Look, this time of year in this line of work, you found whatever means you could to cope and stay entertained.