We’re overdue for a retail rant!

~ Hetty Eliot

Howdy! If you’re sick of all the Thanksgiving GIF’s, enjoy a commercial break by reading a rant from a retail worker during one of the most hellish weeks of the year! It’s gonna get ugly.

First, can’t really report any good news on my editing project. During this time of year in retail, pretty much everything that makes you who you are is sucked into a vortex from hell and you have nothing left to give. Your body outside of work is a mere empty shell; it’s like your soul left your body and you barely exist. Even if you have the same amount of time off that you would any other time, somehow it feels like you have none and nothing you do to take care of yourself counts.

I think I had a seizure in my sleep the other night. I got seven hours of sleep, which is pretty rare when I have to go to work. I usually run on four or five hours because I go to sleep so late (I don’t want to go to sleep and have to wake up and go to work). So I should have felt halfway normal (I never feel normal in the morning), but instead I felt like a bus plowed through my brain. There’s no point in telling my neurologist because he didn’t believe me the last time I woke up in the middle of the night feeling like my head was being twisted off. I feel pretty sure of what they are because before I started taking antiseizure medicine, I’d routinely wake up feeling like a mac truck hit me. I was mocked for sleeping twelve or more hours but that doesn’t mean anything when you wake up every hour. The medicine alleviated this so I think it was seizures.

The episode was probably a result of stress and prior sleep deprivation. Plus I was at my neighbor’s and one of the bulbs in her kitchen chandelier was flashing like its life depended on it.

Most of my time at work this time of year is spent training new employees and I am now officially out of patience. You’d be surprised, but people marvel at my patience. They don’t know that inside, I am seething with murderous rage. I just can’t take dealing with these stupid kids anymore. An HR department outside of the store does a lot of our hiring and they don’t even interview people, they just send them job offers and if the new hires even bother showing up, they are lazy, unenthusiastic, ignorant, walking dress-code violations.

I’ve literally asked them point-blank, “Do you even want this job or not?” And they get all indignant but it’s like, dude, you just told me you don’t want to work too long today because it’s your birthday… And then right after I tell you that you’re working, your babysitter magically needs you to come home right away.

I’m also sick and tired of the quiet ones. Some of these kids don’t even speak. They just stare at you. I used to have sympathy because I reasoned, you know what, they’re probably nervous because it’s a new job, and I myself am shy and quiet in unfamiliar situations until I get used to it. But I’m tired of doing all the heavy lifting. I do 99% of the bullshitting and you do 1%. You can’t give me, oh, 5% so I only need to do 95% instead of 99%? I’m totally out of sympathy because I have horrible social anxiety myself, hell, I am afraid to order a pizza over the phone, and yet I can manage to fake being friendly when all I want to do is die inside. And you can’t even answer me when I ask “How are you doing?”

One of my favorite things is when they don’t get paid and blame me, as though I sit there writing out checks all day long. One guy didn’t set up a direct deposit and when that happens, they mail you a paper check. Well, he doesn’t get any of his checks and he tells his manager he’s not coming to work until he gets paid, as though we’re some mom&pop outfit withholding your wages and he’s going to spite us by not coming to work. So even though it’s not remotely my issue (I’m a jackass and I try to help people who don’t deserve it), I go into the system to look at his paystub, and lo and behold, for his street address he put his phone number and listed his city in another state. Gee, ya think maybe that could be part of why you didn’t get paid? So then after not showing up for five days or responding to our calls, we sent him a termination email. The he calls asking if he still works there. Uh… no–you abandoned your job, remember?

Definitely not gettin’ paid now!

And this might only be part one! Because tomorrow is Black Friday and I have to be at that hell-hole at five o’clock in the morning!

And notice I didn’t even mention my boss?? Because I can’t even stomach telling you about how she’s been behaving!

Happy Thanksgiving y’all.

53 thoughts on “We’re overdue for a retail rant!”

  2. Yes, there’s a lot of idiots in the world.

    I guess your clerks qualify.

    Your doctor didn’t believe you when you told him you had a seizure?

    Doctors always seem to be like that.

    They don’t believe you when you have an ailment and then they’re always telling you have something you don’t have.

    And we’re supposed to believe them when it comes to Covid and vaccines?

    Not.

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  3. Good luck tomorrow. I worked retail and I feel for ya. Every time you look at your boss or she starts talking like Charlie Brown’s teacher, remind yourself she’s risen to her level of incompetence,.as so many do. ♡

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  5. Wow. You remember my rant about Festivals? I thought of including things like that as well, how store workers are stretched thin during festivals.

    In the end, I didn’t. Because I believe only a true store worker (Like you,) can write about this, not some disabled guy who is never going to work there. (I hear my face is a big turn-off for the customers.)

    Say, doctors not believing your illnesses, is it the US thing? Because most of the time I’ve heard that, it always has come from US.

    Granted, if you have a very rare illness, which like, only 0.5 % or 1% of the population gets, that might be excused. But I doubt your case is that rare. (My apologies for the assumptions.)

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    1. Anything is fair game for a rant, my friend. If you see people mistreated, you can call it put, even if you’re not one of them. But you’ve got plenty material of your own, too.

      I think it’s not so much that doctors don’t believe you, it’s like they must contradict you. Maybe it is a US thing, I dunno. Never thought about it. But doctors think they’re gods and get mad if you connect the dots before you do.

      Epilepsy isn’t rare. The type I have is just not well known because it’s easily mistaken for other things, but it’s not uncommon.

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      1. Ah, it is a pride thing then. I say this, mostly because I have never heard doctors behaving like that in my country, (No matter how bad is the health care here in comparison,) Or other countries like UK or Russia.

        Okay, that last one may piss a lot of Americans off. But it isn’t any less true for it.

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  6. Happy thanks giving Hetty.

    I am glad the rants out of you.

    “. Most of my time at work this time of year is spent training new employees and I am now officially out of patience. You’d be surprised, but people marvel at my patience. ..”

    Even the most patient people need to let of steam, it is how stay patient.

    You know Hetty you really a very strong and level headed person. And you write your rants so beautifully and they make me laugh.

    I only did retail as a Saturday and holiday jobs at school. That was enuf.

    I hope you get to enjoy thanks giving at some point.

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  8. “I was mocked for sleeping twelve or more hours but that doesn’t mean anything when you wake up every hour”

    I’ve hated my whole life how it seems like everyone’s always trying to catch you out especially when you’re giving reasons for not being able to follow societal ‘norms’, how you can’t just tell people how you’re feeling and describe your experience and have them firstly believe it, secondly imagine it and thirdly empathise with you. This is just the normal response to someone telling you something in my perspective, especially when it’s something they’re suffering with. I’ve never understood why that isn’t the default for everyone else. It’s one reason why I’ll never have kids.

    The above is a bar that people must cross to be my friend now, no exceptions. I have few friends but it’s worth it.

    Sounds like we need to get your boss up on the rack 😜

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    2. I think there’s different reasons why people don’t empathize. Some people haven’t been kicked enough when they’re down to see things from a different perspective, other people have been kicked but don’t have sympathy anymore when it happens to another person. It takes a sensitive person to be able to put themselves in someone else’s shoes. If I feel annoyed at someone for not understanding me, I remind myself of all the times I’ve done exactly the same. It’s a very rare treasure to find someone who understands you on that level.

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  11. I’m sorry Hetty, it must be as frustrating as hell and there’s not really any way to improve it in the short term. Perhaps shop for characters, you can write a nice revenge murder story set in the store and kill them all off one by one 😁

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  12. Wah wah wah wah… managed 19 fucking music stores for several years. My last year the owner wanted everybody to stay until 8 on Christmas Eve, I sent everybody hone at noon. Fuck. That. As for all the rest years ago I had serious sales and business interaction anxiety, although I was born to bullshit. Once I saw Don Hutson’s bit on vocational theater, I kicked that anxiety to the curb. I did often wonder when I was going to get found out as a fraud, but there’s a workaround for anything, even being a lousy piano player in a room full of prodigies.

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    1. Whoa, I forgot. Jesus loves you, stop at 7-11 for some instant karma crystals and magic colored sand, breathe deep the gathering gloom and remember to celebrate all the minor miracles. And Jeremiah was a bullfrog, joy to the world. Create your own better world through sloganeering at imgflip.

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    2. It’s the big aggregation of small irritations that’s wearing on me. I wonder if it would be better for me to have something actually consequential to worry about, since sometimes people thrive with higher expectations and responsibilities. I doubt it, but it seems to apply to other people.

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          1. A motivational speaker and sales trainer in a van down by the river. Way back in the late 70s or early 80s he took the Meyers-Briggs graph and some other work from IBM(maybe?) and put together a deep presentation on “relationship” selling as opposed to the old pitch/qualify/close. Somewhere in one of his bits I heard “vocational theater” and went “AHA!” The premise (long story short?) being stay invisible, discover who you’re dealing with, find out what they need, hand it to them on a silver platter, transact. The classic “we were born with two ears and one mouth, use them accordingly” scenario.

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  13. Wanted to see if I could comment – but your line: “ I can manage to fake being friendly when all I want to do is die inside.” omggggggggg I love it! But seriousness ppl not responding when you got social anxiety is just mean. Like dude I already feel like every word out my mouth sounded bitchy and awkward, don’t cockblock me even more😂

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  14. We’ve chatted about this before, haven’t we? About revenge bedtime procrastination? Or if we haven’t, then I hope you have fun with this term, lol. I can totally relate. And dealing with people who aren’t cooperative? Can’t imagine many things worse than that.

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