The Hidden Dangers Of Seasonal Paper Products
The summer I was 17, I took a job at a greeting card store. (I know, I know. As one co-worked once said, “How many jobs have you had?” I’ve never counted, but let’s just go with “a lot.”) I won’t name the store, but I will add that if you turned over one of our cards, you would not be greeted with the special gold crown that lets you know someone cares.
For a place that was supposed to specialize in spreading joy and sentiment, it was an unusually tense environment. Our manager cried a lot. I think it had to do with a boyfriend, but after a week, I wanted to spend most of my days crying, too.
I blame this weepiness on two unfortunate aspects of the job:
- I actually had to spend two days inventorying Precious Moments figurines. Even if I liked Precious Moment figurines, going down a three page list and counting statuettes like “Bobby Fishes,” “Bobby and Ellen Down by the Lake” and “Susie’s Goodnight Prayer,” would nearly bore anyone to death.
2. We sold those nature sounds CDs that were very popular in the mid-‘90s, and they were housed in a special display that ran samples of each soundtrack over and over again in an hour-long loop. No human being is meant to hear laughing dolphins at 15 minutes past the hour, every hour, and maintain his or her sanity. I finally understood what drove Noriega out.
As a card store, we also carried a lot of seasonal merchandise, and according to the employee handbook (the very long employee handbook, I might add), seasonal merchandise that did not sell on clearance had to be destroyed after a certain point. Employees couldn’t take it home, it couldn’t be donated – it had to be thrown away. (It makes no sense to me either.)
As the lowest member on the card store totem pole, I was also on trash duty. One mid-August day, it was finally time for me to tote the St. Patrick’s Day napkins up to the dumpster.
(If you have never worked in a mall, you do not know the joy of going to the dumpster through the maze of hallways that runs through the back of your shopping center. This is not a job you want to do after dark.)
Anyway, as I was toting my boxes of St. Patrick’s day table décor through the back of the mall to the dumpster, I ran into one of the security guards.
“Those new napkins?” he said.
“I don’t know about new,” I said, “but they haven’t been opened.”
“Where you going with those?”
“The trash.”
“Really?” he said.
“Really,” I said. “Store Policy.”
“That’s a shame,” he said.
“Uh-huh.”
When we got to his floor, he looked back over at me and said, “Oh s&%$,” and grabbed all of my seasonal décor before exiting the elevator. I continued my ride up to the dumpsters.
What he was going to do with all of those St. Patrick’s Day table decorations, I don’t know. Why he would take them from a 17-year-old girl, I really don’t know. I can only imagine that he really disdained waste, or for an older black man, loved March 17th with a passion few can understand.
However, knowing our store policy, I wasn’t really into the idea of getting fired from the poor man’s version of Hallmark for “stealing” plastic shamrock tablecloths. With cameras being everywhere and all, and the products never making it to the trash, I thought I should report the incident to my always-tense manager.
“What happened to the paper plates?” she said, her tears turning to an odd form of rage.
I repeated my story.
“I’m calling security,” she said.
Since a security guard committed “the crime,” this did not seem like a good idea to me, but what was a girl to do?
Another security guard showed up to take my report. (All of this over six-month-old paper products, by the way.)
This created a terrible conundrum in my teenage brain: If I really reported the security guard, I might get a guy fired over napkins. If I said next-to-nothing, I’d have a security guard that really hated me wandering the mall. After all, it’s not like there were going to be a ton of suspects for who reported the theft that happened with two people in an elevator, and I was sure my story would be the focus of some mall-wide security meeting.
I ended up giving a ridiculously vague description of the security guard. “He was average?”
It felt like enough to seem like I was trying, but not nearly enough to get anyone fired. It was not, however, good for assuaging my manager’s rage. “I don’t think you’re anywhere close to being ready for cash register duty.”
The next week, I went on a planned vacation. There was some trouble with my return flight, so I asked my mom to call the card store and ask about my schedule. I’d done so much not to get fired, I didn’t really want to get in trouble for missing a shift over a late plane.
When my mom called back, she said, “They said you weren’t anywhere on the schedule. I think they forgot you work there.”
“I think we should just keep it that way.”
And there you have the illustrious story of my two-week career in retail, as well as the reason I prefer to buy all of my greeting cards at Target.