KittyHazelnut is Weird

rip me 2k19

So obviously this week was thanksgiving and black friday and all that jazz and I just want to use this as a teachable moment (and to rant because customers are always fucking pricks but black friday is even worse). this was my schedule for the last few days:

Thursday: 5 pm to 2 am (9 hours)

Friday: 3 pm to 12 am (9 hours)

Saturday: 5 pm to 12 am (7 hours)

and the only reason i didn't work more is because they legally couldn't put me on more than the 31 hours I worked this week. 

So, naturally, I was really fucking tired, and most of the coworkers I worked with worked pretty much the exact same shifts, because we all had to come in at the same time to get the lowdown and make intense preparations, because last year it took until the end of January just to get all the putbacks (clothes people tried on and didn't get) back where they belonged. This year, we managed to keep up with the putbacks fairly well, but the store itself was and still is a complete disaster, despite having three to four times as many people working at one time compared to our usual crew.

So what is the moral of the story, you may ask, other than the fact that I am very tired and overworked?

clean up your shit because words cannot describe how fucking annoying it is to clean up a table for half an hour, turn your back to do a new table, and look over to see someone carelessly flipping through the hundred shirts you just had to refold. And some people don't even wait until you leave the table like I can't count the number of times I have been folding sweatshirts at the front table or whatever and some entitled assholes come over and start messing with them. And same goes to people who pick things up and unfold them to look at them and then just throw them back down. You don't need to pick up the fucking leggings okay they are all one fucking color it is very obvious they are all one color and they are put back by size, each shelf is labeled by size, and each pair of leggings has a sticker right on the end to tell you what size they are. There is no reason I should have to refold that whole damn legging stand every fucking shift. And if there's already something there that you know belongs there but isn't folded? Don't pick up and unfold a new shirt when there's one right there that you can look at. Please, for the love of all things holy, do not try anything on if you know you're not going to get it. Putting things away is the hardest part of my whole job, and my store is fucking tiny. I don't even know how people do it in bigger stores. 

i spent most of my week at the register, so fortunately i didn't have to deal with that part too much (other than putbacks and the goddamn underwear table like I'm glad it sold well but y'all couldn't have tried to keep it a little neater? and I worked on the tank top table which again is full of tank tops that have stickers to tell you what size they are, whether they have a shelf bra, and all that jazz, and they're all solid colors, and they're all in size orders, and people still had to unfold them? Like? Bitch? Fuck off?) but the register is honestly even worse.

If a table says "buy one, get two free" you buy one and get two free. you cannot buy two and get the deal. You cannot buy four and get the deal. You must have a multiple of three. It's damn near impossible to keep up with the line when I have to keep sending people to get new shirts all the damn time. On a related note: if one table of shirts is labeled "by one get two free" and one table of shirts is labeled $6, the $6 shirts are $6 and not BOGO. This should not be so difficult to understand. Also along those lines and going back to shitty customers, people suck at putting shit back where they found it. It is entirely possible that you will find a $6 with the BOGOs. That is not the cashier's fault. Depending on the store, the cashier may be able to change the deal to what you thought it would cost. My store does not work like that. And if you want to buy something, make sure you're looking at the right sign. I had someone try to buy sweatshirts for $16 when they were really $22, because the sweatpants underneath the sweatshirts were labeled $16 and the sweatshirts were 60% off. The signs were on two separate bars, each one with the thing it was advertising. It literally could not have been more obvious. I should not have had to call my manager over to explain it (and that still took at least five minutes, and when they left I happened to be walking by and my manager told me she wanted to strangle them so I wasn't the only one suffering). Please do not argue with the cashiers. Especially during Black Friday, we are overworked, underpaid, and sleep deprived, and do not want to deal with your shit.

And also, and I cannot stress this enough without putting it in caps, DO NOT WASTE OUR TIME RETURNING YOUR SHIT ON BLACK FRIDAY UNLESS YOU ARE ALSO BUYING SOMETHING. I can't count the number of people who literally came back from Thursday to Saturday (the three biggest days most stores will ever see) to return the shit they bought over those three days. People were coming back so soon after they bought it, their purchase hadn't even registered in the system yet, which totally fucks with the return prices. Why would you buy something just to return it ten minutes later? What are you gaining from this? 

Okay, to recap without the passive aggressiveness:

- Employees work very long hours during black friday week. We are tired. Many of us miss Thanksgiving dinner to be there. We do not want to deal with dumbasses if we can avoid it.

- Do not throw the merchandise wherever you feel like it. Leave it neatly where you found it.

- Do not touch anything you do not want. Definitely do not try it on.

- Pay close attention to the deals you see. Do the math yourself. Make sure you have everything you need, and make sure it's a price you're willing and able to pay.

- Don't fight the cashiers. We already want to die. You don't have to make it worse.

And here's a short list of the pros of black friday this year:

- I was one of the two main ringers so I got to spend most of my time at the register and only deal with one person at a time. 

- We were asking for donations for a charity that deals with animals, so I could focus on that instead of the transaction itself (and honestly fuck all those people who bought a bunch of stuff and wouldn't donate the change to the animals like bitch you just spent a hundred bucks and you can't spare fifty cents for the puppies?)

- On Saturday I was ringing up a woman who had been standing in line as I went through like three people because I ring people up much quicker than anyone else and when she came over to my register the first thing she said was complimenting me on being so nice and cheerful so that was nice (and also it proves that even if an employee is acting nice and happy and being super helpful they're still probably miserable and staring at the clock waiting for break/close/the end of their shift)

- My store was the most successful in the district compared to last year's sales for all of November so we got $50 each week we won to "fill the fridge" or basically just buy the employees food and we won three times so we got candy and snacks and sandwich stuff so I had a lot of chocolate and my mom got my lunchables 

- My coworker saw my lunchable in the fridge and was like "whose lunchable is that? whose mom doesn't love them enough?" and I thought that was hilarious

- Every night after we closed was basically a party while we cleaned because we were all super tired and also we had a running joke the whole time that we were gonna all jump off a cliff so that was fun in a weird way

- I got to spend my breaks writing my season 15 au cas fanfic which honestly only meant I got a couple thousand words done but it was better than nothing

So yeah be a nice person this holiday season when you're shopping and take pity on us retail workers m'kay we just want a paycheck but we're getting dangerously close to racking up a body count in the process 

Anyway I'm gonna go make some mac n cheese and have my first real meal since breakfast on thursday :)))