Retail Hell: How I Sold My Soul to the Store

by Freeman Hall

  I also had to apologize to Marcella, the display manager. She glared at me, said, “I hate you,” and then walked away. It was a good thing Marcella didn’t turn around because she’d have seen the giant evil grin I had from imagining her fat ass hauling a stepladder up and down eight flights of stairs.

  That’s what you get for building such a noisy monster. Think before you annoy.

  The image made all my efforts worthwhile.

  A short time later, Disco Nights came down. No more dizzying disco ball spots. No more dangerous silver strips. No more earsplitting Donna. The Great Stairwell was once again silent.

  The multicolored railings and walls were the only thing left as they awaited their next festive transformation, whatever that would be. Climbing the fucking stairs still sucked ass, but at least I wasn’t forced to shake my booty, look for hot stuff, and see it’s fun to stay at the YMCA.

  The Shitting Room

  Like most Retail Slaves, most of the time the Handbag Angels and Demons fought over getting morning shifts. But on one fateful Big Fancy day, I regretted begging Jules to switch shifts with me so Cammie and I could go see our friend’s band play.

  By the time noon hit, I wished I’d told Cammie to forget it; I’d catch their next gig. Then I would have gotten to sleep in and avoid the following hellacious events.

  The night before, the General told me the store was having a special cosmetic-makeover-trendy-fashion-whatever show. Half of what she said did not even register.

  I was too busy focusing on the fact she told me to come in at 7:00 a.m.

  “Seven!” I cried — I wanted the early shift, but not that early!

  “The store is opening at 9:00, right after the show,” said Judy.

  I was dumbfounded. Women actually get up at 7:00 a.m. to attend some makeover-trendy-cosmetic-fashion-whatever show at The Big Fancy at 8:00 a.m.? Ludicrous.

  But as I thought about it, I realized why ludicrous made sense.

  Free makeovers and goodie bags.

  There are women who will get up at 3:00 a.m. for a free lipstick. And Lorraine was one of them. (I made a mental note to get her a few goodie bags.)

  When I got to the store, at least thirty boxes of stock were waiting. Within minutes I was sweaty, my pants were covered in dirt, and I had torn my favorite skull tie with the pair of broken scissors we used for opening boxes.

  Great start. Nothing like zooming down the highway to Retail Hell at 100 mph.

  Working alongside Mega-Mouth Marci and Judy wasn’t exactly inspiring either. They bitched about everything from the store to the economy to the weather, and I momentarily thought about stabbing myself with the scissors.

  We had barely finished putting everything out when Suzy Davis-Johnson’s voice screeched across the PA. She was pissed about business and had decided to unload.

  “Whyyyyyyyyyyy??? Oh Whyyyyyyyyy???” bellowed Satan, sounding like a hyena in heat. “This is tragic! How could it happen? What is wrong with us? Tell me what I am doing wrong. How can I help you? Are we not a team? Do we not love each other to death? Can’t we do well together? I love our store. It’s the best ever. We should be number one. I’m so sad, you guys!”

  By the time the store opened I was irritated beyond belief. Marci had talked so incessantly about nothing, my ears were bleeding. Judy turned bitchy because Satan had called us out over the PA as one of the departments with unacceptable decreases. Teddy Bear Lady sat down in Ladies’ Shoes and stared at me. Jabbermouth sauntered up to the counter and started talking about her attack of food poisoning. Then a customer from the cosmetic-trendy-makeover-whatever-fashion show got all pissy with me because I didn’t have any goody bags and I didn’t know where she could get any . . . the hell went on and on.

  All before 9:30.

  On a normal day the store wouldn’t even have been open yet.

  I took a deep breath.

  What was I going to do? Tell Judy I had decided to go back home and go to bed?

  You have chosen this path of retail damnation! Suck it up and get your ass to work. You’ve got bills to pay and Coach handbags to sell!

  As my morning wakeup cocktail of coffee, Rockstar, and 5-hour Energy swirled around in my empty stomach, I was suddenly overcome with that tingly feeling that says it’s time to pee!

  I told Marci I’d be right back.

  As I walked into the men’s room, the smell of shit assaulted my nose.

  Whoa, somebody must have taken a big dump in here!

  I had no idea.

  Public restrooms are often stinky, especially if there’s a lot of traffic, and The Big Fancy’s men’s room often smelled bad because it was so small, but this stench was different.

  It permeated the room like an air freshener gone wrong. Terribly wrong. Shitty wrong.

  I headed over to the area where the urinals were. The stink got stronger.

  As I wondered why it reeked so badly, I looked over and saw one of the urinals holding a mountain of poo.

  I say mountain because it was no Lincoln Log or Baby Ruth bar. It was a pile so massive it could have been a model scale of Mount Everest.

  Some guy must have dropped his pants, backed his ass up to the urinal and shit it all out.

  The really strange thing about his urinal dump was that it was in perfect ice-cream-machine shape. No spills or splatters. Perfect form. It also looked like it came out of a large dog.

  How in the hell was the poor Housekeeping Slave going to clean that up? They would probably have to go to the store restaurant and borrow a service spoon. Or a ladle. Or maybe they would call Maintenance for a fucking shovel.

  Satan Suzy’s voice echoed in my head.

  “Whyyyyyyyyyyy??? Oh Whyyyyyyyyy??? This is tragic. How could this happen! I’m so sad, you guys!”

  Satan and I finally agreed on something. Why is it people have to do such disgusting things with their poo in public places? I’m not safe even in the men’s room!

  The smell was so awful I couldn’t even stand there for thirty seconds and do my pissing. Grossed out and sickened, I bolted for the down escalator. At least the private employee restroom downstairs in Receiving wouldn’t smell like shit. I hoped not, anyway.

  The escalator was packed with fashion-show-cosmetic-trendy-makeover-whatever attendees, all clutching their Gifts-with-Purchase and talking excitedly.

  Way too much happiness this early in the morning. Did someone lace the free lipstick with Ecstasy?

  I had to pee so badly, I nearly let it loose right there. What the hell! Everyone else was acting like animals at The Big Fancy; maybe I should have as well, just relieve my tension and let it all flow out of my dress pants, making an escalator waterfall.

  When I got to the single-stall employee restroom, the door was locked. Fuck. Someone was using it. I stood by waiting, cross-legged.

  Finally, the door opened. A salesman from Sportswear came out and said, “Whew. Had to come down from upstairs, someone took a giant crap in the men’s room urinal. It smelled awful.”

  Rushing past him, I said, “I think it was a St. Bernard.”

  When I returned from my fifteen-minute piss, the first thing Marci said to me was:

  “You look sick. Have you eaten anything yet? I have some brownie left.”

  Judy was standing next to her and followed it up with: “Maybe you need some coffee.”

  Then a nearby customer jumped in: “You need some chocolate. That always works for me!”

  What I needed was to stop being reminded of the stinking pile of poo that had forever blowtorched its image into my brain.

  What I need is to find a bar and start drinking. I don’t care if it’s 9: 00 a.m.

  Just then a customer walked up and said: “I’m looking for something big in deep, dark, chocolaty brown? Can you help me?”

  It took everything in me not to direct her to the men’s room urinal. Instead I began showing her brown bags while trying not to throw up.

  As gross as it was to see a human
dookie bigger than my foot at 9:00 in the morning, it paled in comparison to another incident that has left me with such a revolting memory of The Big Fancy that I should have made them pay for therapy.

  One summer afternoon during a lull, I was having a chuckle listening to Marsha tell me how she had trained her cat Mr. Butters to turn off her bedside alarm clock (was I ever impressed), when Two- Tone Tammy called. She informed us that one of us needed to go keep an eye on the Swim department. Neither one of us wanted to help girls find swimsuits, so we declined instantly, but Tammy turned on her Dragon voice and informed us that we weren’t being asked. Someone was out sick and the girl working over there needed to go on her lunch break.

  Okay, Two-Tone! Since you so kindly put it like that. Whatever you need! We’re here for you!

  Lucky for me, I didn’t have to become Queer-Eye Swimsuit Guy. Marsha agreed to watch Swim for an hour. The other lucky thing was that the Swim department was only a short distance away — across the aisle. Because swimsuit business had been so bad, Suzy Davis-Johnson had decided to move Hosiery temporarily into Lingerie and give Swim some exposure on the busy floor of the store.

  Within minutes, I was bored. I drifted over to Marsha and joined her at the Swim counter. I didn’t totally abandon the Handbag Jungle; I kept an eye out for customers and an ear open for the phone. We were able to continue chatting about Marsha’s talented cats.

  After just a few short minutes, this skinny woman in her thirties with long brown hair wearing a light blue dress and red patent high heels came out of the fitting room. Empty-handed.

  “None of the suits worked for you, hon?”

  The swimsuit lady looked at us both, cocked her head, and said, “Umm . . .”

  “Hon, you took in six swimsuits. I asked you to bring them out when you were finished,” said Marsha, who I could tell was slightly annoyed that the lady had left them back in the room, probably all over the floor.

  The lady didn’t say anything. She just walked by us.

  Marsha and I exchanged “what-a-weirdo” looks with each other, and then we watched her leave.

  That’s when we noticed the wet brownish liquid on the backside bottom of her light blue dress.

  Our eyes could not help but continue traveling down to the back of her legs and shoes, which also had smears of something brown and wet on them . . . something that was leaving a trail across the carpet leading back to the fitting room.

  “Oh my God,” I said, as we both ran toward the fitting rooms.

  As soon as we entered the fitting room hallway, a septic smell strangled the air.

  The worst coming from the room she’d been using. Last one on the right.

  “This is like a fuckin’ horror movie, Marsha,” I said as we neared it.

  Marsha opened the fitting room door like she was in a haunted house and this was the portal to hell. Little did we know, it was a portal.

  A portal to a potty.

  As the door swung open, our eyes burned and our noses almost closed up.

  The weird woman in the light blue dress had shit all over the place.

  Total assplosion.

  The room was covered in her runny defecation like floodwaters from the Hershey highway. It was everywhere. Across the floor. Across the bench. Across the mirror. Swimsuits were strewn all over the shit-covered floor and soaked in a mucky brown crud as if she had used them as toilet paper. Hangers were equally coated. This was beyond Montezuma’s revenge — it was Montezuma’s volcano! I kid you not, it looked like the chick had bent over, raised her ass in the air like a canon, and spray-painted the walls with her shitty diarrhea.

  We’re talking Jackson Pollock painting.

  Dexter crime scene.

  Brutal paintball attack.

  Somehow a bit of the excrement had splattered onto the ceiling.

  How the fuck does shit end up on a ceiling???

  It was bad enough the Shit Lady had unloaded (accidentally or not) in our fitting room, but to ruin six bathing suits and squirt it all over the walls and ceiling like she was a rotating shit-sprinkler was just beyond any thought process we could understand. This was not the sign of a person who had a medical potty accident. It was what monkeys do.

  She could have at least said, “Umm . . . by the way, I just shit all over your fitting room. You might want to call someone.”

  We would have called someone all right. The fuckin’ Hazmat team.

  “Hon, I am not cleaning this shit up!” announced Marsha.

  “You got that shit right,” I replied.

  Marsha was aghast: “I’ll have you know my cats have never shit this bad. Even when little Shania Twain ate all that tomato sauce and got the runs.”

  “This is some bad shit,” I said.

  The entire fitting room area had to be closed for the rest of the day due to the shitty stench. In fact, the smell was so intense, it wafted out into the department, where browsing customers made faces and asked questions.

  “What’s that smell?” a customer said.

  “Oh they’re just doing some construction,” Marsha replied, “You know, welding some iron.”

  Once the gross shock of what the Shit Lady had done wore off, the jokes started. I dared Marsha to approach the customer and ask her if she’d like to get a shitting room started. There are three good ones left! Marsha chimed in with, “It certainly gives new meaning to the retail version of the word dump! For dump duty you won’t need hangers — just take this can of scrubbing bubbles.”

  We both cried with laughter.

  Soon after the Shit Lady left her ass mark all over The Big Fancy, the Swim department salesgirl returned from lunch into what would be her Retail Hell. Marsha and I bolted. The girl was not happy about having to work the rest of her shift smelling shit, but the person I really felt sorry for was the petite Latino woman working in House-keeping that day. I’m sure she’d see more shit-storms than anyone. She actually seemed quite unfazed at the mess until she looked up and saw the brown splatter on the ceiling, to which she exclaimed, “Aiyiyiyi!!!”

  And she was right. When you see something like that, it never leaves you. The Shit Lady’s mess has left me slightly poop-phobic. The vision of her ass-work has burned itself clearly into my mind’s undeletable photo album, and to this day, whenever I go into any fitting room to try on clothes, I can’t help but see shitty bathing suits and walls. When I look up to check the ceiling my mind goes wild.

  How much shit was unleashed in this room? Did someone piss on the walls? I’m not touching anything and I’m so not sitting down. Maybe I’ll just take the clothes home and try them on.

  Unfortunately, fitting rooms are not the only place customers have bodily function accidents.

  One day there was an old man and his wife walking down the main store aisle. Apparently he’d forgotten to put on his underwear, because when he accidentally lost control of his poop while he was walking, a little log slid right down his pant leg and landed on the marbled floor. The oblivious couple kept on walking. At least it was just one turd and not a river of butt mud.

  On another day a crazy customer tinkled on the Cosmetics carpet right in front of the MAC counter. She was not old. No excuses there.

  And a friend of mine told me there was a woman wearing a housedress who liked to show up at the lawn and garden center of his store, stand over a drain in the ground, point a toe over the drain, and quietly let the urine drip down her leg, along her foot and toe, into the drain. Creepy. Maybe my next screenplay should be called Tales from the Sewer.

  I guess the best way to deal with my shit phobia was to understand that what comes out of people’s asses is just a basic function of the human body. One that we all deal with.

  It’s like that children’s book says: “Everyone Poops.”

  I just wish they wouldn’t do it in front of me.

  Merry Strep Throat and a Happy New Flu

  Like any retail store, The Big Fancy plans for the holidays like it’s going to war,
and when your department manager is a general, no detail is left unattended.

  But on December 18 at 3:02 p.m., the General had no plan ready for what happened.

  She had gone to lunch, leaving Cammie, Marci, Jules, a temp named Venezuela (all the temps had weird names), and me on the floor. There were way too many salespeople, considering there were hardly any holiday shoppers. Since we were in the middle of a late-afternoon lull, we kicked out the new girl, sending Venezuela on an extended break.

  Cammie and I were on box duty. The Big Fancy offered free gift boxes to customers for all their purchases. A nice courtesy, but it was a bitch for us because Suzy Davis-Satan required not only that we make boxes, but that we tissue-swaddle each item inside before handing the package over to the customer.

  “I don’t want to see one customer leaving this store without a made box,” she said one morning at a rally, while wearing a Santa hat, “And don’t forget to say ‘Happy Holidays!’ We need to think of ourselves as elves! We are Santa’s cute little elves making life easier for all our customers.” After that adorable analogy, as expected, someone in the crowd pointed out that they were Jewish. Suzy didn’t miss a beat, “I would never forget my Jewish friends — why you are all just little candles of light burning brightly in the menorah.”

  I wanted to puke for all my Jewish friends and light her Santa hat on fire.

  But I digress . . . back to that fateful afternoon where Cammie and I constructed boxes in the back of the department. Having finished our chat about our personal lives, it wasn’t long before the monotony of folding five different size boxes crept in, box after box after box after box. As heinous Christmas music echoed over our heads, we decided to play our favorite Big Fancy holiday game: Fuck Up the Christmas Songs. The way it worked was that we’d start singing along (just loudly enough for us to hear) and change the lyrics. A little yuletide rewrite to warm our hearts.