Dana Goldstein - Spent: My Accidental Career in Retail

Copyright 2022 by Dana Goldstein

Cover Copyright 2022

Cover Art Designed by Michael Rehder; www.rehderandcompanie.com/

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

ISBN: 978-1-7751438-8-8 (Paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-7751438-9-5 (Electronic Book)

First edition printing June 2022

Published by Dana Goldstein

danagoldstein.ca

For all the retail workers who put up with the worst of humanity, either through management or customers. I see you. You are doing a great job.

I m no stranger to the penal system. When I was 11, I was caught slipping a family-size chocolate bar up my sleeve while in a drugstore. I was aware of the man watching me, tailing me through the store, but had no idea he was an undercover security guard. As I tried to leave, he grabbed me by the arm, took me to the basement and told me I was in a heap of trouble. He threatened me, saying the store might press charges and the police might have to get involved. The poor soul had no idea he was dealing with a sassy latchkey kid who was more afraid of her mother than any authorities. I refused to give him a phone number to contact my mother, choosing instead to give him my grandparents phone number. They came from the other end of the city to get me, profusely apologized to the store manager, and assured him that I would not set foot in his store ever again.

But of course I did. I let an acceptable length of time pass before I was back there, shoplifting bags of caramels and packs of gum. On my third visit, I scanned the aisles for the security guard, but he wasnt there anymore. I kept my eyes peeled for the manager, but I never saw him on the sales floor.

I now know this is typical for retail. Its a twisted world where no good deed goes unpunished and managers stay behind locked doors.

Working in retail is harsh. Its a world where cutbacks are commonplace and managers fight for scraps, always paring back to stay within the payroll percentages to appease the Wall Street or Bay Street investors. When you enter the world of retail as an employee, you can expect your vision of helping people and easy work to be clouded by, well, people.

Im confident that almost everyone you know has worked some kind of retail job. Its a rite of passage from childhood into adulthood; the bridge between living by your parents rules and discovering the rules of real life. That first paycheque is significant, even if the dollar value isnt. My first paycheque meant I could finally buy the things I had coveted my whole teen life: a Benetton rugby shirt, Tretorn running shoes, and a burger and fries at the greasy dive down the road from my high school. There was power in my purse.

But working in retail comes at a price, especially as a teenager. Weekends and evenings are no longer your own. Your friends without jobs go to the pool while you sweat out the summer in your polyester uniform. You smell like hamburgers or dry cleaning solution, and that will be all you can smell some days. Your work shoes can never cross the threshold of your home because they are always slimy or sticky and you cant figure out why because you work in a clothing store.

I never intended to be employed in the retail sector beyond my university years. My aspirations went further than stocking shelves, folding towels, and making popcorn. After the allure of babysitting had run its course, I landed my first retail job in 1985 at an amusement park. I was 15 and thought retail was a career for people who didnt do well in school. But when, in 1990, a recession swept across Canada and the United States, forcing people out of long-held careers and into retail to make ends meet, I realized these jobs were the foundation of the economy. For two years, while I was still safely cocooned in university and a part-time job at a bank, people from all walks of life were looking for work wherever they could find it.

Ive worked in so many different retail environments, some of which enriched me, but most of them chipped away at my soul. Ive had access to backrooms, back offices, and the backstabbing common among managers. Ive pored over financial books, look-books, and books on the psychology of shopping.

Ask anyone who has spent more than a smattering of evenings and weekends in retail, and theyll refer to how much time they did, like theyve served a prison sentence. Its a shitty environment to work in. Upper management is filled with power-tripping assholes who wield performance reviews like police batons (and will metaphorically beat you over the head with one). Customers will treat you and the merchandise like garbage, piling and dropping things wherever they please, knowing its part of your job to clean up after them. You are a second-class citizen.

As a retail manager, I dealt with employees stealing, colleagues having affairs, broke customers who maxed out credit cards trying to buy happiness, bosses who couldnt spell, and bosses who put company policy above humanity. I had a general manager who whined, daily, about how her boyfriend was never going to leave his wife and one who thought it was okay to clip his fingernails in the lunchroom. But Ive also had stellar managers who taught me how to be a better manager.

I spent more than a decade in retail, and in all that time I met only two people who deliberately chose this career path. They never intended to stay in the store, but had loftier goals, their sights set on corporate jobs at head office. Staff work where its geographically convenient, while management goes wherever we are sent. The retail world is small and turnover is a huge problem. At one point in my retail career, I had hired and fired so many people that I started recognizing them in interviews when I moved to a new company.

I collected valuable life lessons while I sold blue jeans, built schedules, and managed inventory. My definition of retail includes the gambling industry because the lessons I learned there are too colourful not to share. If youve ever bought chocolate at the till of a bookstore, had anxiety dreams about stocking bath bombs where the hand soap should go, or watched a customer unravel over socks, this book is for you. Weve all done time, one way or another.

O n July 23, 1920, a 10-year-old boy stood at the railing on the deck of the SS Minnedosa, watching the work at the Liverpool dockyards. Icek Fruchtman was tired and nervous, weary from the first leg of his journey. He never imagined there could be so many places on the way to his new home. In the last six days, as his family fled Poland, they had sat in the back of a horse-drawn wagon and stood with strangers in the open carriage of a train. And then there was the walking. So much walking.