A Box of Stuff

All of life can be boiled down to boxes of stuff.

With the store potentially closing/moving/fuck, I neither know nor care anymore, along with some other stuff on the homefront, I’ve been thinking a lot about boxes. My shed is full of boxes: Boxes from my childhood bedroom, boxes from my Paw Paw’s insurance office, boxes from my dad’s schoolroom, boxes of my Maw Maw’s Christmas decorations. In my shed is at least eighteen years of my time on Earth. My fiance still has stuff in boxes from her move into the house. There’s a few years of her life still boxed away. In the shop are boxes full of random fixture pieces and other bits and bobs collected over the years from storefronts past.

So much of our time is spent bringing pieces into our lives. We cherish them for as long as they have influence over us. Some hang around longer than others; some are gone within days. Then we put them into boxes and put them in closets or attics or sheds or garages, and they live in darkness.

What the hell is wrong with me? I’m half a week away from leaving this place for good. Why am I getting emotional about stuff?! Really, this is a common thing when facing such finality. The answer is because stuff carries emotion. That teddy bear you got when you were a baby and had in your bed every night until you were ten. That pen your grandfather used to write every letter. The wreath you grandmother hung on the front door every holiday season from the day after Christmas until the day after Epiphany. They mean something, they stand for something, they are something. To you, to them, to everyone who came into contact with them.

No matter how tiny, there is always something there. It’s all in how we process it, how we weigh it. Some things are heavier than others, and they linger longer. But no matter how you look at them, they’re just stuff. Stuff in boxes. Our life in boxes.

-The Retail Explorer

Shopper Profiles: Broseph McMoron

January 17, 2018 ~ observationsinretail

Here’s the second in our series on regulars. Meet Broseph McMoron.

Broseph McMoron

Broseph, as I touched on ever so briefly in our first post, is named so because, well, he is a moron and calls me “bro” every time. If you recall what I said about pet names, we don’t like them. “Bro” is right up there at the top of the list.

I’m not your bro, buddy.

Shall I list the reasons why? I Hate You (Elzar, Futurama).gif

Okay, maybe only that second reason is accurate. When you use a pet name, we instantly move you over to the bad side of the board. We don’t care if that’s just your personality. We don’t know you, nor do we really care to all that much, and we don’t feel any attachment to you. There are very few of my regulars that I actually like. They don’t even call me names, so why do these other shoppers feel that they have the invitation to do so? Thing is they don’t. We don’t welcome it. We barely like it when you know our actual names. If you must call us by anything, try “sir” or “miss”. (Hell, I’ll even accept “man”.)

So, Broseph got up on the wrong side of the bed to begin with. Not a great start. From there, he just kept digging his hole bigger through general stupidity and laziness, which is par for the course for most of my customers. Honestly, nothing really egregious sticks out in my mind; “Bro” is just what brands him for me.

That, and he would always walk right up to the counter and shake my hand with the most miserable limp handshake. It’s weird enough that you go out of your way to shake the hand of a retail sales associate who’s really not doing much to help you with any major purchase, but to do it with such an awful handshake? That’s a whole new level of blech. That’s almost as bad as sweaty money. Almost. (We’ll touch on that another time.)

Oh, Pete, so hopeful.

Those are a couple of my favorite strips. Dell is a rockstar in these. And as usual, both of these things have actually happened in the shop. I don’t recall if Broseph was actually the instigator or not, but I absolutely buy him as having been the inspiration behind these.

Bottom line is this: Don’t call us by pet names. Just treat us with the same level of respect that we extend to you. And as always, don’t be a moron. Use your head. We’ll love you forever.

-The Retail Explorer

Birdbrains

January 16, 2018 ~ observationsinretail

Hey, watch out for those doors. They’ll jump out and getcha.

At the end of last week, the owner made a curious request, signalling a possible about-face from his current stance of wanting to close the store. He asked me to break up the single store fixture, a long series of connected gondola shelving units running down the center of the shop, and move the now eight-foot segments against the windows to make shorter aisles and open up more space for him to move his helicopter flight school into the space (not kidding one bit about this).

So, yesterday and today, I accommodated his request. In the process, I exposed two raised power outlets in the center of the shop space. I placed the fixtures over them to minimize risk of Shopper, well, death. In exposing them, I had to find ways to cover them up without taking away too much space for the Shoppers to navigate the shop. (They’re quite poor at that kind of thing.)

Over one, I placed the small cylindrical speaker my future mother-in-law bought me for Christmas a couple of years back, which I had been using to play the in-store music so that the Shoppers would shut their annoying traps about it being so quiet in there. (Seriously, quiet is good. What’s wrong with quiet?) Over the other, I placed this wire news rack, sent to us years ago by an industry magazine publisher to display their product.

As I looked at it, silently guiding Shoppers around it like a traffic cop, I chuckled. A few times. Why? Well, because of the similar way in which I used it back before the building’s renovations. Allow me to explain.

Back then, we had almost exactly the same footprint for the shop. The only differences were the doors and stock rooms. The only one worth mentioning here is the front door, two massive sliding glass doors, which slid behind massive pane glass windows. Well, apparently, this opening was too ambiguous, too poorly defined for my Shoppers. Far too often, they’d glide right into the glass like little birds. Cold days, when I would make the opening smaller, only made the problem worse. I knew it was only a matter of time before one of these little birdies smacked into it hard enough they’d go flying right through the glass.

To combat that, I moved some stuff around in the shop to signify where the doors ended and the entrance began, because the thick aluminum frame wasn’t enough of an indicator. One one side, I placed the flight cases (think big briefcases for pilots to transport their instruments and charts, which they really don’t carry anymore now that charts have gone digital); on the other, I placed the news rack.

It didn’t work.

They still smacked into the door. Honestly, I should have expected it from a creature so unobservant as the Shopper, which doesn’t even notice signs, which are put there to inform and aid them, on the door at eye level. They’re basic, predictable creatures.

So, I stood over this news rack, in the middle of the room, for a minute or two, smiling and chuckling, listening to them smack into it in my head. Ah, memories.

-The Retail Explorer