sejintenej wrote:Whilst I can understand your post, look at it from the other side; according to the bestseller supermarket cashiers live a life of hell - customer rudeness, customer accusations of getting the bill wrong, customers' stupid complaints, management offensiveness .......
David makes some excellent points again.
Last Christmas, I thought it would be fun and a source of some extra spondulicks if I got a job as an Extra-Christmas-Staff Girl at a famous High Street chain store. Fun? "Life of Hell" really does sum it up. However, the customers surged and jostled and bustled and queued in three floors of hell in a sort of resigned acceptance that this was Purgatory, and that they
just must endure it for two more weeks before the Heaven of getting Christmas over.
Christmas? There was only one small reference to anything traditionally religious - I encountered some Frankinsense Room Spray. The whole heaving hectic remorseless operation was determinedly secular. Nativity? What Nativity?
I was amused at the panic with which many customers added a new bathmat and loo brush to their huge stashes of presents.
Management offensiveness...
oh yes! I know that companies have to be careful about staff security. However, I never knew when I would be pounced upon by a Security male-and-a-female and told to empty and turn out my pockets, open up my locker, supply a taste from my bottle of water, show the content of my make-up bag, empty out my purse and step out of my shoes. This could happen twice in the day. I was snapped at with fury by my sharp-tongued "coach" when I asked if I could make a trip to the loo. (The Ladies Staff Loo was on an upper floor - escalator trip , stair climb and two card-protected security doors.) Nobody has spoken to me with quite so much shaming scorn since Miss Jukes! It was humiliating. At my age!
I found myself becoming more and more exhausted. The sales ethos was completely task-orientated. Nobody seemed very interested in the products/garments at all. I'd like to say that, with the drive for "queue-busting", that this was just a Christmas thing, but I think that it was probably the case all year round. Nobody cared about what they were selling. The emphasis during the day was who was enduring at the till, who was guarding against theft (rather than helping a customer try on something splendid) in the changing room and who was categorising discarded items to be put back. The nursing world would have called this "task orientation".
You could be seen to be displaying mega-efficiency by voluntarily crossing off who had gone where on the who-goes-where chart! The most efficient muttered furiously to themselves for extra effect when a manager rushed by.
I was in trouble for allowing a disabled customer in a wheelchair who wanted to try on a bra into our non-lingerie changing room. (She and her chair pusher were worn out in the crowd.) It seemed that it was a legal minefield if I had helped with the bra if I wasn't a qualified bra fitter. Oh dear. But they were so tired!
One manager behaved very like a prison wardress - stern, bossy, righteous, gimlet-eyed and furious whenever possible. I was summoned to her office - but was granted a moment of mirth when it appeared that a customer had rung in to say that I had been the most helpful person
ever - totally wonderfully marvellous! "Continue to give good service" said the Wardress fiercely, and with marked reluctance. It was obviously agony for her.
I never did master every function of the till + vouchers, giftcards, special offers, three-for-the-price-of-two, a points system, etc, etc. I just don't have that sort of brain. Horribly, I seemed to exert a negative influence on barcodes.
Well, it has been an experience.
At my age!
