1. Store hours are optional.
People will show up at your store once the doors are already locked for the night and will argue with you to let them in. If someone lets them in, or they sneak in before the store officially closes, their sense of time vanishes and they’ll stay as long as they like, no matter how many times you remind them that the store has closed and you’re trying to close the registers.
2. Everything is a seat.
It doesn’t matter if your store is alone, in an indoor mall, or in an outdoor mall: no number of benches is ever sufficient. In fact, most of the benches may be empty, and you’ll still have customers lounging all over freshly folded piles of clothes, or stacking the clothes on top of each other to make room for them to sit on a display table. Even when you ask them to please not squash the merchandise, chances are they’ll just find a new spot on the other side of the store.
3. Bringing clothes from the dressing room to the dressing room attendant is too hard.
The fitting room attendant may be standing less than 10 feet away from the exit of the fitting room, but it’s still too much of a challenge for most customers to bring their unwanted clothes to said attendant. Instead, the attendant will have to race to the newly emptied fitting room to grab armfuls of clothes and hangers so that the next customer can occupy it in a timely manner. And no, they’re not going to button or hang up the clothes for you, either.
4. The things you have to say to customers will get them annoyed with you.
You’d think it would be common knowledge that retail employees don’t want to ask you “Can I help you find anything?” every two seconds, but that doesn’t stop customers from getting annoyed about it. Usually, they’ll either cut you off with a “no,” ignore you altogether, or, most confusing of all, just smile, silently nod, and walk away.
5. There are dozens of unclaimed children.
Somehow, there always seems to be unsupervised children running around the store. I’ve seen them spilling food, napping on fixtures, projectile vomiting on the floor, and even urinating all over the front door. You’re not going to have the time (and boy are you not getting paid enough) to keep an eye on all the children running loose, which means you’re going to get stuck cleaning up all the messes.
6. The adults are worse.
Who do you think is letting all the kids wreak havoc? Being a grown adult does not exempt a customer from making a gigantic mess. My store saw its fair share of spilled food, water bottles filled with urine in the fitting room, mysteriously wet/stained merchandise, and even a used diaper shoved into a wall of folded clothes. Customers almost never seem to ask for what they need, be it a bathroom, paper towels, a seat, a trash receptacle, etc., and they’re even less remorseful about their messes than the children.
7. You learn how to be a good customer.
I haven’t worked in retail for about three years, but I still treat every store I enter as if I worked there. Once you’ve worked a retail job, you catch yourself doing things different when you’re shopping, like inspecting the piece of clothing at the top of the pile instead of ripping one out from near the bottom, or bringing your clothes out of your dressing room when you’re done with them. Sometimes there’s even a lingering compulsion to refold an entire stack of clothes that was ravaged by someone else. You’ll never stay past closing unless you absolutely have to, and you’ll apologize profusely for it. Best of all, you’ll probably find yourself striking up conversations with the employees so you can both complain about… you guessed it… retail.
