If you live in a relatively uneventful town as I do, the mall is the hub.

Want to hang out with friends and just kill time? Just walk around the mall. Chances are you’ll run into someone you know at the food court. However, when you work at the mall, it becomes a terrible beast, eating up all your free time. Even when you are off duty and you go to the mall you see customers you recognize from work … or the food court employees remember you by that large pretzel order you made on Christmas Eve (IT WAS FOR EVERYONE that had the misfortune of working there, Shift Manager Tyler!). This is my second summer working at the mall, and it does not get any easier, but the stories do get more interesting.

I work at a lingerie store, and it is so interesting to work back home for the summer. Why you ask? Well students aren’t the only ones that have the summer off. It is so fun for me to see my high school teachers enter the store as soon as it opens, surely hoping that their current students are too busy sleeping to be at the mall at 10 a.m. Don’t worry though, I’ve been here since 8 a. m. and I barely care that you are buying panties. (I say barely, because there is definitely that 11^th grader in me laughing at my pre-calculus teacher being uncomfortable coming to my till).

Another fun thing about working in the mall is you catch wind of drama storms that customers don’t even notice. Recently, my store’s management had a face lift, with a lot of our supervisors , managers, and employees leaving, but they didn’t go too far. Our previous assistant manager became a full-time manager at a make-up store down the hall, because the previous manager of said make-up store, who used to work at the body care place a year ago? Yeah, she kept stealing deposits from the store. She was escorted from the store in hand-cuffs. Fun stuff. Kudos to my previous assistant manager though! Now you are in super-charge of a store.

Then there are your coworkers that have multiple jobs at the same mall. They know about the current shoplifters making their rounds, which new managers are cracking under pressure, and which not-so-great employees are looking for new employment. Your insane coworkers that work at another place at the mall spend even more time than you do at there, and that’s saying something. You go through the entrance, dodging mall-walkers and stray children demanding pretzels, head low, avoiding eye contact because you know for the next eight hours you are going to have to talk to the most unruly of customers and refolding the same display table over, and over, and over again.

One positive of working at the mall is that you get a discount at the food court, but it definitely can hurt when your store is right next to a DQ and sometimes a girl just really needs a Blizzard. One of my goals for last summer was to sweet talk the Bavarian Pretzel employee into giving me free food, but that kind of went downhill when my debit card got declined. Another fun thing that happens is when customers you just served are in the food court while you are trying to get food and they stare at you like an escaped zoo exhibit.

One uniting thing that brings all mall employees together is when you go into another store in the mall and you see the cashier or the seller concealing misery after a terrible customer encounter and you just turn to them and say, “Boy, do I know how you feel. I work at the mall, too.”