Retail Rodeo
To anyone who has not worked in retail, you are a lucky bastard. Many of you have though and you know how many skills from retail can be easily transferred to librarianship. A retail job is often the first job one can qualify for as a teenager with no experience. When I was fifteen, marching down the street to the local mall to fill out an application at Hot Dog on a Stick was practically a rite of passage for every teenage sophomore.
Surrounded by the sticky sweet smell of deep-fried dough, soft faced girls in ridiculous striped uniforms hopped up and down to mix churn giant vats of lemonade through the rhythmic pumping of a plow-like handle. The odd and titillating sight of the jostling teen girls was enough to draw anyone in for a cold glass of lemonade.
Hot Dog on a Stick is a uniquely Californian enterprise that started out on Santa Monica Beach in a hut across from the exercise equipment next to the pier. Comparable to other areas of the country where Cinnabon is the preferred mall junk food, any self respecting Angelino has a long standing preference for lime, cherry or lemonade.
In the late nineties, Hot Dog on a Stick paid its mostly under eighteen employees about six dollars an hour, enough to put gas in my tiny, old VW Cabriolet and buy myself some cheap clothes on the Third Street Promenade. Unfortunately, I did not last even a single day.
I showed up to the working audition (yes you have to audition in order to work at Hot Dog on a Stick) where an older teenage girl promptly thrust the ridiculous uniform into my hands. Tramping off to the food court bathroom I shimmied out of my jeans and into the nightmarish duds. The stand was in full swing when I returned, with both cash registers furiously ringing up sales, corndogs crackling in the frying vats of fat and a chorus of girls baying orders over the din of the food court madness.
Every item cost two dollars including tax so we supposedly didn’t need calculators. I was placed outside the stand in front of a long line of hungry shoppers with only a pencil and pad in my hand. It occurred to me, I was being put on display in the most hideous uniform ever constructed in the mall next door to my high school. My teenage pride was at stake and getting severely wounded by the second. How would I recover if a popular kid saw me there? It didn’t fare well for my already nerdy image at all.
As the orders piled up my brain shut down, unable to keep track of the lemonade and corndogs. My Hot Dog on a Stick mentor was getting frustrated as I felt myself shrinking down to nothing. After only ten minutes I asked quietly if I could leave and promptly did so. Okay, so I guess I wasn’t cut out to work at Hot Dog on a Stick.
I did however end up working in quite a few retail jobs that worked out to my advantage. Working a bookstore led directly to my current job as a library specialist. I have found that in order to do well at retail you have to develop somewhat of a thick skin. Crazy people love to bother both bookstore clerks and librarians. I developed quite a repertoire of homeless acquaintances when I worked in the bookstore that would come to me with their specific needs on specialty anarchist literature, always paying in cash so as not to have the government spying on them.
They would ask whether it was okay or not if they left their bikes covered in stuffed animals outside or whether or not they might carry in a large colorful parrot on their shoulder without annoying the elderly bookstore cat. They taught me how to actively listen and reserve judgment.
Working in a private library is easier than working in a bookstore in several regards. Though I still do a little bit of everything, in the bookstore I did a lot more everything to a very specific level of detail. Here at the library there is more funding and more staff members available to divide work amongst. While we still do have to worry about “The Bottom Line” I never get the impression that someone is furiously counting every penny we take in for computer printouts, marking our names down someplace and demoting points.
I like offering my research services but I don’t want to measure each transaction at a cash register. So many aspects of our daily lives are based on buying and selling goods that it is nice to step away from that pursuit, if only for a little while and enjoy the hum of an institution where people go to learn and not buy objects. Of course they are still paying for it, whether it is through their tuition or their tax dollars, but at least I don’t have to write out the bill every time I answer a question.
- Tawny Sverdlin's blog
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Rodeo is such a great thing.
Rodeo is such a great thing. I have tried it few times unprofessionally and I must say that it is an amazing feeling. Of course it is a little bit dangerous but you must try it at least once in a life. I would definitely recommend to try it once.
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First of all thanks a lot
First of all thanks a lot for the interesting and informative article. I have to admit that I am very interested in rodeo and I always watch all competitions of them. This is my favorite attraction because it is not a traditional kind of sport like football or basketball. And I always follow all news about the rodeo. But this story not about it. Only the headline remembered for me about this attraction. On the other hand I have to admit that I really liked your story. Many things which you have mentioned is really the true and it is happening for many people. Nowadays the economic situation is really hard in many countries but I believe that after several years everything will be great. So thanks a lot one more time for the interesting information and I will be waiting for more interesting news from you in the future.
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