Thanksgiving is near, a day filled with turkey, family, pumpkin spice and everything nice! But, for some, the festivities don’t stop there—or even begin at the dinner table. Families even willingly skip dinner altogether just to stand or camp out in endless lines to get a piece of those infamous Black Friday sales.
The appeal? The rush of the doors opening. The thrill of getting that one sweater you’ve been eyeing all season because it’s on sale. The hype surrounding the masses competing to get anything and everything. In the end, it’s all worth it, since we all just want to walk out with arms full of shopping bags. But in the midst of all this frenzy, have you ever stopped to realize who was checking out your purchases? Restocking store items? Helping you find the electronics section?
The answer is staff or seasonal workers, whom are pulled away from families, a turkey dinner, and apple pie, all in order to serve you, the customer. They basically keep the place from falling apart as they attempt to control the hordes of frantic buyers pouring into the stores—who are frankly just unfolding everything. This Black Friday, I want you to keep in mind Vinootna Kakarla, a 3rd year student at UCI who worked last year’s Black Friday.
At the crack of dawn, Vin as her friends call her, started her day at 2AM to get ready to begin her 5am-5pm shift at Banana Republic. Her duties involved being in charge of the cash register—the epicenter of all the craziness that Black Friday has to offer—and restocking merchandise, an important task on this day. She recalls she had to “restock really fast” in order to keep up with customers. Despite the long workday ahead of her, Vin felt motivated but in hindsight, affirms that “the hours were tough.”
Black Friday sales attracted so many people that the “long lines went outside the store!” “Being a cashier in that situation was really tough,” Vin recounts and continues to describe the work as “pretty tough and laborious.” If you’ve ever worked in customer service, you can empathize with this situation since you know that working retail during the holiday rush is hellish, especially when it comes to customers. Again, she worked the register and dealt with all kinds of customers: from the very rude to the finicky customers.
Source: 20th Century Fox
Who were the rudest and most difficult? “The adults that were really picky about what they wanted,” according to Vin. She also recalls that they were “really rude to the cashiers.” Those working in retail understand that one has to bite their tongue when handling difficult customers, and most of the time, they have to hold in all those negative feelings like this:
Source: Meme Creator
Or remember not to sass you like Dr. Ken.
This work requires lots of emotional labor (managing one’s feelings as a job requirement) and only the strong-willed can hold on for so long, even when Karen has chewed you out and still wants to speak with your supervisor. Ironically, these same adults are probably parents looking for a deal on potential Christmas gifts that they will give to their children, whom they virtuously teach about manners and patience. What happened to treat others like how you expect them to treat you?
But is Black Friday even worth it? I’ve got insider information that it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be. Vin describes how people were “buying a sh*t ton of stuff because they all thought it was on sale,” but in reality, “there weren’t a lot of sales going on more than normal.” She even went as far as to say that she felt that “the individuals there were getting duped.” For retail employees, I think there’s a consensus that it is not worth it and that this hype is unnecessary, especially when it means that people forget the spirit of the holidays and mistreat those giving up their holiday to make your shopping experience a pleasant one.
The outlet mall she worked at was open for a full 24 hours, like many across the country, which means that countless retail employees, like Vin, didn’t have the opportunity to fully enjoy the Thanksgiving holiday. So the least you can do this Black Friday is: relax, learn some patience, and remember, treat retail staff like the humans that they are!