For many, the cheerful run up to Christmas brings the promise of time with family, lots of good food and singing along to overly well-known songs! However, the lead up to Christmas can look a little different in the world of retail… Whether you are considering working in retail next Christmas, or if you can relate to the rants and laughs of all that retail jobs bring, I hope you enjoy these highlights from my Christmases in retail!
Disclaimer: I love Christmas and I have loved my job in retail, however, for entertainment’s sake this article focuses primarily on the challenges Christmas brings!
Santa Squabble
I have to start with the one experience which perfectly captures the bursting of the magical bubble which is working in retail at Christmas. Whilst many Christmas temps start as late as November, permanent workers are all too aware that Christmas actually starts long before the temperature begins to drop, and the festive products start to decorate stockroom shelves many, many months before they will be gifted. However, the first big Christmas shock I received was a little more unique and popped up out of the blue skies of August. Every year our store holds Santa’s Grotto events which could not seem sweeter or more magical, yet when two men with short grey beards come into the store on one of the hottest days of the year saying that different people from our experience team have agreed to them being our store’s Santa, the magic rapidly fades. It was hard to imagine their angry faces donning little gold spectacles and that sparkling Santa smile. When the winning one reappeared months later with a then full beard and all suited up, I almost couldn’t keep back a laugh at the complete transformation in him! That Santa squabble was the beginning of my first chaotic retail Christmas!
Gift Wrapping
Onto a slightly more relatable Christmas challenge that I am sure too many retail workers have had to face! One of my most painful memories was when our store made the rather regrettable decision to offer gift wrapping services. Never again. A lady walked up with two baskets full of items and half-threw them onto the counter and demanded I gift wrapped them for her. The classic interaction where a customer fails to use words such as “Hello” and goes straight in with the “Gift wrap. All of these”. She was instantly tutting about the fact they actually have to buy the wrapping paper, but once that was purchased I had hoped it would be smooth sailing – how silly of me. We only had a small counter and she had bought the cheapest roll of wrapping paper which was not staying put at all and, as I was already on edge by her rudeness, I fumbled a little at the beginning. She started tutting and sighing every time I made a move whilst asking passive aggressive questions such as “Is this your first time wrapping something?” and “Do they not train you in this?”. Halfway through I asked her if she would like me to stop as she was clearly unhappy, yet she told me to keep going, until I had wrapped every one of her awkwardly shaped presents, only to ask, when I was wrapping the final one, where she could go to complain! The absolute cheek of some customers!
Observing the Gift Purchasing
One amusing part of the job at Christmas is having a unique insight into people through their selection of gifts. There have been numerous occasions where I have been asked what the cheapest fragrance gift set is in a tone making it perfectly clear that they feel aggrieved by the fact they must buy their mother-in-law a present. It is also entertaining, in some ways, that most of our customers in the beauty department are lost men scrabbling to find last minute gifts. One of the most humorous enquiries was when a man came in on December 23rd and asked for help with choosing a present for his girlfriend. I asked what type of present he was after – bear in mind we are in a large retail store, so he could be after anything – and he said he didn’t know; I proceeded to ask a series of questions such as what she might like or even what his budget was, but he was completely useless! An interesting education in the world of gift giving! Working the tills is bad enough at Christmas with the pure chaos, but seeing people buy so many incredibly generic gifts, for me, may be the worst part. I always painfully smile a little to myself every time someone comes to the till spending £50 on a selection of chocolate tins and pretty packets of sweets because they clearly don’t know what to buy people and so, in my opinion, they waste their money on gifts which will inevitably be mindlessly eaten by the end of a lazy Boxing Day. Although the hardest part of the present buying process to witness is when people come in after Christmas Day and complain about the gifts they were bought – one outrageous one was a man complaining about a friend gifting him a gift card! This leads me to…
The Returns
The chaos, unfortunately, does not end when the buying of Christmas gifts ceases – on the contrary! Many, many of those items which you spoke to customers in excruciating detail about, or rushed to the stockroom for, or perhaps even painstakingly gift-wrapped, will be coming back through the tills before the New Year arrives. Of course, most people are lovely and appreciative, but one too many people do not just return their unwanted presents, but also enjoy commenting on the particular person who failed in their gifting endeavours. Bless the one very young boy whose mum returned the body spray he had bought for her in front of him whilst harshly saying that he got the wrong one! There are also the people who believe that we will happily change our returns policy because they don’t want to ask their “naggy” sister-in-law for a receipt or that their child carefully opened their new toy to find it completely broken – they definitely didn’t over-excitedly play with it on Christmas morning!
Now, of course, I have focused on the bad, but I do (deep down) always enjoy working in retail at Christmas – most people are in good spirits, excited to find gifts that will only spread joy, not complaints. Whilst I could write a whole other article on the Christmas time complaints (from the fact that we have the heating on, to the cards not being “religious enough”, to being told a thousand times how cold it is outside), there is a lot of joy in working in a store at Christmas and hopefully helping people find gifts which won’t be returned in the New Year!