Retail. Oh GOD, Retail.

Yet again, I begin an entry in this here blog with an apology. I am very aware that this entry is a couple of weeks late, but I am also aware that it is far more prompt than the last entry was. I take this as a positive sign. A few more months of haphazard shit, and we will have turned me into a regular blogging dynamo.

Apologies aside, this week's entry is about the magical world of retail.

Let me make something clear here. I don't have any particular problem with shopping. I approve of shopping, in a general sense, even if I myself am not as an avid a shopper as many of my friends. Working retail is another story altogether.

I work in a local independent lingerie store, neither Victoria's Secret, nor Fredrick's of Hollywood. It's a cute little place with an excellent selection of bras, panties, and cute little things, and in many ways it's not a bad job. I'm selling things I like in a store I approve of, for a boss I generally think is pretty awesome.

That said, retail is like high school. No matter how good your particular high school is, it is still high school, and therefore it is terrible. No matter how good your retail job is, it is still retail, and therefore it is terrible. It is also, for the most part, unavoidable. Yes, you could go into the service industry, or become a nanny, or just go straight for the gold and become a hooker, but for the most part, retail is simply what you do when you aren't qualified to do anything, and when you're poor. I am both of those things, so retail it is.

Retail is a poor decision for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, retail is a poor decision because it forces you to interact with other people. Now you may be thinking, “I don't get it, Rachael, I like people!” You are wrong. You may think you like people, but that is because you don't work retail. If you worked retail, you would realize that people are terrible. They are smelly, inconsiderate bastards who talk on the phone while you ring them up, thrusting their credit card in your face, and babbling away at whatever halfwit was stupid enough to have answered the phone when these inbred underwear buying hippos called.

People are also gross. Incredibly gross. A truly surprising amount of the time, they're not actually looking for underwear. They have wandered in off the street, taking a break from their evidently constant masturbation, hoping to find sex toys to shove in their every orifice to distract themselves from the emptiness of their broken, greasy lives. For the record, all of these disgusting, mutated examples of pseudo-humanity are male. They are also apparently incapable of distinguishing between Adult Mart and a high end, reputable, classy lingerie store. The presence of women not bearing the telltale signs of herpes should really be a dead giveaway.

People are also cheap. Really cheap. Women come into the store with bras that are literally falling apart on them. They complain about spending forty dollars on something that will actually separate their nipples from their belly buttons. They hang around for two hours, showing me far more of their pustule-encrusted wrinkled rolls of fat than I would EVER under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES like to see, and then only buy ONE FUCKING BRA. If I were on commission, I swear to you, you would have seen me on the news by now, wielding a bloody knife and growling.

IN SUMMATION: I didn't hate people until I started working to retail. I walked in there my first day, bright eyed and bushy tailed, innocent and sweet, and retail has killed all that love. Beaten it out of me. What a shitty decision. Ugh.