When my family and I were living in our small apartment in Flatbush, Brooklyn, my father (and sometimes my mother) was always working late nights to support the family - even during the holiday season. My mother would stay in her bedroom to rest after her work shift and watch the NY1 news channel in her bedroom, while I lay in my full-sized bed watching Cartoon Network's Christmas specials.
Both of my parents were nurses who worked hard to pay the bills and give us the stuff my brother and I wanted. Our 6- and 7-year-old selves didn't mind they were slaving for hours at a time. As long as we got our Sega Dreamcasts, pinball machines and Mega Blocks - my family didn't have Lego Blocks money back in the day - all was well.
My parents are still working the same jobs a decade later, while every year I work holiday jobs to try to pay them back for what they gave me when we didn't have much. Every day after work, I'd come back to the dorms and talk to either Facebook or my roommate to complain about my sassy boss, the management's frugality with working hours and that customer who had four huge loop earrings in each ear.
But in the back of my mind, I knew I was being pretty weak for complaining. If my parents could work eight-hour shifts at their hospitals for more than 20 years, then surely I could handle five hours at retail stores like Hollister or Aeropostale. I was young and fully functioning; they were in their 50s.
However, after my last night working at Hollister - which paid minimum wage - I thought to myself: is this really worth it?
I didn't have to do much soul searching during my walk back from the Boulevard Mall to conclude that it didn't. I doubt there are many seasonal retail jobs that are worth it, either.
Holiday retail jobs take your goodwill intentions, flip them for their profit and throw those intentions back at you. They take your yule time cheer and transform it into fake smiles to greet customers for profit. Additionally, you have these managers who've been putting on this fa?\0xA4ade for so long that it feels like it wore into their very being. I guess this is why they seem so emotionally dead or unnecessarily cruel.
Folding and hanging clothes, greeting customers who may not want anything to do with you and dealing with self-centered co-workers will wear you down mentally even if the job generally lasts for a little over a month. I eventually started counting time by cents rather than minutes. I'd make a recurring joke that I was being paid 60 cents for the five-minute bathroom breaks I took while on the pay clock.
What bothered me the most while taking the walk home that night, though, was that I sort of knew working at Hollister was going to be an irritating experience. The hiring manager was pretty upfront about the low hourly wage, and Hollister was already known for the shallow nature of its consumers.
I thought college seasonal workers like me didn't necessarily need much else for such a job. I could talk about how shallow and materialistic the retail environment was, but at the same time, the very reason I took the job was a materialistic one as well.
I took the job to buy my family gifts - mere things. I brought my mother a scarf, my father a shirt and I forgot what I brought my brother. I'm sure they appreciated the presents, but within months time my mom stopped wearing the scarf completely, and I never even saw my father wear his shirt.
My parents never really cared about the presents; they were concerned about me finishing college and making sure I didn't get anybody pregnant. I applied the same logic to seasonal retail jobs and realized that no one really gives a damn about the workplace as much as they'd like to think.
Most managers and co-workers only care about their own paychecks and job security, while customers just want to get the clothes and leave. The work environment becomes a second priority during the hectic holidays, which leads to a generally stale and sometimes tense atmosphere. Fixing the environment will probably never be a focus, because half of the staff is going to be gone in two months anyway.
We get the paycheck. The company gets its cheap labor. Everybody wins.
It's a shame these seasonal jobs lack holiday cheer, but such is the system we work in.
Email: brian.josephs@ubspectrum.com
