Tag: retail

Not dead yet

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Two eleven-hour shifts in a giant building with no air conditioning when it’s 95 degrees outside down.

One to go.

RIP, my original head

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

KP8RD8qGonna go get a tooth torn out of my head tomorrow.  I’m not looking forward to any part of it, for obvious reasons, to the point where I’m actually kind of embarrassed at how much it’s weighing on me.  It’s a wisdom tooth.  Those shits get pulled all the time.  It’ll be fine, and I’ve got an excuse to spend the rest of the day in bed.  How often do I get to do that nowadays?  This is a good thing.

Stupidest thought of the last several days: that since I mostly chew on the right (which may not even be true) I’ll have to relearn how to eat.  I don’t think so.  I’m pretty certain that people who have single molars taken out aren’t generally in need of physical therapy afterwards.  I’m just being ridiculous.  I am also certain that once the swelling goes down, if indeed there’s enough swelling to be worth worrying about, that my face will neither be a different shape nor noticeably lopsided-looking.  They’re not removing my jaw.

Anyway.

Keeping with the “it annoys me that this annoys me” theme…

I dropped below 10,000 Twitter followers this week, for the first time in probably two years.  In itself, this isn’t a huge deal; followings ebb and flow and I don’t think I’ve ever had more than 10,300 or so, so it’s not a big drop at all.  It’s mildly annoying, because I like that five-figure following, but ultimately it’s a nothingburger.

Now, that said: I worked at getting that 10K following, and I had several strategies that I used that worked.  It took under a year to go from a few hundred followers to 10K.  And once I hit 10K every single one of those strategies stopped working, and nothing I’ve been able to do since then has been able to push me above that 10.3K number I referenced earlier.  Anybody reading this big into Twitter, and have any suggestions that don’t involve actually buying followers (never) or premium access to one of the various Twitter helper programs like Crowdfire?  I don’t want to spend any money on this, but time I have.

Anybody out there know more than me and want to share?

Had a woman come into the store today looking for occasional tables, and in talking to her about what she was looking for she volunteered that she recently bought a 1600 square foot house, filled it with new furniture, then sold it “on a whim” six months later to buy a 4400 square foot house.

Which she now needs to fill with more new furniture.

Is it wrong that I don’t know this woman at all and I still feel like her taxes probably ought to be doubled or tripled?

On the books I read, and where I get them

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Reading1 Comment

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For the last several years, I’ve basically been boycotting Christmas.  With the single exception of my son, I’m done buying gifts for anyone at Christmastime and I don’t want anyone getting anything for me either.  I’m not a Christian.  I’m a grown man with his very own job and in general if I want something I can get it for myself.  The fact that the right wing has managed to make how I greet people during December into a shibboleth doesn’t help, either.  Fuck it, all of it.  I’m out.

My mother has had… some trouble with this concept.

I’ve tried to redirect her always-considerable Christmas energies (my list of “what I got” when I was a kid was regularly two or three times as long as anybody else’s, and we were never rich– Mom just really prioritized Christmas) away from my wife and I and toward my son, but “No, really, don’t get me anything” hasn’t sunk in.  She’s still getting me things, although I’ve gotten her to tone it down to one or two smaller gifts.  This year it was a Barnes and Noble gift card.  Just that.  And she practically begged me to use it.

I should not be surprised that my mother knows my weak spots.  Okay, fine, I’ll bend my principles and go get some free books, geez.

She also got my wife a card, and my son had some free-floating cash around, so we piled into the car yesterday to go to Barnes and Noble, and Christ if I wasn’t reminded yet again why I get every damn thing I read from Amazon now.  I used to shop at Barnes and Noble all the time and then they moved their store to the mall, and since then damn near every time I walk into the place it generates a blog post.  The mall is seven million miles away and the weather was absolute shit yesterday and the crowds and the parking lot and jesus why the hell am I doing this to myself and my family.  

A brief diversion: I have, for the last couple of years, been trying to aggressively diversify my reading, if not in subject matter than at least in terms of the authors I’m reading.  I’m always on the lookout for new authors, and in particular I’ve been trying to focus on women authors and authors of color for the last couple of years.  I wrote my top 10 books of the year post yesterday, and while part of me looked at it and went yeah, mission accomplished— eight of the eleven books were by women– another part of me noticed how blindingly white the list was.  Nine out of the ten authors.  In other words, white women, specifically, appear to be the beneficiary of this policy.

Okay, cool.  So this year I focus more on authors of color, right?(*)

Y’all have any idea how hard it is to find authors of color in the science fiction/fantasy section at Barnes and Noble?  Way harder than I thought it was going to be.  I started by going through my Amazon wish list and trying to find some of those books.  No luck on 90% of them.  I wanted to just scan through the new books, but they’ve gotten rid of that section in SF&F recently and everything is spine-out now.  Okay, start looking for authors with visibly ethnic-sounding names and/or using initials instead of first names, which is generally code for “woman author.”  No luck.  Hell, just finding books by women was difficult enough.

I mean, I eventually found three books, two from my wish list and one that I literally grabbed because I’ve heard of Wesley Chu and he’s Asian and I’ve never read anything by him.  But the whole process was unpleasant and took much longer than it ought to have.  Turns out discovery of new books is kinda complicated if all you have is the spine and the author’s name to go on.

And then we got up to the counter and the salesperson gave my wife her spiel about the membership card.  And we’re cool with that!  It’s your job, you go do it.  And then I got called over by the salesperson next to her and she did the same thing, and my son made it obvious that he was standing in between his parents and the first lady realized we were together.  And I didn’t have a card either, because the card costs $30 annually and I really don’t spend the $300+ every year it would take to make the card worth it at Barnes and Noble any more.  I’m not arbitrarily adding $30 to my sale so that I can save money $300 worth of purchases later.

So she leans over to me and snarks, again, in a really shitty sort of tone, “You’d have saved nearly half the cost of the card already if you joined up!”  And it’s at this point where you’re no longer just doing your job and you’re kind of being an asshole.  I already said I don’t want your card.  You’ve had the card for years.  I get it.  I have to spend $300 before I save any money and I’m not going to.

I opened my mouth, and alternate-universe me snapped “If I wanted to save money I’d have bought this shit from Amazon” back at her.  This-universe me, luckily, has a bit more sense and just said “No, thanks” again and we left, driving another seven million miles in snow and over ice to get back home, and I resolved to let the Goddamn post office do the driving for me from now on.  Because I’m in sales right now and I’ve worked a register plenty of times before and I try my very hardest to never be anything but perfectly nice to anyone on the other side of a register from me.

So quit making me work at it.

Also, lady?  Did you notice we were buying with gift cards?  Somebody else already spent that money.  I’m not getting your loyalty card today.  Between the two of us we got five or six books for like $10 and I don’t care about your card right now.

Ugh.

(*) Miss me with it if you have any plan to quibble with how I arrange my reading, okay? There are millions of books out there and I can’t read all of them, so I’ll use whatever the fuck criteria I want to decide which ones I spend my time on.  Thanks.

Proof of life

On By Luther M. SilerIn Work2 Comments

24dc9ee…I’m here, I promise.  It’s been a hell of a long week, honestly– Sunday was spent doing mostly nothing at work and trying to recover from the case of 24-hour Con Crud that I came home with, Monday and Tuesday were the Longest Days Ever at work, and then Wednesday and yesterday I pretty much sat around the house playing Nioh.  I managed to get out tonight; the three of us went to dinner and then selected pumpkins at a local patch; there will likely be some sort of carving thing happening on Sunday night, so there’s a post right there.

Actually, Monday’s shenanigans deserve at least a brief mention, if only in a holy shit I survived that sort of way.  We sell beds, right?  We also sell what we, perhaps too grandly, are supposed to call top-of-bed products and most of us just call bedding, because saying top-of-bed products is Goddamned stupid.

Anyway, we’re clearancing out all of our bedding.  All of it.  Every last piece.  We’re doing it because we’re bringing in an entirely new line of stuff, and the old stuff has to go before the new stuff comes in.  As you do.  Selling bedding has always been fun, because in addition to the usual commission we make a substantial number of points on it too.  We get paid 20% of our points (which we can get for a variety of reasons) at the end of every week, meaning it’s not only basically immediate money but it’s good money– you can make $20 on a $100 bed set, and our bed sets went up to $300.

As of Sunday, we were still paying out full points for bedding.  Which meant when I sold a set of bedding for– get this– $24.99, that money basically went straight into my pocket.  So I was actually pretty damn excited about the idea of steering every single person who walked in the door toward buying bedding, and making up for several weeks of low pay.

And then they turned points off on Monday, meaning that where I was expecting to make about $20 a sale I made $1.25 instead, and instead of the usual three or four sales for a Monday I had twenty-nine, well over half of which involved stripping a bed and bagging everything up.  By myself, since I was the only person on my side of the store.

And then Tuesday I did it again, only with eighteen sales instead of 29, because most of the good shit got sold on Monday.

So yeah.  I’ve been tired.  Real tired.  I’ll try and post more next week.

Action vs. Reaction

On By Luther M. SilerIn Work3 Comments

IF you take up an hour and a half of my time on a busy-as-fuck Sunday to purchase twenty-five different vases, all of which are heavy, some of which lack price tags (and therefore I need to figure out what they are) and all of which are on clearance and may or may not be ringing up correctly;

and IF I manage to keep a smile on my face and the murder in my heart at bay during this process, while you spend a hundred and twenty-five dollars to purchase items originally valued at nearly six hundred and fifty dollars, earning myself the grand total of six dollars and twenty-five cents in the process;

and IF I have to keep a running total of what the computer is charging you and what it ought to be charging you, and tell my manager “just fucking trust me” under my breath when I call him over to authorize the additional $77 in discounts that the computer should have given you but didn’t;

and IF another employee and I carry each and every one of those, again, twenty-five vases to your vehicle and wrap them carefully in paper so that they do not damage each other;

and IF my reaction to you calling me two days later and accusing me of getting your discounts wrong is not to laugh and hang up the phone or call you names but to carefully annotate a printout of your invoice documenting each of the extra discounts I applied and how, in fact, the computer appears to have applied an extra dollar and fifty-seven cents that I did not personally approve to your account, meaning you saved even more money;

and IF after going to that extra work, you still don’t believe me, I offer to take a picture of said calculations, now annotated even further so that my chicken-scratch is comprehensible to an outsider, and send it to you on your cell phone so that you can see where every dime of your money went;

and IF you then call me at eight fucking forty-five at night, on my personal goddamned cell phone, while I am enjoying the fifteen minutes that I get to spend with my six-year-old son in between me getting home from work on a Tuesday and him going to bed, in order to berate me further about said discounts and how you don’t understand my calculations;

well, THEN, you should probably expect a somewhat less-than-entirely-polite response.

The End.

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A brief work anecdote I forgot to tell yesterday

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

seriously-how-many-paint-chips-did-you-eat-as-a-childThis one’s new.

We all have emails at our jobs, like I’m sure a lot of you do, and also like I suspect a lot of work email accounts, they’re really locked down in terms of what we can send and/or receive.  Chief among these things: images, which is a serious pain in the ass because “send me a picture” is one of the first things you want to tell people when they call you and tell you something is damaged, and that means we have all had to create alternate work email addresses that can receive images.

Not the point.  Point is I have a work email.  It’s on my business cards.  I hand out lots of business cards, as you can probably imagine.

I checked said work email late yesterday evening for the first time in a couple of days (Saturday is my Monday, for the record) and had two emails from PayPal.  One of them was letting me know that I had money in my account, and the other was reminding me that I had money in my account.

My work email doesn’t have a PayPal account.  Why the fuck would I have a PayPal account under my work email?

It turns out that a customer who had come in and gotten a quote on some side chairs had decided to pay for them by sending me the money via PayPal.  Me, personally, at my work account.  There’s a note attached to the payment: “4 blahblah side chairs.”

How the fuck is anyone stupid enough to think this is how anything works?

How the fuck do I get through a conversation with this idiot without using the word “idiot”?  Because this person is an idiot and deserves to be called one.

Christ.

On things left unsaid

On By Luther M. SilerIn Work5 Comments

Drifting off to sleep last night, at an hour most reasonable humans wouldn’t even be thinking about being in bed yet, I made a terrible mistake and checked my work email for some reason.  The email I received pissed me off enough that it took a full two hours to actually fall asleep.

This is not the email response I sent this morning.

b8ab1889e9a600a5675fc0a5062aca0e.jpgDear assholes:

It took me four days of work, six emails, several phone calls back and forth both to you and to my store, and at least one visit to work on what was supposed to be my day off to get you to come in and spend some fucking money on some fucking furniture.  During this entire process you repeatedly emphasized that you had sold your previous furniture and had an empty room with nothing to sit on.  I should have realized that this poor decision on your part was an indicator that you are dumb people who make stupid fucking decisions and handed you off to someone else.  But no!  I persevered, because 5% of $4000 is $200, and that’s a couple of credit card bills paid for the month.

Last night you sent me an email berating me because I had “guaranteed” that your furniture would be in your house in two weeks and when you called and scheduled your delivery today it was on the 19th, two weeks and three days after you purchased.

Lemme be clear here:  Youse a buncha lyin sonsabitches, and I’mma cancel your fucking furniture order and let you stare at some fucking bare walls where a sectional ought to be and a bare floor where you wanted a rug, because I’ll set $200 on fire before I let you fucking pricks get away with calling me a liar.

I tell every single motherfucker who buys from me the same exact fucking thing.  I say it so many times every day that it’s a programmed phrase: your shit will get here within two fucking weeks, and if you want it delivered it’ll probably take another week or so after that.  Every.  Single.  Motherfucker. Wanna know why?  Because it’s fucking true, and because I don’t make my fucking measly 5% on your shit until it is in your house.

Yeah.  Not on sale.  I don’t make shit from a sale.  I make money on delivery, which means I don’t get paid for your furniture sale until you have your furniture.  So there’s no fucking point in lying to any fucker about when their shit will arrive, because guess what?  Motherfuckers notice when they have no shit if they are expecting shit, and I have neither the time nor the energy nor the inclination to spend every fucking moment at work dodging phone calls from angry motherfuckers wanting to know where their shit is.  I know for a fucking fact that I didn’t guarantee you your shit would be in your house in two weeks because 1) it wouldn’t and 2) I never ever ever ever ever use the word guarantee to anyone, ever.

We had a bunch of fucking furniture stolen by pirates last year.  Motherfucking pirates.  That’s not a joke.  It’s fucking true, and some poor fucker had to call his fucking customers and tell them that they weren’t getting their leather sectional for two fucking months because a bunch of half-starved illiterate fucking Somalis with AK-47s and a couple of RPGs stole it.

So fuck you.  I didn’t guarantee you shit, and I sure as hell didn’t tell you your shit would be in your house in two weeks, because it would have led to this exact fucking conversation we’re having right now, only instead of you being a liar trying to extort another discount from me you would be right.  And I’m not having that.

I repeat: fuck you.  Take your shit in two weeks and three days, come pick it up your damn selves, or cancel your order and I will turn around and sell your shit to someone else.  I give no fucks which option you choose.

Oh, and this party you have scheduled for the 16th, which is exactly two weeks from the date where you made the purchase?  First of all, that’s fucking Monday, and it’s Martin Luther King Day, and no fucking pair of white-ass white people are having a fucking party on a Monday on MLK day.  I call bullshit.  Second, this would be another example of you making bad fucking decisions.  I don’t feel bad about it at all.  If you weren’t lying about the party– and you are— you would be idiots, because shit happens, and even if I’d guaranteed some shit would be in your house, it’s possible that other shit would prevent that shit from being true and your party would still suck.  Go rent some fucking folding chairs; you can’t fit more than five people on the fucking sectional you ordered anyway, goddammit.

Have I said fuck you yet?  Because fuck you.

Love,

Luther

god what day is it

On By Luther M. SilerIn Work1 Comment

And now it’s 53 hours and five days.  Breakfast this morning was a Snickers bar and half a pot of coffee.  I considered adding a couple of cigarettes on top for a truly balanced breakfast but then remembered I don’t smoke.

The whole morning was jitteriness and is this the coffee or do I need a Clonazepam type of nonsense, the afternoon was abject fucking death-boredom, and the evening was frantic Jesus we’re understaffed where were you assholes all day craziness.

What I’m getting at is the review of Rachel Caine’s Ink and Bone that I was gonna write is gonna have to wait until tomorrow.  Short version: go read it.

G’night.