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| the 6 circles of Hell |
Discerning urban consumers like you and me buy everything we need at the local farmer’s market and local farmer’s clothes shop and punk rock craft fairs they have all over the place for some reason, or else we steal all the other shit we need from the Internet, so we probably don’t get many chances to go to the mall anymore. That is of course unless we’re blowing people’s fucking minds and doing it ironically. Same idea as an occasional meal at The Cheesecake Factory, although I don’t think you can have ironic diarrhea, can you? I’ll get back to you on that.
The mall does have its plus sides though. Maybe you want to read comic books for free at Borders because those things take like ten minutes to read and they cost a thousand goddamned dollars? Maybe you’re considering suicide and you need a reminder of how shitty the world is to push yourself over the edge? Maybe you’re a pedophile? The point is, sometimes you have to come down off the mountain, roll up your sleeves and wade into the turdy tidal pool of Americana. Working in a store at the mall seems like a self explanatory job, but what about that dude at the info desk? What’s his horrible life like? Let’s find out.
The mall does have its plus sides though. Maybe you want to read comic books for free at Borders because those things take like ten minutes to read and they cost a thousand goddamned dollars? Maybe you’re considering suicide and you need a reminder of how shitty the world is to push yourself over the edge? Maybe you’re a pedophile? The point is, sometimes you have to come down off the mountain, roll up your sleeves and wade into the turdy tidal pool of Americana. Working in a store at the mall seems like a self explanatory job, but what about that dude at the info desk? What’s his horrible life like? Let’s find out.
STREET CARNAGE: As far as I know, you work in the mall? What is it that you actually do? What is it called?
GUY AT THE MALL INFO DESK: My job title is Guest Services Manager. There’s a general manager for the whole operation, then there are a bunch of us department managers: me, security, leasing, housekeeping, etc. I’m in charge of the staff that sits at the information booth and tells people where the bathrooms are.
That sounds depressing. What are the basic requirements of your job?
Besides staffing the information booth, I deal with corporate gift card sales and help the marketing department with the different events that go on in the mall. I also field all of the complaints that people decide to have.
What kind of complaints?
Stores come and go all the time, especially the ones that aren’t big, national chains, so whenever something changes we get a million questions about where they went and how to get in touch with them. Right now I’m getting a lot of questions about Dairy Queen because they’re closed for renovations. I think they must’ve been giving out blow jobs with every cone, because people are flipping the fuck out that there’s no ice cream available. The most annoying complaint that I get almost every day is that we don’t offer electric scooters for people to use, we just offer regular, manual wheelchairs. It’s annoying because the people who are asking almost never need a wheelchair to begin with. Most of the time it’s just morbidly obese women who can’t walk halfway across the mall without getting winded. Then I have to sit through a conversation with them and their weird, Rube Goldberg logic machine about how I’m doing them a disservice by making them use their arms. Aside from that the questions are annoying, but pretty mundane. You know that thing that little kids do where they make you answer “why” a million times? It’s not just kids, adults do it to me all day.
What else do you do when you’re not playing pre-school teacher for zombies?
I spend the mornings answering emails and calls from corporate customers and basic sales stuff. The afternoons are a bit different, depending on what’s going on in the mall that week — sometimes it’s setting up for an event, setting up signs and displays around the building or interacting with the stores for various reasons.
What’s the mall like that you work at? Is it a big one?
The one I work at is in the suburbs. It’s about a million square feet, 150 or so stores. I’ve heard different numbers for the amount of people who come through every year, I’ll just say “lots.”
What’s the state of the union at malls these days, if you will?
The mall I’m at is doing fine, money-wise. We’re basically just a landlord. The stores just rent space from us so even if they’re not busy, they’re still paying us. Most of them are in pretty bad shape though. They all report their monthly sales to us, a lot of the smaller ones are barely making more than their rent.
How often do people condescend to you?
All day long, if I have to work out in the open at the information booth. People are pretty awful and entitled. The worst one recently was a woman who had her car towed because she was parked in the fire lane for like, an hour. She came to my office furious, explained what had happened and asked what I was going to do to fix it. I asked why she had parked there in the first place and her answer was “I paid $85,000 for that car, I can park it wherever I want. Not like you, you probably drive a piece of shit, so it doesn’t matter.” Hard to argue with logic like that.
That seems reasonable. So what the fuck is going on with kids these days?
Whenever people find out I work in a mall they ask that. You know what though? Kids are the least of my problems there. Most of the complaints I get about them are from old people who are just upset that they exist and still look good and fuck. Whenever someone complains about a group of teens I usually ask them to tell me specifically what they’re doing that warrants a complaint, and nine times out of ten times they just say, “Well, nothing yet. Just have someone keep an eye on them.” Kids get a bad rap at the mall. The old people, the morning mall walkers, are way more annoying than they are. Kids just want to hang out and be left alone. Old people want to find me in my office and tell me that the music is too loud.
That’s pretty much the same idea behind hating on hipsters isn’t it? Speaking of sluts, what percentage of the girls that come to the mall are dressed like porn stars? That’s gotta be a tough part of the job to deal with, right?
Every single one of them. It’s certainly distracting.
How often do people steal shit from the mall?
Every second of every day, and most of the stores don’t report it. I’m not saying you should steal from the mall, but if you do and you get caught, you’re probably not gonna get arrested even if they catch you. I don’t mean little shit, like a girl took a pair of earrings from CVS — it’s big shit. Some dude recently filled a bag with the entire front display of bras from Victoria’s Secret, probably $10k worth of merchandise and just ran. We’re constantly getting alerts about organized gangs of shoplifters and stuff. It’s pretty awesome how ballsy some people are.
What are the people who work in the stores like? Got any examples of stunning stupidity?
A lot of the clothing stores don’t actually hire clerks anymore. Now they hire everyone as “models” so that they can hire and fire based on looks. Clerks have always been pretty dumb, by and large, but now it’s gotten out of control. I’ve had to interact with the staff at Abercrombie & Fitch a bunch of times, and every single person who works there is incomprehensibly stupid. As far as stupid customers, it’s gotta be parents. Parents lose their kids all the time. We had a 3-year-old who someone brought to Guest Services a while ago because he was in the middle of the mall crying. Whatever, because like I said, kids get separated from their parents every day, but it’s usually just for a few minutes. In this case, we were looking for the parents for over two hours, paging them over the P.A., the entire management and security staff was going store to store to find them. We had to call the cops after a little bit. Eventually they came looking for him. How do you not know your kid is missing for two hours? The cops were so mad that they arrested the mother for child endangerment.
How disgusting is every single touchable surface in the mall? Contagious plague zones over there or what? How often do people injure themselves?
There’s a kids play area that’s basically just a giant, foam-padded petri dish. Kids puke in there all the time. Old people are always falling down and hurting themselves, usually on the escalator because that technology is too advanced for them to comprehend. There’s a law that anytime someone is hurt on an escalator it needs to be shut down until the state comes out to inspect it to make sure the problem wasn’t our fault. Anytime you see an escalator that’s not working, odds are it’s because an old person couldn’t figure out that all they need to do is stand still and let the machine do its work and the one guy the state employs to do inspections hasn’t been around yet. Although, last year a teenage girl almost lost a toe in one. That was some horror movie shit. Even though it’s pretty obvious, the food court restaurant kitchens are even worse than you’ve ever imagined.
Have you ever enjoyed a single second of your job?
The people I work with are pretty cool, they’re not just mindless retail drones for the most part. When I first started I wasn’t sure what to do with some of the complaints people sent in. Like, some people write the most horrible, racist shit on the comment cards when they complain about a store. I’m supposed to respond to every complaint if the person provides contact info, so I’d go to my boss and be like, “Yeah, I don’t really know what to do here, this person is obviously crazy.” He’d take a look and say, “Hmm, well, fuck this guy,” and rip it up. I’ve worked at some other places where they’d make you engage every nut job that contacted you, give them free shit and stuff. Now I’ve got a little license to tell people to piss off if I feel they’re being retarded. I’ve also got freedom to come and go as I please, as long as all my shit gets done.
Why did you take this job? Is it something that you were interested in, or just a paycheck?
It was supposed to be a job while I found another job, but then the economy tanked, so here I am.
Whenever people find out I work in a mall they ask that. You know what though? Kids are the least of my problems there. Most of the complaints I get about them are from old people who are just upset that they exist and still look good and fuck. Whenever someone complains about a group of teens I usually ask them to tell me specifically what they’re doing that warrants a complaint, and nine times out of ten times they just say, “Well, nothing yet. Just have someone keep an eye on them.” Kids get a bad rap at the mall. The old people, the morning mall walkers, are way more annoying than they are. Kids just want to hang out and be left alone. Old people want to find me in my office and tell me that the music is too loud.
That’s pretty much the same idea behind hating on hipsters isn’t it? Speaking of sluts, what percentage of the girls that come to the mall are dressed like porn stars? That’s gotta be a tough part of the job to deal with, right?
Every single one of them. It’s certainly distracting.
How often do people steal shit from the mall?
Every second of every day, and most of the stores don’t report it. I’m not saying you should steal from the mall, but if you do and you get caught, you’re probably not gonna get arrested even if they catch you. I don’t mean little shit, like a girl took a pair of earrings from CVS — it’s big shit. Some dude recently filled a bag with the entire front display of bras from Victoria’s Secret, probably $10k worth of merchandise and just ran. We’re constantly getting alerts about organized gangs of shoplifters and stuff. It’s pretty awesome how ballsy some people are.
What are the people who work in the stores like? Got any examples of stunning stupidity?
A lot of the clothing stores don’t actually hire clerks anymore. Now they hire everyone as “models” so that they can hire and fire based on looks. Clerks have always been pretty dumb, by and large, but now it’s gotten out of control. I’ve had to interact with the staff at Abercrombie & Fitch a bunch of times, and every single person who works there is incomprehensibly stupid. As far as stupid customers, it’s gotta be parents. Parents lose their kids all the time. We had a 3-year-old who someone brought to Guest Services a while ago because he was in the middle of the mall crying. Whatever, because like I said, kids get separated from their parents every day, but it’s usually just for a few minutes. In this case, we were looking for the parents for over two hours, paging them over the P.A., the entire management and security staff was going store to store to find them. We had to call the cops after a little bit. Eventually they came looking for him. How do you not know your kid is missing for two hours? The cops were so mad that they arrested the mother for child endangerment.
How disgusting is every single touchable surface in the mall? Contagious plague zones over there or what? How often do people injure themselves?
There’s a kids play area that’s basically just a giant, foam-padded petri dish. Kids puke in there all the time. Old people are always falling down and hurting themselves, usually on the escalator because that technology is too advanced for them to comprehend. There’s a law that anytime someone is hurt on an escalator it needs to be shut down until the state comes out to inspect it to make sure the problem wasn’t our fault. Anytime you see an escalator that’s not working, odds are it’s because an old person couldn’t figure out that all they need to do is stand still and let the machine do its work and the one guy the state employs to do inspections hasn’t been around yet. Although, last year a teenage girl almost lost a toe in one. That was some horror movie shit. Even though it’s pretty obvious, the food court restaurant kitchens are even worse than you’ve ever imagined.
Have you ever enjoyed a single second of your job?
The people I work with are pretty cool, they’re not just mindless retail drones for the most part. When I first started I wasn’t sure what to do with some of the complaints people sent in. Like, some people write the most horrible, racist shit on the comment cards when they complain about a store. I’m supposed to respond to every complaint if the person provides contact info, so I’d go to my boss and be like, “Yeah, I don’t really know what to do here, this person is obviously crazy.” He’d take a look and say, “Hmm, well, fuck this guy,” and rip it up. I’ve worked at some other places where they’d make you engage every nut job that contacted you, give them free shit and stuff. Now I’ve got a little license to tell people to piss off if I feel they’re being retarded. I’ve also got freedom to come and go as I please, as long as all my shit gets done.
Why did you take this job? Is it something that you were interested in, or just a paycheck?
It was supposed to be a job while I found another job, but then the economy tanked, so here I am.
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5 comments:
hey get a load of me!
you're famous
douche-tard indeed.
Luke, can you do one of these with Leo titled "WTF does an Irish prick do all day?"
That's a pretty good premise. What does an Irish prick do all day? Besides drink and fight.
eat lucky charms, slobber over girls way out of my league, go to church, diddle little boys
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