John Butlerremembers his J1 experience as a shop boy at Macy's.
We were marched down the corridor and led into a windowless room. The door slammed behind us and we peered around, our eyes adjusting to the dark. A long black table dominated the room, around which sat 20 plastic chairs. Stale smoke clung to the walls. An opaque glass window ran the length of one wall. Were we being watched?
We started talking, noting dummy registers waiting by the back wall. It was July, we were the summer intake of sales assistants at Macy's San Francisco, and today we were going to show them just how much we knew about operating a cash register, a particular concern for me. The stocky black guy with the moustache and flat-top to my right was Rhon, the "h" a silent, exotic flourish I found to be scarcely believable. I told him how I had never used a register before and he laughed. He asked if I had told them that at the interview, and I laughed.
My only experience near a cash register had been watching the Dunnes Stores girl in Dublin ring up a week's shopping in 20 seconds while languidly snapping gum and thinking about her fella. I would never have told them this, of course not. I wouldn't have got near the job, and I needed this one badly, having neither lunch money nor bus fare home. My 19 room-mates each had jobs by this stage, and my J1 summer was nearly at its mid-point.
Our supervisor came in. Before we started, he told us how the delay was planned and how he wanted us to "go ahead and stand up and introduce the person to our left". Rhon kicked it off, explaining with mirth how I had never even used a register before.
As the room erupted in laughter I stared dumbly at the guy on my left, trying to remember anything he had said to me. Did I even have a name for him?
Thus began my career at that historic department store, home to the most convoluted cash registers ever. For every sale, labels had to be scanned, reviewed, punched and analysed. At training that morning there were equations to be memorised. After everyone else ate lunch there were codes, security procedures and forms to file. My stomach growled. The day crawled by.
We were assigned to our departments after training. As I stood at the end of the line, I noticed that human resources had seemingly appreciated that each of our personalities was a snowflake, uniquely suited to a specific part of Macy's world. In this way Treva, the shrill, squeaky-voiced mother-of-four who wanted to do voice-overs for Disney got posted to the Disney store. Daniel, the wispy model with the Human League haircut got electronics. I got dresses, specifically those of four- to 14-year-old girls.
The first week wasn't great, to be honest. Was it better to be stationed by a till I couldn't operate or to wander around the floor where I could be asked advice about a dress by a mother-and-daughter team? On the Tuesday, I tried to charge an executive $30,000 for a pair of infant Esprit leggings. On the Wednesday I was found in men's shoes, where Rhon earned 5 per cent commission selling a product he wore every day. I knew about men's shoes. I could sell men's shoes. In military terms, men's shoes was like writing for the army magazine. Four- to 14-year-old girls' dresses was down in the muck and bullets. I was hauled back to the war on floor four.
8pm rolled around on Friday, and I had made it through my first week. I hadn't balanced my register once, but Rhon and the others assured me this happened to them too. So why, as I was leaving, did two security guards show up? It seemed this time my numbers were too unbalanced to be the result of an accident. Put simply, my counting was beyond stupid. They shone torches into the recesses of the terminal searching for the swag. They found my burrito from lunch while I tried to convince them that we were alike, despite the fact that they fought crime and I sold girls' dresses.
The A-list cashiers worked weekends. On Saturday I came in to pick up a cheque and I watched them ring up registers, and I noticed they were taking a good 10 minutes per customer, and they didn't mind, and neither did the customers. They would punch in department number, store number, style number, type number. They would swipe, scan and punch. Customers would pay by credit card and they would swipe again, then authorise it with a lengthy phone conversation. Customers would sign two forms and they would carefully wrap and pack everything into bags. They would then speak to them about the benefits of the store card and finally, after a lifetime in Dunnes Stores minutes, the customer was free to leave.
There it was. In my eagerness to be as fast and efficient as those back home, I had ignored the social contract implicit in American shopping. The mall is the hub of the community. In my first week at Macy's I had been mashing the key-pad frantically, jamming goods into bags and shooing people out the door because I thought they wanted to be somewhere else. But they wanted to be in Macy's with me.
By September I was dispensing advice to sedated mums and screaming daughters about what ribbons went with which dress, because I knew that they knew that I knew nothing. They just wanted to talk. I beat every sales rep on the floor in targets and I was even offered a job managing the shoe department, which would have made me Rhon's boss. I could have insisted he scrape the silent "h" from his name tag. But I turned it down. I missed Dunnes Stores. I wanted to go home.