Fred's Book Club: Black Friday Blues.

Greetings, book lovers, and welcome to another edition of the Humpback Writers. What dumb name is that, you ask? Why, it's a dumb name that reflects the fact that it is posted on Wednesdays, or Hump Day. Which, on Thanksgiving week, is more like Friday for most of us, but never mind. It's still dumb.

But speaking of work, today's book is all about retail, reflecting the Thanksgiving tradition of going to the mall and knocking people over for Black Friday sales. Of course everything is different this year, what with Chinese Death Virus preventing the usual doorbusters, thanks to government diktats and retailer fears of causing so-called super-spreader events. Also, with the blessings of our city leaders, the summer had plenty of doorbusters of another kind, wherein people would literally bust down doors and help themselves to 100% discounts. But that's another story. 

Our focus today is on the plight of the retail worker, and there's no better source than Norm Feuti, writer and illustrator of the comic strip Retail from 2006 to this past February. Feuti published a book on the subject in 2007, featuring a bunch of the strips from the series, called Pretending You Care: The Retail Employee Handbook.  

"I am of the opinion that everyone should hold a retail job at least once in their life," writes Feuti in the introduction, "not because I think it's an enjoyable experience, but because I think it builds empathy for the human condition. I believe that working in retail for more than fifteen years has taught me a lot about people and the world we live in. The things I've learned are not always pretty, but they are valuable and true nonetheless." 

For example, one of the things he stresses is that you have to pay your dues. Under the heading "Being the Newbie," he writes, "The transition from newbie to trusted colleague is a slow process, so you should count on being handed the crappiest jobs the store has to offer for at least the first month. Everyone has to go through an initiation period, so when they tell you to clean the toilets or climb into the cardboard compactor when it gets jammed, just suck it up. You can't be accepted into the flock until you've felt their pain." This is indeed good life advice; it teaches humility, but conversely, when you've survived the crap jobs, you learn some self-respect for being able to handle adversity. 

Another important lesson is etiquette, or "How Not to Be the One Everybody Hates," and Feuti devotes an entire chapter to the subject. "Certain actions and behaviors will be considered unacceptable by your coworkers, and if you break these taboos too frequently you'll soon find yourself the object of everyone's scorn. If you walk into the break room and everyone suddenly stops talking, it's a good bet that you're doing something the rest of the staff considers 'not cool.'" He goes on to detail a number of ways you can screw up and infuriate your coworkers through poor etiquette in the retail setting, something that should be required reading for everyone in the business.

Throughout the book are scattered cartoons from the Retail strip, which was very funny, even to those of us who mostly experience retail from the other side of the register. Here is a sample page:

And here's a page particularly appropriate to Black Friday:

On the topic of the products sold by the store, the author makes an interesting distinction in a chapter called, logically, "Products" -- "all retailers tend to think of their merchandise in the same way. Whether they're selling jeans, computers, or Rubik's Cubes, retailers all see their individual wares as generic 'products' that affect the bottom line in either a positive or negative way." So the things that the front-line workers deal with are only 1s and 0s to the home office, tabulated to generate the bottom line of profit or loss. Which explains why the buyer can be very frustrated to find something he wanted is no longer available; that particular product (bit of data) wasn't generating enough money (bit of data desired). 

And yes, Feuti deals with one of the most irritating experiences in retail -- the sudden offer to enroll in a credit card program that offers a whatever discount or something, even if you are only spending five bucks. It's irritating on both sides of the counter, but the guys in the home office hundreds of miles away aren't bothered in the least.

One more section I wanted to mention, though, that's applicable to any workplace is what Feuti calls the Archetypes -- twelve basic types that employees run into. For example, the Animosity Generator is rude, inept, lazy, unhelpful, and gives everyone and the store a bad name. The Slacker is a master of goofing off. The Whiner complains about everything, but everyone else's suffering is invisible to him. The Transient (retail's most populous Archetype) is only hanging in there until something better comes along. And so on. 

It's a fun book and would make a fine present for the retail Lifer (another Archetype) on your list. Feuti's cartoon work is bright and clever; he's busy these days doing another strip called Gil and books for children, and good for him. He won't have to return to the cash register any time soon. 

As for me, I never worked in a retail store (they wouldn't hire me), but I was a teller for a year. So I met all the cranky customers in front of the desk and the same Archetypes behind the desk, thus I still clicked with the book. Pretending You Care is a book for anyone who's ever had a job, especially one that deals with the public. Scary things, publics.