Rendezvous with Retail, and Other Tasty Tidbits

I may be writing a lot about all kinds of retail things for awhile. It is interesting stuff. People are interesting creatures.

Two nights ago, just as we were closing up, one of my (female) coworkers dashed into the men's room yelling, "Oh, no!" and then came out, fuming mad.

"Go in there and look," she said to me.

I wasn't quite sure . . . being a men's room and all . . . but I went anyway. Someone had plugged up the drain in the sink and turned the faucet on, intending to flood the whole place. Ms. Alert, my coworker, had caught the prank, pre-disaster. The sink had not yet overflowed. She had a few choice words for the little *%#@'s that had done the deed (her words). Had she not heard the water running, the entire store would have been flooded by morning. Makes you wonder why they did it. What were they thining?

We are always worried about "shrink," which is shoplifting. When I worked at the same store two years ago, our loss was enormous. The store has since come under new management, and the difference is noticable. Departments have been moved and the whole store is neater and better run, and I like that. The ship wasn't so tight before, and we were all stressed as a result, because our manager left stressful tasks to the last minute. It's so efficient now and loss is down quite a bit.

The store where I work is located in a mall, and the mall is dwindling. There are many empty storefronts in the mall. We have a few things, like a Bath and Body Works, Sears, JC Penny, Macy's, movie theatre, and those kinds of things; but we're missing an Old Navy, Gap, Banana Republic, American Eagle, and other stores that would generate a good shopping crowd. Someone told me that we were supposed to get those stores, but the mall manager didn't want the kinds of people in his or her mall that would come to those stores.

I said, "What kind of people? The kind with money?"

The look I got told me all I needed to know - it is about race. No one wants to shop next to Hispanics. This could start an entirely new blog post, so I won't go there. I'll just say, I don't get it, and I prefer to stay naiive. My neighbor likes to say the "N" word a lot. She drops it at will. She does not like African Americans at all. (She doesn't have a racial slur to use for Hispanics, so she just says "Mexicans" in that case.) A few of my other neighbors have said that "if all these houses in this neighborhood get bought up by Mexicans, I'm moving!"

It was the same way in Iowa, where there was a large Hispanic population. Only there, they were called, "foreigners." There were two towns near where we lived in Iowa that you could find Wal-Mart, grocery stores, doctors, etc. We chose the closer town, but my neighbor chose the one farther away, and I asked her why. She said, "It's because there are less foreigners there."

I said, "Oh, you mean Mexicans?"

"Yeah," she said, "I guess that's kind of mean, huh?"

"Yeah," I said, "It is."

I had to walk away from a group of moms on the playground once as they discussed "the Mexicans" and how they stole from Goodwill and would talk about you in Spanish if they saw you in Wal-Mart.

So this post started with tidbits from retail, and ended up with racism. But they really do tie into one another. Just last night, a coworker was telling me of a huge sale last week that happened when I wasn't working. She said, "We had tons of people all at once. I mean, I turned around and there were all these Mexicans," she whisper-hissed the word.

One of my friends says that one day she wants to move somewhere where (I know this sounds bad, she says), there aren't as many Mexicans (or any probably). I told her, good luck finding it. I've never lived anywhere that there wasn't a Hispanic population.

Like I said, I want to stay naiive, because I know there are issues. And I don't want to make this blog any longer than it has to be. But I think a lot of the issue has to do with ignorance. People don't want to take the time to look into what is really going on, but choose to remain angry about what they precieve is going on.

Oh, and I don't worry too much about my neighbor using the "N" word a lot. I have to overlook it. After all, she is a redneck. ;o)