Now let's get one thing straight, before I go any further. Cashiers do not equal Retail Employees. Cashiers manage all things cash register. Retail people do everything else. We are two VERY separate sections in one teensy store. We even have two separate managers...and our Retail Manager is freakin' crazy. More about her later.
I want to tell you about the vigorous one month training all of us brand spankin' new employees had to endure before RH opened it's doors. Hired, check. Fill out paperwork, check. Sit through hours of low-quality videos about situations we'll all be dealing with in a month, checkcheckcheck. Half the month was about getting to know each other, and getting to know our training managers.
Most of the trainers came from the South. I'm talking Texas, Tennessee, Louisana, Arkansas...they all had thick accents and enjoyed grits and called us "sugar" and "baby". They were (some of them..) the kind of people that you might enjoy hugging. If you liked hugging people.
Before we could train, however, we unloaded the trucks. I'm talking two weeks worth of trucks. A whole store's worth of merchandise that needed to be set up in an orderly fashion before we opened our doors at the end of the month. We (cash and retail) performed the duties of unloading the merchandise off the truck (most in boxes taller than I stand), opening the stuff, and setting the store up for business. Talk about manual labor at its finest. I set up and decorated more Christmas trees than I've decorated in the last seven years total. I drove home every night wearing suits of glitter and dust and smelling like biscuits and gravy. It was not my best look.
After we managed to set the store up per our display pictures, we started wearing our uniforms to work. In light of this, the managers actually made us lift up our pant legs to make sure we were wearing the proper socks. One day during training, a server actually got sent home because her socks did not match her shirt or pants. They told me to take out a set of my earrings. I did not. I made sure to wear my ponytail low so it could cover my ears the next day. I'm a rebel.
Each section of the restaraunt and retail had its own trainer; cash trainer, cook trainer, retail trainer, server trainer...you get the idea. We all trained separately and learned things according to our sections.
Retail trainers huddled us close together in little kumbaya circles and breezed through facts until our feet started to break out in blisters. Between Display 1 and Display 2, there must be precisely 36 inches of room to accomodate wheelchairs. FIFO with food - First in, First out - make sure the later dates get pushed to the back of the shelf, and the earlier dates pushed forward. Always wear a smile - it doesn't matter if your mother died yesterday, you wear that smile and you wear it convincingly. Or else.
They gave us acronyms and quizzed us on them daily. UTAH. STARS. Something else that I cannot remember because I'm a bad retail employee. We make sure the guest (not be be confused with customer) always comes first. We make sure the bathrooms are always clean. We make sure our demos are always turned on and their batteries are always on full charge.
We are RETAIL, hear us ROAR. LOUDLY. WITH A SMILE ON OUR FACE.
My least favorite part of the training was the role-playing. The trainers gave the cashiers cue cards and we retail ladies had to deal with their crap. Some of them were grumpy guests with a chip on their shoulder. Some of them were just looking to eat and not shop. Some of them were really bad actors, and mostly, I just laughed. It's what I do best in any situation, at any given time. Laugh. The cash actors would ask where they could find a gift for their grandpa. I laughed. They brushed me off and I laughed. I laughed until everyone else was laughing, too.
I'm pretty sure the trainers were thinking Well, the girl can't make a sale to save her life, but when she laughs, it'll set things right. Maybe we'll keep her, make her tell jokes or something. We'll stick her back in the toys every day, make those kids laugh.
And boy do I love kids. But that's another blog post.
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