Barenaked Ladies – Never is Enough

This weekend is the biggest shopping weekend of the year, which makes sense as origins are concerned. Christmas is a month away, and many of us have a convenient long weekend to shop on. It’s a brief respite where dinner is all set with leftovers from the days before and plans are still a few weeks away. It makes sense that more people than normal would pack into their cars and check out the deals, and so more and more businesses thought to themselves, “hey, let’s offer specials so more of these people who are off will come by.” This is a reasonable history (I don’t know the official one, because this isn’t a research paper), and seems totally feasible in scope. Somewhere down the line, though, someone decided that the best way to celebrate a season of family gratefulness and peace on earth is to be a total dickface.

Eventually, as surely everyone knows, these businesses felt that the earlier they started their doorbusters, the more sales they could make. Sadly, they were right. Stores opened at 6am, then 5, then 4. Some at this point open at midnight. People have been injured and trampled at these events, because saving 50% on a pressure cooker whips otherwise human organisms into a frothy deal-rage. As the hours got longer, and the people grew more terrible, retail employees started referring to this day as “Black Friday.” Contrary to popular belief, actual humans care more about basic respect than making lots of money, especially when most of that lots of money is going to someone who isn’t setting foot in a single store during the day, so basically no one in the retail world looked forward to it, giving it a name evocative of the stock market crash despite the mass profits, not losses, associated with the event. It is a credit to the continued lack of respect big corporations have for their employees that “Black Friday” would become a nationally celebrated shopping holiday… why is it called “black Friday”? Well, some will say it’s because “we’re in the black today,” but to hear it intoned by a worker, it’s clear the origin. But who cares! TVs are on sale!

This is the conflict that arises every year: entitled shoppers telling retail employees that they should be happy to have a dead-end, low-wage job in an industry that accounts for most of the jobs in the country, and retail employees telling shoppers, in private at least (the customer is almost always wrong, but must be treated as right), that they are tools large enough to fix God’s toilet. Recently, as more and more corporations have chosen to open on Thanksgiving itself, slashing well-deserved family time, the shopaholics and CEOs have taken to sharing the plight of our servicemen and women abroad in war zones over the holidays. While I agree that our soldiers should be home for the holidays (because war is childish and should end for good), I do find it sort of disgusting that the two are conflated. Soldiers, for starters, enjoy the utmost respect without any question of whether they are actually good at their job, while retail workers are treated as categorically subhuman even if they are paragons of professionalism. More importantly, though, when you sign up for a job that might actually be important, like protecting a country, there are sacrifices that come with it. Forcing a wage slave to work on what should be a widespread day of rest is little more than reminding them they’re owned by you. The world will operate just fine if Macy’s is closed on Thanksgiving. If the military pulls out for the weekend, that’s a little more complicated a scenario. If you must equate the two, do it to demand the troops’ return home, not to demand that the perennial losers of the success lottery must have one further indignity tossed their way (while you, the armchair advocate for Holiday Hours, are conveniently off work… how fast will you be gargling piss and bile in anger if YOU were asked to come in on Thanksgiving).

With this set-up, then, it is tempting to buy into the central thesis of Barenaked Ladies’ “Never is Enough.” It pokes fun at the idea of what passes for life these days, which was also what passed for life in the late 90s when it was released: blowing beaucoup bucks on alcohol and calling it a cultural experience, for example, or working one’s backside off at school when the only jobs out there are low paying and humiliating. See also: retail, which Ed Robertson singles out specifically. “I’ve never worked a single day in retail, telling people what they want to hear, telling people anything to make a sale,” he claims (and brags). And who would want to? People in retail want out. The people I was surrounded by during my stint all had dreams. One once desired to be a baker. Another, to go into day care and children’s services. There was the woman with a masters in museum science who finally escaped to a relevant position, and the many older people who continued their education, slowly but surely, to try to better their position. Most were not so lucky as my museum science co-worker. Why did they want out? Well, the better pay scale didn’t hurt… anyone who believes retail pays a living wage has never worked it. The bigger stress, however, was the terrible atmosphere. As Sartre said, hell is other people, and retail makes you confront the worst, most entitled, most terrible of people. It can be the subtle awful, like the never-bathing man who would sometimes stake out architecture, to the small awful, like the manga-hobos, teens who would sprawl across the manga aisle and read them all for free (never putting a single one away). But then there are the bigger entitlements and annoyances: the educators looking to use their discount on gossip magazines and trashy romances, or the old women calling our managerial staff bitches for not taking an “all sales final” return. There were the business novices that would tag along with you, reciting your name as if you were a new contact, and the intelligence novices who didn’t know who wrote Hamlet, but were damn sure about to belittle you for working behind the desk. And of course, there were the most prevalent sorts: the ones who felt that you-the-worker owed them everything, every second of your time and thought, and gave no thought to the fact that we were two humans performing a role. The worker is the lesser, even though the client needs them to get what they want.

So goddamn, it would be lucky to never work a single day in retail. Some things just aren’t worth the money one is paid. I do, however, take issue with the basic premise. Just as I believe education is worthwhile, even though the labor market we enter is laughable at best, and just as I believe travel changes us for the better, even if we might be better off without that Eurobender, I don’t really buy into the final idea: “Never is enough… you never have to do that stuff.” Quite the opposite. Retail is dehumanizing, it is way more work than it looks like, and it is full of the worst creatures you’ll ever encounter. And that is exactly why we should all have to do it.

Now, someone out there is kvetching about this, so I’m sorry, I don’t really think you need to leave the cushy six figure salary you have now for a barely five figure one. I don’t think the education you were privileged to afford should be made meaningless through a “dead end” job. But I do think, had you done so in the past, you’d be a better human being.

See, if you’ve never been worried about being fired not out of incompetence, but because there wasn’t enough money, despite selling tens of thousands of dollars in merchandise a day, you won’t understand a retail worker. If you regularly can save money, because there’s enough of it in your paycheck to do so, you won’t understand that they can’t. If you’ve ever dropped a couple hundred on a new iPhone or a new game system the day it came out, without saving, and without it affecting the rest of your week, you probably don’t grasp the problems of a retail worker. And most definitely, if you think Black Friday is a celebration, you may not even be the same phylum as a retail worker.

It’s like any other of the prominent problems people talk about today. Our grandparents started accepting different races because  they met them and they realized they were good people just like them. Our parents opened their doors to gay couples when, again, they realized they were no different than they were. Similarly, facing a problem can make people see how misinformed they were: consider the senators who will rail against emergency funds for disasters until their own constituents are hit. Of course, we don’t want to end gun violence through more people being scarred by gun violence, but with class struggles, the easiest way to inform is to have someone be there, and it takes minimal pain to do it. Here’s the thing: an upper-class privileged youth is never going to grasp how little money retail brings in, because they’ll always have another source to bail them out (see also: Jeff Bennet’s discussion of “Common People”). What they CAN see, however, is how people immediately look at them differently behind a counter with a chintzy name tag. They can see people shouting at them for needing to look up an answer, and people condescending to judge their competence before they have a chance to show it. They can see the people who leave trash in the aisles and stacks of merchandise on endcaps. They can also feel what it’s like to stand for 8 hours every day, and to not have a full hour for lunch. They can feel the sting of being insulted for following store policy, and the shame of a manager overriding that policy like they’re some know-nothing who just didn’t know how to break the rule. They will also encounter some amazing people: the customers who are truly grateful, and the ones that strike up conversations during their queries. They’ll meet coworkers from all walks of life, all backgrounds, races, ages… they will see everyday people that they may never have encountered. Sure, maybe they won’t understand why raising the minimum wage is so important, but having worked in retail, they will at least have a frame of reference as to what humans are like when they enter the hallowed walls of commerce. For most people, that should be enough to tip servers and reshelve merchandise where it belongs. It should be enough to ask courteous questions and treat workers with respect. It should definitely be enough to know that behind those uniforms are minds aching to do better things, and capable of it too, but with no ability to make that upward climb. And if we’re lucky, maybe it will be enough that we’d start seeing more and more CEOs who realize that the human cost of turning holidays into shopping days is too high to care about the comparatively measly profit cost of staying closed.

As for me, I think it’s obvious I’ll be cloistered in with my family and my turkey and my long weekend, and not lining up for doorbusters. A wise man once said, after all, that one never has to do that stuff.

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