Every day I handle more money than I will ever make. Every day.
At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.
At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.
“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.
The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.
I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.
I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.
I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht.
are you saying that engagement rings aren’t just cool rocks
They sloth is my favorite
STORY TIME!
Ok so when I was doing a security job on a college campus, the geology club on said campus was having their mineral and fossil sale (which is where the club gets the vast majority of its funds for the year). They had some really cool shit but their sales techniques were… uh, they were bad, just really terrible. They set up the tables, put all their stuff out, hung a sign up… and then sat there, occasionally mentioning quietly to one or two passersby “Hey we’re having our mineral and fossil sale if you want any.” Very boring, overly factual, not very attention grabbing.
Now I’m a fuckin nerd so I’m all over this shit (the sale was literally a foot away from my security post so I wasn’t even getting in trouble for spending literal hours ooh-ing and ahh-ing over the really cool stuff they had). And me being the type of nerd who must SHARE ALL THE THINGS when I find cool stuff (and who also has 18 years of customer service/retail experience to draw on), I start trying to get some of the literal hundreds of students walking by to get some of the cool things. The club only needed a couple hundred bucks and we were on the largest campus in the state so they should have been making their goal easy but almost no one was biting. So my “must share the thing” nerdiness teamed up with my “must help all the people”-ness and I did my best to pitch in and get them more sales.
Now, it was two days before valentines and a lot of the people walking by were dudes. So I start trying to get them interested with comments like “hey come check out the cool stuff you could get for your bae!”
One group of dudes paused but it didn’t seem like they were gonna stop and get any of the cool things, so I go “No, seriously, chicks dig this shit, you literally cannot go wrong here. There’s fossils and cute little carvings of manta rays and kitties, and literal gemstones here; that box is full of fucking EMERALDS that are 3 for $5. GET. SOME.”
They didn’t believe me that the ladies would go nuts for “a bunch of shiny rocks.” So I decide to prove it to them. And in the most booming voice I can muster (and I can muster quite a bit after a decade of choir classes) and yell “THEY HAVE SHINY ROCKS OVER HERE AND THEY’RE REALLY COOL!”
Literally instantly, three separate groups of ladies look straight at the tables and make a beeline for them, all of them saying some variation of “Wait, did you say shiny rocks? WHERE?! WHAT KIND?! OMG!” Suddenly a dozen or so different gals (and several dudes), who seconds ago were only thinking about getting to class, stopped in their tracks to detour to the table full of shiny rocks. Only two left without buying at least one thing.
The dudes I’d been talking to before were bewildered but convinced, so they start looking for the best shiny rocks they can get to give their SOs. Several of them came back a few days later to inform me that my seemingly ludicrous advice of “get them shiny rocks” had gotten them laid or scored them a date.
So, remember kids, GET THE BAE A SHINY ROCK. That shit WORKS.
Useless 