Tag: retail

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Toys R Us

I was not a Toys R Us kid.

No, I wasn’t one of those weird religious kids who weren’t allowed to play video games, and I didn’t have hippy parents who thought GI Joe was promoting war. TRU just wasn’t an option for my corner of Indiana.

Like I mentioned in my previous post, K-Mart was a big part of my childhood. The two K’s really — K-Mart and Kroger. This was before Target, before Wal-Mart, and those two stores were the bulk of my retail experience in the mid to late Seventies. I spent all my time in the toy aisle of K-Mart; I could probably still note its location on a store map, had the store not been gutted and turned into a Big R farm supply. I also did a lot of my toy gawking at a now-gone variety store called GL Perry’s, which was just down from the Kroger in the also-gone Pierre Moran mall. But it was a few years before I really got locked into a proper toy store for my Lego and Star Wars needs.

The Concord Mall didn’t have a Toys R Us, but did have a Kay-Bee toy store. I was definitely a Kay-Bee kid. They originally had a narrow little store just to the left of the anchor that was then Robertson’s, and was later Meis, Elder-Beerman, and most recently Carson’s, before dying. It later moved into a bigger location in the middle of one of the arm’s spokes.

In my mind, Kay-Bee was slightly more disorganized and second-rate compared to TRU. The aisles were narrower, the shelves were more floor-to-ceiling and packed tighter, and the front half of the store was this blue-carpeted dumping ground for pallets and bins of toys, with little walking space between them. All the video games were locked away in glass cases behind the front counter, which was counterintuitive to browsing them for hours. It didn’t have the flow or the larger footprint of a bigger, standalone TRU store. It was a bit of a mess, but wonderful as a kid.

Another thing is that in retrospect, they had a lot more discount/clearance stuff, oddball brands and closeouts. It was a bit of a dumping ground for weird brands on the way out. And I used to fixate on that stuff, both because it was weird, but because it had the magical yellow tag on it saying it was discounted, showing the old price slashed out in red, the perfect argument for convincing a parent that you needed to buy it. And these strange off-brand things are now impossible to find online.

One weird example I was thinking about: so there was this big market for third-party Atari joysticks back in the day. Atari used a common 9-pin connector on the 2600, and they used the same circuit on the Commodore 64. I was always on the lookout for a better controller, a cheaper solution for the C64, and Kay-Bee was the dumping ground for every small company that tried to get in on the video game craze and got burned when it crashed. I remember buying a pair of the garbage wireless 2600 joysticks when those got dumped on clearance. I also had a weird touchpad controller that was like a mix of an Intellivision disc-style stick and the Atari keypads used by Star Raiders and nothing else. It wasn’t that great, but I have some obsession for finding it online, and it’s impossible.

The other big example was that Kay-Bee was a big dumping ground for the liquidation of the Mattel Aquarius, which was my first computer. I’ve already written about this at length, but the bullet is that Mattel crashed and burned about fifteen minutes after they quick-released this underpowered, chicklet-keyboarded machine, and they started showing up at Kay-Bee for like a hundred bucks in a bundle with four games and joysticks and everything else. I got that for my thirteenth birthday, and that started a whole great career that led up to where I am now. (Not sure if that’s good or bad, but middle management at a software company is probably better than coal mining.)

Anyway, Kay-Bee became my default place to go in the mall. Any time there was Christmas money or extra allowance or a birthday coming up, I’d gravitate to that spot in the mall. And every obsession of my pre-teen world was there, almost like a cycle of things I fixated on as a kid. It went from Star Wars to GI Joe to model trains to model planes to D&D to video games. I know a lot of people talk or write about how music or punk rock saved their lives, but for me, in those years, it was everything in Kay-Bee. I don’t know what path, better or worse, I would have traversed if I had not spent the beginning of junior high memorizing the Dungeon Master’s Guide, but going to Kay-Bee (and to Walden Books) to pore over the collection of modules and figurines and dice was a major percentage of my time.

At a certain point, things changed, and the fixation went to the other wing of the mall, the one with the independent record store, Super Sounds. The toy store was somewhat forgotten. It changed its name at some point to KB, and the later, Mitt Romney and friends drove them into the ground, a story that would later repeat itself with TRU. I never shopped at Kay-Bee after a certain point, although sometimes out at College Mall, I’d duck into that location as a nostalgia trip. I remember Kay-Bee going under, but I was tuned out of the news for whatever reason, and never really mourned it in any way.

Much later, Toys R Us did come into focus for me, but it was a place to look for video games. I remember buying a Nintendo 64 there, at the one in Seattle at Northgate Mall, and I’d always check them out to see if they had any weird cartridges, in the pre-Amazon days when you could just look up every cartridge in the world and be a click away from owning it.

But Toys R Us never had that strong reverberation with me, that primal childhood pull, just because it was off my radar. I think Chicagoland had many locations, and there actually was one just north of University Park mall, but I never regularly went to UP until I started driving, and then the interest was in music (and girls, but nothing ever happened there).

I can relate to the same angst that people have about the TRU bankruptcy, and the various rumors about brand necrophilia, the stories that they might come out of bankruptcy court as a holiday pop-up, or a mini-store inside Target, or whatever. I went through this with Wards, which I really missed after working there for years. And some random mail-order place later bought their name and use it for this pickwick-like catalog of Chinese junk, which never sat well with me. Wards vanished quickly, and it’s impossible to find any traces of it anymore. I’m guessing the same will happen to TRU. Lots of people are taking pictures now, but they’re uploading them to cloud services that will also die or be killed. Try finding a picture you put on Kodak Gallery or MySpace ten years ago — that’s what will happen to all deadmall history in a decade.

There was a TRU in Emeryville, a few miles from my house, which is now becoming some sporting goods store. I took a few shots last weekend of the one out in Dublin, which is just sitting there. I’m always curious to see what will happen with these places, and what direction retail would go. I should archive more, but like I said, the more I get into this, the more depressing it gets.

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Death of a Kmart

The news has been out for a bit about the bankruptcy filing of Sears Holdings, and the massive list of Sears and Kmart stores closing. In my area, it’s a bit odd, but the one in Stoneridge mall, an upscale mall that’s doing well, got the axe; the one in Hilltop mall, which is complete devastation, did not get closed. I think all the Sears stores I used to shop last century are gone, but that’s another post.

The closest Kmart to my house, which is in Pinole, is slated for closure. I’ve never shopped there, so I decided to head up there last week. It’s in a little shopping center just east of Hilltop mall, just down from a Target, and sort of hidden away on a lazy stretch of big-box stuff, like a Best Buy, a Lucky grocery, and across from a Sizzler that looks like it’s also circling the drain. (To be fair, most Sizzler restaurants have looked like that for decades, though.)

There are like three eras of Kmart for me. As a little kid, we were there almost every week with my mom. This was the Seventies, before Walmart, back in the days of blue light specials and the K Cafe. It was the place where I got all my Legos and Star Wars figures. I have very fond memories of that store. I can almost smell what the store in Elkhart smelled like, the mix of tru-green fertilizer in the garden center, syrupy cokes spilled on the floor of the cafe, and the heavy starched denim of Wrangler jeans. And I can still feel the wobble of the wire cart, the one with the broomstick affixed to one corner so you couldn’t push it out of the store.

I worked across the street at Taco Bell, and later just south at the Concord Mall. I bought my first CD player at that Kmart. And in the days before Target and before Walmart, I bought a lot of stuff there. And that logo is the Kmart logo I always remember, the slanted red K and the minty blue letters for the mart. Those old-school stores all looked the same, too, with the low-slung rectangular marquee, no curves and styling, and the big, all-glass front.

Then there’s the Nineties era of Kmart. By the time I got to college, going to Kmart was not a necessity; it was ironic. I would go late at night with my friends when we wanted to remember childhood, and goof on how crappy things were there. And Icees and corn dogs. Kmart tried to change then, with the big red K and the white mart in script inside the K. Some became a Big Kmart, with the Big in blue, and a yellow swoop under it, in true Nineties graphical style. They also made those marquees big and round and lofty, tried to look less like an early Sixties grocery and more like an actual department store. They added more stuff to compete with Walmart and Target, groceries and drug stores and whatnot. I’d still pop in back when I was back in Elkhart. And when I got to New York, there were magically these Super K stores, which was a weird nostalgic throwback for me to visit. (More stories about those at some point, maybe.)

Then there’s the new Kmart. And I have no connection to this Kmart. None. It’s like brand necrophilia, like someone said, “let’s make a store shittier than Dollar General, and just as a goof, we’ll call it Kmart, and put a monochromatic logo designed by a five-year-old on the front.” A scattering of Craftsman crap, a random layout, and a general feeling that makes the old Seventies redneck Kmart look like a Nieman Marcus. There’s a Kmart out in Concord I occasionally go to on a goof, mostly because it’s a nice drive on the outskirts of Mt. Diablo. But when I’m inside, there’s no connection, nothing that reminds me of childhood, and definitely nothing I’d want to buy.

So, the Pinole store. It was total devastation. There were gaudy clearance signs everywhere, inside and out. It looked like any name-brand merchandise they may have had, was gone. Maybe it was bought up already; maybe it was sent back to the vendors for credit. Entire aisles were closed and taped off. People were throwing stuff on the floor everywhere. Kids were putting on halloween costumes, running through the store, ripping open toys, and throwing them on the ground, while their parents ignored them. The entire store smelled like shit. There were large signs by the layaway department that said ALL SALES FINAL, and others with the Sunday circular, saying WE ARE NOT A PARTICIPATING LOCATION.

I went through the clothes department, and everything was on the floor. It seriously looked worse than when I went to the Astor Place Kmart on the morning of 9/11 and every secretary in lower Manhattan was trying to buy tennis shoes so they could walk home without the subway running. I picked around for any jeans that might fit, and they had no Levis or Wranglers left; they had a knockoff brand called “Rustlers” or something. The smallest size was a 50-inch waist.

I took some pictures, and hurried out. Honestly, the whole thing threw me. The entire dead mall, death of retail thing is really getting to me. So many things are shuttering, so many pieces of my childhood are vanishing. And so much of the history will be lost, because it’s only being instagrammed, and in five years, instagram will be cratered and unarchived. It really bugs me, and makes me want to archive more, see more, take more pictures. But the more I do it, the more it depresses me.

The other thing is that the more I dig around in these online dead retail communities, the more I realize I hate 90% of the people in them. Nostalgia groups are the worst. I sometimes creep in this Elkhart group, and it’s nothing but borderline illiterate people bitching about Amazon and technology, and waxing nostalgic about garbage food that will kill them. And maybe I shouldn’t say that. But there’s part of me that thinks that being obsessed about this stuff is only like a degree removed from hoping that coal mining jobs come back, which isn’t going to happen.

There needs to be progress, and there needs to be a future. And in looking back, I feel like we built too many malls because they were a convenient tax dodge, and we bought too much junk that’s now filling our landfills because we were told we needed to buy more plastic from China. And I’m torn, because I can waste so much time looking at pictures of old stores and reading about old malls. It scratches an itch that will always need to be scratched. But it prevents me from doing anything creative, or moving forward with my life.

I’ve had this stupid idea in my head for years, about doing a combination glossary, wiki, and blog about the Nineties, about my experiences and the places I worked and shopped and visited. And I feel some need to do this, before I forget all of it entirely. But I’ve written books that took place in the Nineties, and I did that glossary book, and they were my worst-selling books, and not in my voice. (Not that any of my books are selling anymore. Jesus christ my book sales are morbid these days. Another topic.) So I know I could burn a lot of cycles on this, but I feel it would be wasted time. But here I am, still writing about it.

Also, it hasn’t started raining yet, but when it does, that means lots more time in malls. I’m also going to be in Elkhart in December, so I’ll get one long, last look at Concord before they tear it down. Anyway.

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Sears

Yeah, so that Sears in Marin I posted about? It’s on the new closing list. I think it has until April. I should probably go take more pictures, but the last trip was so depressing, it’s probably not worth it.

One of the other Sears store on the new closing list is the one in Shoreline, WA. I have a specific history with that one. In 1996, I was talking to this woman who lived in Southwest Washington, and she was going to be in Seattle to stay with some friends, in Shoreline. We agreed to meet for lunch, and for some reason, the meeting place was that Sears. I think it was the only public landmark I could think of in that area. Anyway, yada yada, and I ended up dating her for the next year and a half.

I really shopped at that store — it was sort of dumpy, and in a weird part of town. The part of Shoreline that is on the water is very affluent, with a golf course and lots of multimillion dollar houses looking out at the water. But the row of stores on Aurora — I think there used to be an outdoor mall in the area, and it was gone, and sort of isolated. The one thing I remember is that the inside of that store vaguely reminded me of the Sears in University Park Mall, in Mishawaka, Indiana.

The UP Sears is not closing. The thing I remember about that one — in my senior year of high school, someone called in a bomb threat right before first hour. When I was driving into the parking lot, firemen were waving people away, telling us to go home. So I drove to the mall in South Bend. It wasn’t open, so I slept in my car for a few hours, and then cut through Sears to go to the record store, because the Joe Satriani EP Dreaming #11 came out that day, and I had to buy it. I don’t know why I so clearly remember walking through that Sears, or why it looked different to me, but it’s a very vivid memory, thirty years later.

The Sears I would have compared that one to would be the one in Pierre Moran mall, in Elkhart, which closed last year. The entire mall was de-malled a dozen years ago, but the Sears remained. Ray’s girlfriend (now wife) worked there forever. I was also friends with someone who worked in the design department there, and used to go visit her, so I was somewhat familiar with the insides of the store, although it was enemy territory for me, being a Wards employee.

The Sears in Bloomington is completely gone, which is weird. The mall lives on, but the Sears was completely leveled, and a grocery store is going in there. That would be a sad thing for me to see, because I always parked in front of that Sears when I went to the mall. I think I parked in front of it the first time I went there, in the summer of 1989. I remember going there with a then-girlfriend in a cab so she could pick up one of those Brother word processors she ordered from their catalog, which really dates me.

Another closing last year was the Sears in Lynwood, WA, at the Alderwood mall. That was a frequent stop for me, because the aforementioned girlfriend moved to an apartment not too far away. I had a car at her place once that needed some work done, and it was a long weekend of wrenching on it, then realizing I didn’t have a good breaker bar or a metric socket, driving to that Sears, buying tools, going back and breaking a socket, returning to Sears to exchange it on that wonderful Craftsman unlimited warranty, repeat a few more times.

Also, Alderwood has strange memories for me because I used to shop there all the time, and the day before I left Seattle, I went there in my one-way rental car to buy some last-minute stuff, and ate one of my last Seattle meals there at the Uno pizza in the food court, which is so revolting and horrible and last-minute, but there you go. (The Uno is now gone, too. Probably a good thing.)

I feel dumb for obsessing over dead malls and retail, and nostalgia in general is such a high-carb k-hole for me to stumble down, with little reward and a lot of depression. But I keep doing it. I’m looking forward to the weather improving so I don’t have to walk indoors anymore.

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Dropping computers

My Mac is back in the shop.  It has TS4088.  When it switches GPUs to save power, if the computer is hot enough, it crashes.  It’s common on this specific make and vintage, and it’s the problem with buying a computer on the first day of a major revision.  I complained to the right person, and Apple agreed to swap out the entire logic board for free.  Now I just have to wait.  I’m using S’s computer in the meantime, which is much faster than my 2007 MacBook, but I only have my most vital of files on it, like my new book I’m writing.  Maybe this will make me get more done.

My computer is now just shy of three years old.  Once it is back, I am swapping in an SSD drive, which is currently sitting on my desk.  It’s still a good computer, fast and light and well-constructed and all of that.  The logic board thing is unfortunate.  I hope that when it’s replaced, I can get another year or two out of it, although three years is about the right timespan for upgrading.  The only thing I miss having is that the newer models can mirror their entire screen to the Apple TV, and mine can’t.  I don’t know what I’d use that for, especially since it’s easy enough for me to mirror any movies on my computer to the TV.

I went to the Apple store to drop it off.  I drive down this ghetto back road that is barely paved, like an Indiana road.  I hit a pothole and one of my wheel covers came off.  It rolled like a Tron deadly disc and went right under a moving semi truck.  Now my car looks weird, with three silver wheels and one black.  I went online and the official Toyota wheel cover is $80 each, or I can get a set of four generic ones with no Toyota logo for $30.  I ordered the generic ones.

As I was walking down from the second floor above me, there was a woman walking in front of me.  She looked sort of like that woman from Cagney and Lacey who was later on Nip/Tuck, the kind of woman that still wears 80s pantsuits with the giant padded shoulders.  She was trying to carry an airline roller bag down the stairs and somehow became discombobulated and fell dramatically, half-flinging the bag, which slammed into the metal hand rail, then bounced and hit the stairs hard, falling down a dozen steps to the landing.  The fall was so stupid and awkward, I was certain she triggered it from some kind of brain aneurysm.  I stopped and asked her if she was okay, and she said she was, but papers from the bag were everywhere.

I’ve been noticing more weird episodes like this every time I leave the house.  Like almost every time I go to a store, someone is in a shouting match with a clerk.  I went to the drug store last week, and this woman was screaming at the pharmacist.  HIPPA rules probably prevent the public disclosure of prescription information, but this woman was screaming the entire episode over and over, so I know what it was.  The pharmacist called her doctor to check on something, and it turns out they could not fill her vicodin prescription for two weeks because she just filled her methadone prescription.  It seems like everyone around is on massive amounts of oxycontin, and can’t sleep at night without valium, and takes a dozen of those five-hour energy drinks every day.  And then when they go to a store, and a clerk is just doing their job, they scream at them like the CIA just called in a drone strike on them because someone misspelled their last name.

The last time I picked up a computer at the Apple store, this happened.  The system is simple: you make an appointment, they help you with your computer.  So they brought my computer out, and set it down in front of a cashier, and all I needed to do was show her my ID, and she would hand it to me, and say “have a nice day” or something.  But in that heartbeat between the guy handing it to her and me showing her the ID, a guy comes up, no appointment, broken phone, “I DROVE TWENTY MINUTES YOU NEED TO HELP ME WHERE IS YOUR FUCKING MANAGER.”  I just needed to flash my driver’s license, take the computer 18 inches from my hands, put it in my bag, and he doesn’t even give her a chance to speak, just continuing over and over “I DON’T UNDERSTAND I DROVE ALL THE WAY HERE FROM WALNUT CREEK AND YOU GUYS CANT JUST LOOK AT MY PHONE I DONT WANT AN APPOINTMENT NEXT TUESDAY I JUST DROVE TWENTY MINUTES.”  And so on.

I used to work in retail.  We’d have customers like this.  It wasn’t every day, maybe once or twice a week.  Is it worse?  Is my timing just bad?  Does everyone think they are the center of the universe?  Has the internet made us hate big companies?  Is the quality of everything so shitty now, with everything outsourced and nickel-and-dimed to the point of nothingness, that everything always breaks, with no recourse?  Are we all just cynics because we can’t believe anything anymore?

I’m trying not to let things like this bother me anymore, trying to give people the benefit of the doubt, trying not to lose my cool when it takes someone too long to do something.  I was at the post office the other day, and they were training a new cashier, and I had to mail a book to New Zealand.  The 2-minute transaction took about 7 minutes.  I think 80% of the people in Oakland would have fucking ended that trainee right there, cut off his head with his own chained-down pen and fucked his windpipe as the blood gushed out of his severed arteries.  I just smiled, and let him learn.  He’s a trainee.  It’s a post office job, and if he doesn’t lose it six weeks from now, it’s a good job and he’ll have a pension that hopefully won’t vanish soon.  He could be out stripping the wiring out of houses and selling it for meth, but he’s learning to work at a vital position so he can feed his kids and pay taxes that might someday repave that fucking road that ate my wheel cover.  I’ll give him the five minutes.

So I sit down at the Genius Bar, show the guy my paperwork, he starts to run tests on my MacBook.  Right next to me sits down the Cagney and Lacey woman.  She pulls out her MacBook Air that just fell down two flights of metal stairs.  It has a cracked screen.  “I have no idea what happened.  It must be defective.”

 

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The Drugstore Habit

I used to have a bad habit of going to the drugstore on a Sunday evening and dropping a decent sum of money on random stuff that I suddenly realized I needed: razor blades, acne medication that promised to work, cases of RC cola, issues of Lowrider magazine, that new Michael Crichton novel, whatever. And at various points in my geography, the drug store became a Target, which is basically a drug store but they also sell furniture and motor oil and low-end clothes. And I guess for a year, it was a Marsh grocery store, but Marsh pretty much was just a drug store that also sold 36 aisles of food. I think one of the reasons I did this is because in Indiana, everything closes at 5:00 PM on a Sunday, except Osco’s and Walgreens. (And grocery stores and Target…) And in a need to do something on Sundays, I’d go to the only thing open, and it was hypnotic, and I would suddenly realize I’d need dental floss, or beef jerky, and boom… $57.86 of consumer goodness.

And now I realize that I can’t really shop at pharmacies anymore; they have become colluded over the years. I went to a CVS last night (shampoo, glasses cleaner, legal pads, facial cleanser) and it was just impossible to shop. Maybe it was a New York thing, but whatever hypnotic spell the drug stores of 10 or 15 years ago in Indiana had, these ones had the total opposite. The aisles were spaced wrong, the ceiling height was different, everything was laid out in this “get-your-stuff-and-get-the-fuck-out” manner that broke the spell for me. And I had a friend that used to soapbox on this for ages, but drug stores have gradually sunk into this hole. It used to be drug stores had a soda fountain, and ice cream cones and a sandwich bar, and you went there to relax. They were like the Cheers bar, but no alcohol. And if you needed some tincture of iodine too, they had it. And when’s the last time you saw a drug store with a soda bar? You haven’t, because all of those old-timey stores with the hand-painted signs and the zinc ceilings and whatnot got bought out and gutted, and replaced with an exact clone of the CVS store that they have in 5,700 other cities. Has anyone written a book about this? Someone should. (Not me, though!)

I am in the middle of trying to get book 3 going. I know there are really like 9 books or whatever, but there are basically only two (Summer Rain and Rumored to Exist) and all of the other ones are greatest-hits/live at the Budokon sort of things that don’t “count”. So now, book three. And I need another book like Rumored. I need ten like Rumored. So this time, I’m trying to write a full outline, with three acts and all of that shit, for a book, and then I will have a whole plot, and I won’t have to play the “it’s a book about nothing” game that made 98% of the people out there look at me like I was starting a NAMBLA chapter in the back of a day care center. The book will have all of the expected dark zaniness of Rumored, but be a book. I think. I hope. But no word on this until it’s underway, because this is the part I always fuck up.

Not much else. I wish I was back in Alaska now. OK, back to work.

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Nintendo tapes

I wish I would have kept a journal when I went to high school. Okay, it would have taken more time to carve out the daily entries from the stone tablets way back then, but there are times I wish I had greater memory of day-to-day activities, even if it’s just so I can write another crappy book that’s based on part of my life.

I’ve been thinking back to the past in order to recycle some crap in my head into a new book, and I’ve also been reading threads on SomethingAwful that are absolutely drop-dead hilarious, and I wish I could do something similar. One of the recent threads was about experiences in working at grocery stores, and it contained some of the most hilarious stories about irate customers and general mischief, the sort of thing that is so damn funny because you know there’s no way you could make that stuff up.

And thinking back, I have a lot of funny stories from my days of working at Montgomery Ward back in high school. I worked in the paint department, mixing paint and unloading pallets of boxes of cans, each weighing about ten pounds each. Over the years, I managed to work in almost every department of the store, filling in to get extra hours and unloading trucks at 6AM during the summer for the extra money. I didn’t socialize much during high school because most of my classmates were dicks, so I spent most of my time back in the paint department, huffing mineral spirits and carving wooden paint stirrers into punji sticks and potential ninja weapons.

The general idea of working in a retail store puts you at risk for many encounters with the criminally insane. I don’t know who is responsible for it, but long ago, someone came up with a saying called “the customer is always right,” and that bit of mistruth will make any job behind a cash register sheer hell. There are people who cannot remember how to add two and two who can somehow instantly recite that bit of propaganda. I mean, I would think the small amount of brain matter it would take to store that phrase would also be enough to comprehend why it is impossible to put a lawn tractor on the roof of a Chevette and drive it home, but I’ve seen that one happen.

Monkey Ward was a step up from Target or K-Mart and akin to Sears in their paint offerings. They had their own brand of paint (which was actually superior to almost all other paints, because Wards owned a chemical company from back when it was part of Mobil Oil, and they made an incredible paint for a steal of a price) and we custom mixed it to one of 768 or 863 colors on a chart. We also sold all the fixins’ as far as brushes and drop cloths were concerned, and there were a few bins of wallpaper. But we were peons and jerk-offs, not trained interior decorators. I don’t know how you’re supposed to tell, as there is no accreditation program or professional degree for decorators. You can’t just go, “oh, he has a PhD from Rutgers in wall coverings, he knows his shit.” So I guess price is the only real gauge, and when you’re paying ten bucks a gallon, you aren’t getting shit in the way of design help. Most of the time, people came to me and said “four gallons of #221 in semigloss” or whatever, and I slung that shit out like I was making chocolate shakes in McDonald’s. I’d take their money, tape a can opener to the lid of the shit, and tell them to come back soon. If they got really crotchety about it, I carried the paint to their car, mostly because it gave me a chance to check out the ladies of Housewares on the way back in. But then I quickly forgot the home project in question and went back to seeing what I could break by putting it in the paint mixer.

About once a week though, I’d get one of Them. They would come in with a piece of tile, a scrap of carpet, some wood off of a door frame, a few slips of paper, a magazine cover, and who knows what else. They would then slap all of the shit down on the counter and say “what looks good with this?” I would refrain from saying, “my dick would look good on it, you wanna see?” and tell them that I was, despite my professional appearance as a 16-year-old jagoff who could barely tie his tie plus an ugly maroon paint smock that had more paint explosions than cloth visible, not a professional decorator. My car was six different shades of bondo; I couldn’t match my ties to my shirts, so I bought all white shirts and all grey ties; the biggest thing I’d ever painted in my life were the Led Zeppelin runes in four-foot high letters on public property. And when I told them that they were up shit creek and I would not hold their hand while they compared each of the 863 colors twenty two times to all of their samples, they looked as if I told them I’d just told them I was selling their house to the Viet Cong.

The paint department lived in Four Seasons, which held a mix of different merchandise, depending on the time of the year. In the summer, the lawnmowers, tractors, and weedeater paraphernalia rounded out the area, with kiddie pools and lawn furniture and the barbeque grills. When fall came around, they moved to snowblowers, plows, and tire chains. And as the season started (usually after July or August), the Christmas trees and lights and toys made our department the default playground, as shoppers dumped their cold virus-saturated bumdles of doom in our aisles the terrorize the shelves and convince us all that breeding was a bad, bad, idea. As the defacto toy department of the store, we also had to field the calls and inquiries about the Big Thing of the year. Cabbage Patch dolls made a comeback one year, and we got exactly four of them from the Franklin Park warehouse. In a strange bit of irony, we got all black Cabbage Patch dolls. Even though these insane screaming mother robots were willing to crack someone in the fucking head for one of these dolls, they would dodge into our store, look at the four remaining items in stock, mentally think “I’m not givin’ mah kid a black doll” and then rush back out to look for a “REAL” cabbage patch.

The Nintendo was the sure kick in our collective balls, and that one happened twice in a row. The first time, we got two shipments of four; one in October, and the other on December 24th. We got approximately 427 million phone calls about it for three months straight. I started answering the phone “Montgomery Ward, we have no Nintendos, this is Jon, how may I help you?” 50% of the time, the people would still ask us if we had Nintendos. That remaining four that came in on the 24th was probably a mistake, but when they showed up, I had the front desk page over the intercom that we had them for sale, and they were gone in 20 minutes. Of course, the next year, you’d think they would order 200 dozen of them per store and make up half the company’s profits on game consoles, so they gave us exactly six of them. And twice as many phone calls. And every person that called would ask me, “Do you have any of the TAPES left?” “Do you have any Intendo TAPES?” “TAPES? TAPES?” THEY ARE NOT FUCKING TAPES! THEY ARE CARTRIDGES! THEY CONTAIN A ROM CHIP! NO MOVING PARTS! NO TAPE! NO MAGNETIC MEDIA! IT IS NOT A GOD DAMNED 8-TRACK! “Um, so you got them Mintendo Tapes or not?”

Christmas music was on a loop. It played about 5 hours or so, because there were many times I heard the tape three times. We opened early, we stayed open late, we had extra hours and mad dash sales events and special sales and I usually got a couple of 40-hour weeks, even with school. Our only escape during the day was to go to a boarded-up, cigarette-infested, paneled back room that was our break area, or go out in the mall and fight every fucking degenerate to get a spot in line at the pretzel stand for a lunch of corn dogs and soggy fries. It’s almost sad that I now miss the food at that place, especially considering the number of years it took off my life.

I should talk about this more, because I haven’t even started to discuss the people I worked with. As an aside, this isn’t the stuff I’m researching for a book – I have found a great new idea and I’m working on it, but this is just a way to get the cobwebs out of my head. Anyway, ER is on in 15, so I better get situated.