Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Ramblings and thoughts on Retail and Trayvon Martin


I've been thinking about education a lot lately. Mostly about what its limitations are, but also because school is right around the corner, the Trayvon Martin case and how education has played into the discussion surrounding it, my work situation.

Lets start with the least fraught of those, my work situation. I've spent my summer working retail at the same establishment I've worked at for the last seven years (it'll be eight at the end of August). For me, that establishment (which shall remain nameless in this post, but doubtless you all know the place) has been a safety net. I worked full time for a long time, but haven't been full time in years. I could never quite let go and just quit. The people were amazing. I had a 401K I wanted to keep contributing too (despite the stupid stock market). It was a change of pace from my regular job. And essentially, it was, it is, easy.

Retail is easy in lots of ways. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out how to help folks pick a backpack. You can usually figure out how a GPS function from reading the box. Its not difficult in an intelligence sort of way. You could probably be dumb as a rock and still be good at retail. A fact that makes me, a Master's degree holding, dead language teaching, book loving, dilettante of all things intellectual, well, it makes me a little sad sometimes.

The thing that makes someone good at retail is the caring part, which is the thing that makes it decidedly not easy. You have to care what this person, this stranger, wants and then you have to care enough to make it happen for them (if you can).  You must do this even when they're rude, when they're critical, they're indecisive, dismissive, and even when they themselves don't know what they want.  Keeping a level of interest against all those obstacles is difficult. The added burden of keeping the store clean and presentable doesn't help. Again, its not hard to dust. But its hard to care about dusting.

Its the caring that got me wondering about education. I work with highly intelligent people, many of whom are also well-educated. What makes or breaks them in the retail world is finding significance in their daily retail grind. What helps them, what has helped me do that? Is it the caring part? Or the education part? Or is it just plain old smarts?

That got me thinking about what makes a successful retail employee, the type of employee that sells the pants off of good products and does it day in and day out without succumbing to burn-out and boredom. There are a few at my retail establishment and I've worked with them for a good amount of years. I've watched them work. Its the caring that really gets them going, but why do they care? And how do they care without caring? If you care and then the sale goes, it sucks. If you care, and the person you're helping is an asshole, that sucks too. If you care, and all you get to do all is dust because its slow and there aren't any customers, that sucks most of all. So, the caring yes.

The intelligence helps a lot. Problem solving and creativity are a salesperson's friend. And education doesn't hurt either. I love talking to people about the places they're going and the sites they'll see. I mostly know about that stuff from reading about it or learning about it in a class. So education helps a lot. But mostly its the caring.

Here's where Trayvon Martin comes into the mix. I wonder about empathy and retail and stereotypes. You learn quickly in retail not to give into your first impressions, since people often surprise you. Not always, but often enough that you learn to give everyone, the same welcome and the same service, regardless of physical appearance. The grungy cowboy? A millionaire rancher willing to buy three pairs of boots at a time. That little old lady who looks like she's got oodles of cash? Not willing to part with any of it unless those pants fit her 70-year-old parts perfectly. The filthy 20-something kid who looks like he's going to rip you off buys tons of gear to replace his old stuff for his next thru-hike. Its just not worth it to assume you know what a customer is going to do based only on what they look like. So you greet everyone with the same smile, the same offer of help.

I've gotten so used to questioning my first impressions that I often find myself doing so outside of the store. That homeless guy might be a druggy, but he might also be an out-of-work IT guy who didn't make it through the recession. Maybe that mom with all the screaming kids is just lazy, but maybe she's been working all day and all night in order to feed her kids and she just doesn't have the energy. A Hispanic guy in work boots and dirty jeans? Maybe he doesn't speak English and does yard work and construction and maybe he was born here and is working on his house in his old work boots and dirty jeans. And that black kid walking down the street in a hoody and jeans? Maybe he's got his hood up because its raining and he doesn't want to get wet. Maybe he's got skittles and iced tea in his hand, and maybe George Zimmerman should have worked a little retail before he trusted his first impressions. Because his first impressions were wrong, and the cost wasn't a missed sale or an unhappy customer. The cost was a kid's life.

I know everyone is up in arms about the Zimmerman verdict. I'm not a legal scholar or even anywhere close to one. The legal standing of the case don't really matter in the face of the larger social issues: that when we see certain people we assume certain things based on gender, race, clothing, cars, shoes, hairstyles, whatever. I don't think that's ever going to change. Its probably one of the things that helped humans survive, since being able to tell the difference between a friend and an enemy quickly, without thinking, was probably the difference between life and death. But we don't live in that world anymore, and today it makes a lot more sense to take a moment and question those first impressions, especially if you're carrying a gun. That's what bothers me the most, I suppose. That we don't take the time to think about people's circumstances or connect with them in a meaningful way. Instead, the tendency is the think the worst of people. Add deadly weapons into the mix and you get a case like Trayvon Martin's. Awful.

And I wonder, as I always do in the face of awful events, how to make it better, how to make people see past stereotypes. Maybe we should all work retail for a year.





2 comments:

  1. I don't know how to make things better. Not completely. But I know this: Trayvon Martin was at least a little bit guilty of making the same sort of snap judgment you say Zimmerman made. There is evidence to support the assertion that Martin used a racial slur (the friend he was talking to on the phone testified that Martin called Zimmerman a cracker), but no evidence, to my knowledge, that Zimmerman did the same.

    From the beginning, Martin thought Zimmerman was a threat, just like Zimmerman thought Martin was a threat. Obviously, the fact that Zimmerman followed Martin around didn't help to dispel that suspicion, so Zimmerman's hardly completely innocent there.

    But this is a two-way street. Either one of these men could have avoided tragedy by communicating and by being more open to the possibility that their initial impression was wrong. We'll never know exactly what happened and whether Zimmerman was actually justified in using his gun, but I think it's important to remember that there are two sides to every story and that in almost all stories, every character is both a little good and a little bad.

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  2. I agree with you to a point. But I also think that as the person armed with a deadly weapon, Zimmerman had a greater responsibility to get past his first impressions. I'm not saying that makes him more or less bad or that Martin was some angel. I just think that if you've got a gun, you should really think twice about what you're doing because the stakes are so much higher.

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