High School Work Flashback

[kybearfuzz]

I love working a day out at the feed mills. They're short visits and generally you get to see really cute, furry farm boy types, like today's object of lust -- brown hair, reddish-brown goatee, chestnut eyes, fur rolling out of his tee-shirt collar, broad shoulders, hairy arms, and dirty, ripped, tight jeans around a butt that was used to squatting to pick up those feed bags. Sigh... :)

While back at the office, I was talking with a co-worker about how I worked retail Thanksgiving Day and the day after while in high school. It was such a bizarre mix of people working there and I recalled that for my first actual job, it was something of a madhouse...

My senior year in high school I started working at Roses Department Store as a stocker. Think of Roses like a KMart, one that pretty much got wiped out by the Wal-Mart invasion in the early 1990's. They were mostly in the Southeast of the country, so if you've never heard of it, I'm not surprised.

Over the next year, I moved up to salesperson, service desk, and even the coveted office person/layaway guy. All in the evening shifts. The people who worked there were right out of Saturday Night Live (back when it was funny). We had one young married manager who was screwing nearly every girl in the place. We had one girl who was screwing nearly every guy in the place. Occasionally, they screwed each other. We had people who stole, people who cheated, and people on dope. And these weren't just the college and high school students, but the day shift folks as well.

The stories I know of could literally write themselves: the vaseline in the hair of the office pothead, the cashier in electronics who literally wet herself behind the register, the lesbian love affair of the layaway girl and the chick in cosmetics, the horror of cleaning the women's restroom (I suffered that one more times than I care to recount), the cashier who found herself pregnant after a brief affair with an underage stock boy (no, not me! ewww!), the Tammy Johnson Maybe Baby (it ranks up there with Bigfoot and Nessie -- no real photographic proof), the manager who was fired for stealing money from the cash register bags because "he needed to feed his children," the guy who lost his cash register bag somewhere between the office and the front of the store, the associate who stole a boat by walking it out the front door (like it stuck to his shoe), and the mystery of the perpetually missing name tags (a secret I shall take to my grave).

Sadly, the store went out of business and sold several stores to private owners. One still exists in Somerset, KY, I have pictures. The two in my hometown (yes, we had two!) are now a Kroger's grocery store and a JCPenney's. In looking back, I'm not so sure that Wal-Mart was the major cause of Roses demise so much as the people who worked there.

Comments

[joelbear.livejournal.com]

i remember shopping at Roses, Pic n Save, Grant, Kress, McCrory's.

[kybearfuzz.livejournal.com]

ah, I recall the Pic N Save stores, but not the others.

[bleuvalentines.livejournal.com]

Hee hee ...

[kybearfuzz.livejournal.com]

LOL... remember the place do you? :)

[bleuvalentines.livejournal.com]

A wee bit ... I still have nightmares that revolve around duct tape because of one of those creepy managers you mentioned. *shudder*

[kybearfuzz.livejournal.com]

Duct Tape? Is this a story I haven't heard???

[ciddyguy.livejournal.com]

I've worked retail and have worked for a couple of local stores and they are now all gone.

I also worked at Home Club for a brief while and it then went non member and finally went out of business a few years back.

I worked at Sears during the Christmas shopping season one year and as luck would have it, I worked electronics which meant dealing with clock radios, boomboxes etc. My kind of stuff, being the geek that I am. :-)

Anyhow, sounds like working at Roses was rather interesting to say the least.

[kybearfuzz.livejournal.com]

It was a strong influence to go to college after working there for a year, that's for sure.

Goody's

[mickeymac.livejournal.com]

Was Goody's in Somerset when you lived there?

Thats where I worked in College. I was the Head Key Carrier in the Bowling Green store. It was actually a great job. Of course there were the same kind of stories and personalities.

My first managers name was Cricket. Ah the memories.

Re: Goody's

[kybearfuzz.livejournal.com]

Oh I never lived in Somerset, but we have a Goody's in Corbin (my hometown) and London (nearby). I love that store enough to have one of their credit cards!

LOL.. Cricket??? :)

Memories

[rixtur.livejournal.com]

I remember my first job while in college. It was a steak house resturaunt in Tallahassee called "The Cattle Co." It was fun at first but later became a nightmare and led to me becomming a health inspector. The owner didn't care much for sanitation and payed for it in the end. ANyway, I too had to work Thanksgiving for those folks too lazy to cook thier own shit. We even got robbed on Christmas eve one year. I could blab all day with scandalls from that place.