A Retail Retrospective
It's been almost 15 years since I worked at the copy department of an office supply store, but I still remember... a lot. Plus, some business and other ramifications.
I am one of the 60% of Americans who have worked in retail, and when I saw an ad for Office Depot on Xwitter1 the other day, it reminded me of those 10 months I spent working at one from November 2009 to August 2010. It is the only time I have worked retail, aside from about 3 months at a Giant Food in the summer of 2007.2
It’s been long enough to speak frankly about some things that happened, right? Keep in mind, none of my personal experiences from 15 years ago necessarily represent the current traits of the companies or people mentioned… including myself.
So, what did I learn? To give people a break when they try to sell me an extended warranty.
Okay, there’s a real answer, too. It’s amazing what you can still remember after more than a decade, and it’s amazing the myriad of ways our personal experiences can tie into the world around us.
Getting the Job
I was an unemployed recent college graduate living at home in the fall of 2009 and, it’s somewhat embarrassing to admit now, had to be dragged to several retail stores to apply until I found a job. A lot of us recent grads back then didn’t have many leads for professional jobs, and it had definitely been a matter of misplaced pride that I would forego working retail.
Step one at Office Depot, after getting in the door, dressed and showered, was taking their customer service test. If you’re familiar with these tests, you know that they just ask what you would do in various work scenarios. For a certain kind of person, and one who can tell the difference, there are two options: say what you’d want to do, or what they’d want you to do.
I must have passed the test because I went right to the interview, conducted by the store manager, and as I recall I didn’t get out of there without a job offer.
Of course, early-20s me essentially had no negotiating skills. I made $8.00/hour ($11.30 in 2024 dollars) the duration of my employment. As low as that is, I found out later that my wage was $0.25 higher than some of the other employees. (Hey, it’s 10 extra bucks a week!) Maybe some hiring guideline was at play, whether the copy department—which required a bit more skill than cashiering, but less than sales or tech support—or perhaps the undergraduate degree.
I started during the afternoon shift on Black Friday, November 27, 2009, after lunch with my family.
Good People
The store manager turned out to be great, personable and reasonable. I was never rescheduled or forced to work a day I’d wanted off. Although I did work New Year’s, it was for 1.5x-pay (per company policy). I got my Sunday mornings off.
In addition to the store manager, I liked all three of the assistant managers. Two of them, including one who had just had a baby, had seemingly harsh exteriors but really were great people. I still remember doing a favor for the other one of those two, and in return he bought me a drink—an energy drink.3 I don’t even remember what specific favor I did for him, but even small acts of appreciation can be memorable.
The third assistant manager was the most outwardly fun, a Bolivian immigrant who jokingly insisted on being called “El Jefe”—the boss. After I left in August 2010, I actually friended him on Facebook, but we lost touch after I deleted (not deactivated) Facebook from 2011–14.
I also remember a handful of peer coworkers, all of whom I liked as well. (Maybe I’ve blocked the bad ones from memory.) One of them was a cashier from Ghana and very proud of his country’s performance at the 2010 World Cup.
Soccer
That’s probably the only time in my life that I paid attention to soccer, but I never really got into it even then. The 2010 World Cup was the one with the vuvuzela craze, though, and who could forget that.
But only after I looked it up now did I remember that part of Ghana’s success that year came at the expense of the U.S. team. Both countries advanced to the final 16, but on June 26, Ghana won 2–1 in overtime to eliminate the United States. I think mainly what I remember is our guy coming into work the next day, beaming.
That was also the year the North Korean team, after fighting Brazil to a close 2–1 match in the first game of the group stage, was placed on national television for their second game, only to be embarrassed 7–0 by Portugal. Rumor had it their coach was never heard from again.
Less-Good People
At some point, the district reorganized their stores and our store manager was reassigned. His replacement, Gabe4, was about as uptight as the old guy was chill.
Gabe told me once about how he was so committed to his job that he divorced his wife, which sounds so ridiculous now that I’m doubting if I remember the conversation correctly. It was in the context of me telling him that I was not going to be able to come in for a store-wide meeting that he had scheduled for a Sunday morning.
In general, the overall transformation of the workplace was dramatic. It was as if someone at corporate had decided this particular store was a bastion of positivity that had to be assimilated. I never had any stereotypically corporate-sounding conversations the previous manager, but with Gabe…
I made the mistake once of telling a customer to go to Staples when we didn't have what they were looking for. It’s a move I'd learned from an old supervisor (who had since left to sell knives door-to-door). It seemed reasonable enough; how can you properly serve a customer if you don’t have the product they want anyway? For all I knew, it was an option, as no other staff were around when I saw her do it.
I was not so lucky, and Gabe was not so pleased.
Office Store Wars
It’s time for another detour, because at that time Staples was the king of office supplies, which is clearly a rapidly-dwindling tract of land now, but less so then. In 2010, Staples did $24.3 billion in revenue compared to $11.6 billion for Office Depot.
And while Amazon was already bigger than both in 2010, at $48 billion in revenue, that’s nothing compared to the $575 billion Amazon did in 2023. In 2010, Amazon was probably not selling more office supplies than the office supply stores. Now, it most certainly is.5
The knife in the craw6 for Office Depot was that it had attempted to merge with Staples back in 1996. Staples—founded a few months before Office Depot, both in 1986—was always the bigger company and it was officially making the acquisition, even though Office Depot was actually doing better at the time, as the New York Times reported: “In its fiscal year ending on Feb. 3, Staples reported net income of $73.7 million on sales of $3.1 billion. For all of 1995, Office Depot earned $132.4 million on revenue of about $5.3 billion.”
The third major office supply chain, OfficeMax, wasn’t bothered by the deal. A spokesman told the Times that OfficeMax “did not view the merger of Staples and Office Depot as anticompetitive.” But who were they, as a competitor, to make that determination? The U.S. Federal Trade Commission disagreed and shut the merger down in July of 1997.
The near-sale turned out to be the high point in Office Depot’s history. The company still does about $8 billion in revenue but that figure has declined every year since 2018 and, after adjusting for inflation, has shrunk significantly since the roughly $10 billion in 1995.
Office Depot would eventually be reduced to a 2013 merger, not with Staples but with OfficeMax. The FTC apparently considered this one to be harmless enough, in part because by then both of those companies were lagging heavily behind Staples.
Then, another Staples–Office Depot merger was attempted in 2015, but the FTC stepped in again and had it shut down. Of course, with Office Depot–OfficeMax already one company by now, maybe they had a point this time.
Office Depot had now tried to merge with the #1 office supply chain, was rejected, eventually had to merge with the #3 chain, and then once #2 and #3 were merged, was unable again to merge with #1. So it’s not too surprising that another bid by Staples was rejected in 2022, not by the FTC but by Office Depot, who was done with this shit, as they say.
As for my Office Depot store, well, it has been closed for years, and where it once stood, as of the last Google Street View image capture in June 2022, is: nothing. Such is the state of brick-and-mortar retail this decade.
So, yeah, an employee should not be sending customers to a competitor. But if we didn’t have the thing, we didn’t have the thing, and maybe that was the larger issue.
And Warranties
My run-ins with Gabe did not end with the Staples story.
Anyone who’s ever tried to buy a piece of tech has heard the spiel: For “just” some amount of money more (maybe 15–20% of its cost), you can protect your investment for 2–3 years! You quickly say no thanks and move on.
Or… not so quickly.
Well, I’ve been the one asked to give that spiel, and was quite bad as it. As you might guess by now, Gabe was much more insistent than his predecessor that I sell these policies. Which yes was part of the job, but also less of one at the copy department, where not too many people are buying the big-ticket items like computers or printers. Maybe a keyboard or mouse would get to me, which, yes, we sold warranties for those too. I finally did sell one, with Gabe watching carefully and then announcing on the employee walkie-talkie. What he probably thought of as motivating his team came off a little condescending.
Also pretty uptight was the new assistant manager at my department. Part of the uniform for those of us in the copy department was a red apron, but never having spilled ink or toner on myself, I never bothered. No one had ever mentioned it to me… until, you guessed it, this guy. It’s a shame that’s all I remember him for.
And More
I haven’t even told the story about being stranded during a snowstorm after store closing, having taken the bus into work; about how for at least a decade afterward I still had a hard time wearing a blue dress shirt with black dress pants, which was the uniform; about having to follow the early stages of Stephen Strasburg’s career using a game tracker on the work computer—although thank goodness I was lucky to be off of work for his very first start.
But what’s interesting as I go through this exercise is that, while I do remember a couple customer interactions that I won’t discuss now, it’s my interactions with bosses and coworkers that were most memorable about my time as a retail peasant.
A Final Detour
This will be my second week in a row discussing Australasian comedy and, what’s the bit here again? That’s not a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice?
Viva La Dirt League (VLDL) is a YouTube channel based in New Zealand. They create several different running series, but the one that I always liked best is called Bored. That’s an episode of it up above. I have worked in an environment similar to the one portrayed in Bored, which helped draw me into it initially. Their other series are entertaining enough, but my frame of reference is much weaker. Lots of fantasy and RPG stuff.
It’s not absolutely necessary to have experienced something to enjoy media about its depiction, of course. I have spent even less time in a traditional, physical office with multiple coworkers than I have in retail, but I still like Office Space, for example.
There’s a regular character in Bored named Ben, a deranged customer always trying to find absurd ways to scam the tech store. But he reminds me more of grocery store customers, namely the gentleman in 2007 who complained that he was being overcharged 10 cents for his gallon of milk.
Only after sending us to confirm that, yes, the display price was 10 cents lower than the barcode price, did he then insist on getting the milk for free. Maybe I’m just lucky, but I’ve never needed a couple bucks that bad. Ben is far worse than this guy was, of course, but comedy is firmly grounded in hyperbole.
Wrapping Up
Even with that story, the management is what I remember more about the Giant job as well. You know that cliché where you request a day off, and they give it to you initially, but then change the schedule midweek and blame you for insisting you have the day off that they had promised you? Yeah, that happened to me.
Anyway, this post hasn’t been meant as an airing of grievances. Very few people, especially near the bottom of the workplace hierarchy, work in retail because they like it. My memories of Office Depot, before Gabe showed up at least, really aren’t bad.
Makes me one of the lucky ones.
Today’s Takeaways
The quality of a retail jobs, like most jobs, depends a lot on the quality of the people.
There really does seem to be an element of entropy that is natural to… well, any kind of apparent stasis really. See: my store that eventually closed; Office Depot as a whole, now a company without the best long-term outlook; even the U.S. national men’s soccer team so far in its history, that 2010 World Cup just being one example of the squad’s shortcomings.
The whole concept of an office supply store only goes back about 40 years and it seems those stores have been in an existential crisis for at least half that time. Talk about an idea having its time and place.
Your Turn
If you’ve never worked a retail job, do you consider yourself lucky, or is it just somewhere your path in life never took you? And if you have worked retail, did it change you as a customer at all? Anything else I discussed in this post is also fair game for the comments!
I insist on using this unpronounceable monstrosity, combining the old and new name, whenever I write about Elon Musk’s website. It deserves no more, no less.
Where I earned the $7.25/hour federal minimum wage, but netted less than $5/hour after payroll taxes and mandatory union dues.
I’ve changed Gabe’s name because I don’t necessarily have flattering things to say about the person he was in 2010.
Not to mention Best Buy, which shares a lot of inventory overlap with office supply stores and did $46 billion in 2023 sales, almost 6x Office Depot.
I make no apologies for mangling metaphors.